Telstra scammer claims to be from Melbourne but can’t pronounce Australian city: I heard the call

An aggressive but clueless scammer has shown he has no idea about Australia despite claiming to be calling from Melbourne.

Daily Mail Australia received a call this week from a worker claiming to be from Telstra.

But he was easily agitated when he didn’t know the name of the customer he was trying to scam, instantly proving he wasn’t legitimate.

‘Don’t you know your name? Don’t you know your name? How many times do I have to tell you? How often? I don’t have any name,’ she said.

‘I only have your phone number and your IP address record.

Don’t know your identity?

When asked where he was calling from, the man on the line said he was dialing from 242 Exhibition Street in Melbourne, the address of Telstra’s headquarters.

Unlike a typical resident who works and lives in Melbourne, he had trouble pronouncing the Victorian capital.

“Melbrony,” he said.

He ran into trouble when asked a second time to pronounce the city.

‘Melbrony’.

When asked a third time, he tried ‘Melbrone’.

He then claimed that he was calling about an internet protocol setup.

“The reason behind this call: We’ve been getting a lot of error and warning reports about your IP address on our firewall,” he said.

Questioned about his name, he claimed it was Luis Fernández, which is also the name of a French soccer player turned coach and actors from Venezuela and Spain (in the photo, the Spanish actor in Madrid)

‘Those errors and warnings indicate that your IP address has been changed from private to public. Understand?

‘Which is supposed to be in private mode and you are completely unaware of this problem.

‘That is the reason you are receiving this call today. Understand?

‘Did you make any kind of Internet configuration changes on your end?’

Questioned about his name, he stated that it was Luis Fernández, which is also the name of a French soccer player turned coach and actors from Venezuela and Spain.

But he became aggressive and cursed when asked to spell his name.

‘Why do I have to spell my name? Are you my teacher or what?

When asked where he was calling from, the man on the line claimed to be calling from 242 Exhibition Street in Melbourne at the Telstra headquarters (signage on a Sydney store is shown here)

‘You spell it, son of a bitch. You spell it.

I’m a rude guy, yes. I can’t spell my name. What do you think of me?

‘Moron’.

The scammer misspelled the name of who he claimed to be.

‘LUIS FERNANDEZ.’

‘Should I spell it again, you son of a bitch?’

Then he hung up.

Phone scams were the most common in 2021, with 50 per cent of fraud occurring this way, a report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission revealed.

Authorities received 144,603 reports with $100 million reported lost.

This was significantly more than the text message method with 67,180 fraud reports and $10 million reported stolen.