Under the guise of the inquiry, the scammers try to convince you to transfer money or install software which gives them access to your laptop. These reports are all very similar: a phone call from the ‘National Police’, the ‘Ministry of Justice’ or ‘the Dutch Supreme Court’ claiming that suspect activities have been reported involving your citizen service number of that you are suspected of drug dealing or money laundering. “And that’s a lot for a specific form of fraud.” In two hundred of these cases, someone had transferred money or disclosed their details. Since the autumn 2021, the helpdesk has received over 16,000 reports from students about this phone scam.

Stay up to date with the latest information on scams at Recent scams or enter in your browser.For Tanya Wijngaarde from the FraudeHelpdesk, Golden’s story sounds familiar.

Our Cyber Security team will investigate the report and may be in touch if they have additional questions. Submit a Report Misuse of Service form and include as much detail about the call and caller as you can remember. If it’s an SMS, delete it and don’t reply.

If you think something’s not quite right, just hang up.

Be careful of being tricked into calling expensive international phone numbers.These are charged at premium rate and can be expensive. Be wary of phone numbers beginning with ‘190’.Calling back may result in instant charges in excess of $20. Don’t respond to missed calls from numbers you don’t recognise.If the caller is claiming to work for Telstra, do not share your personal information, credit card or online account details over the phone, unless you made the call and the number you called came from a trusted source, such as the contact details provided on your bill, or go to contact us.If you're not sure that the person on the other end of the phone actually is who they say they are, hang up and call the organisation by using their official published contact details.

Anydesk software spam calls