You may have seen in the news recently several stories about businesses being targeted by fraudsters using several methods of impersonation and intimidation... As businesses and customers alike rely more and more on digital services, it’s more important than ever to be vigilant and protect yourself from such attacks. These scammers may pretend to be a customer, your bank or even your service provider.
Here’s some tips on how to recognise a scam and what you can do:
Signs of a scam:
- They sound urgent, persistent to gain your information or even threatening.
- If it’s written such as in an email or text, there are spelling or grammar mistakes.
- They ask for remote access to your computer.
- They ask for personal details, passwords or bank details.
What to do:
- If you can see the number, check whether it's genuine by searching online.
- If they claim to be from a respected business, look the business' number up and call back.
- Don't click links, open attachments or reply.
- If it’s an email seemingly from BT, forward as attachment to phishing@bt.com, if not send to report@phishing.gov.uk and then delete the email.
- If it’s a text, forward to 7726 so we can help and then delete the text.
The National Cyber Security Centre has several steps on to keep yourself Cyber Aware such as utilising 2 step verification on your email, as well as using strong passwords. You can view their advice on this dedicated page.
Need to report a cybercrime? You can do this directly to Action Fraud on their website.
As a service provider, we also get fraudsters contacting us pretending to be one of our customers in an attempt to get us to make changes to business accounts. We take this very seriously and have a robust security verification process in place.
When contacting BT Business for anything, we will always make sure we’re discussing the account with a named contact and the person on the other line will always go through what we call our ‘validation process’ where we will send a unique 4-digit pin to your phone number or email address.
If we find that you are not a named contact, but you should be, then there are a few ways we can get you added.
- We can first get in touch with a named contact on the account, go through validation and confirm with them if you should be added to the account.
- If you would rather get yourself added before speaking with anyone from BT, you can discuss this with a named person to add you via the BT Business app/website or if you have access to a bill invoice from the last 9 months you can register yourself on the app/website and from there you will become a named contact for that account.
This is to make sure that only authorised contacts can discuss account details regarding to your business. We require this on every call so if you are unable to pass security, we would be unable to discuss anything regarding the account for your safety.
This would be the process when dealing with a complaint. If you’re unable or unwilling to go through our validation process, then we would look to close the complaint as we would be unable to take any action on the account without any first completing all necessary security checks.
If you’re ever unsure if you’re talking to BT Business, you can hang up the call and independently go to the BT Business website and contact us directly to ensure you feel confident you’re talking to us.
