Hi all, I know you are all a bright bunch so not going to fall for a scam call, but just a FYI I had heard about the latest Spark scam calls going around, a bit more convincing than usual, and I actually got one just now. Myself and the people I've heard it from are all on the Auckland NorthShore, so I guess that's the current number range they're working through.
Said he was from Spark, and Spark was rolling out a minor speed increase from 100Mbit to 155Mbit, and that the switch over would happen in the next day or so, and just to run a speed test to confirm current speed so I had a before and after. So far, I was quite impressed, by scammer standards he sounded fairly legitimate. Had asked for no details and had so far guessed correctly that it was a standard (ie, most common) fibre 100Mbit plan. He also went on check all the light on the router was green and everything was working well. He then said to use speedtest.net. I was curious where this was heading so humored him a bit longer. Said my ping was too high at 3ms and should only be 1ms, and make a configuration change. And which point he started to give instructions on how to run to run something from the command line at which point I informed him I was a computer tech and knew exactly what he was trying to do, and then he wasn’t very friendly and hung up.
I wouldn't normally bother to post this, but from my point of view, these have been far more convincing than most "I'm from Microsoft and you have a virus" type calls. All the current scam calls are using spoofed caller id of an Aussie call centre, 00614-98552416, 11944740, 17597180 etc.
Hope that is of help to someone who can pass a warning on to possibly vulnerable person.