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# Phone scam
'You deserve this, you c***': Scammer seeking credit card number verbally abuses Cork woman
The woman had googled a helpline number to gain access to her emails, and called up what she thought was Google’s call centre.
This article contains explicit language
A CORK WOMAN seeking access to her emails recorded a conversation she had with a scammer, where she said she was going to pass on her credit card details before he started abusing her.
Speaking to the Neil Prendeville Show on Cork’s Red FM, Sarah described how she was verbally abused by the call centre worker when she was asking for help to re-access her email account.
She had googled a helpline number for Google to regain access to a gmail account she had been locked out of. She called the first number that appeared in the search.
Sarah said: “It was a local 021 number. When I rang it, the location comes up as Cork.
I was talking to him a few times before I actually recorded it. It got ridiculous, the things he was saying. I was like ‘what?’
She said that she was originally quoted €300 initially for them to restore access to her account, but was then quoted €200.
The recording of the conversation was played out on the show. The man can be audibly heard calling Sarah “a c***” after she told him she had an iPad in front of her instead of a computer.
“You just lied to me,” the man, who referred to himself as Jonathan, told her. “You deserve this, you c***… I don’t give a shit, I don’t give a fuck.”
She responds: “Excuse me? Do you get paid to abuse people instead of helping them? Why are you speaking to a customer like a dog?”
Speaking to Neil Prendeville, Sarah admitted she had fallen for the scam and would have given over her credit card details until the man on the other line started to verbally abuse her.
“I thought this guy was from Cork,” she said.
Sarah added that he had threatened to hack her emails and delete all of her messages if she didn’t pay them.
When the show called the same number, the person who answered said that the company was based in Ireland but would not say where.
“I was fooled,” she said. “I had no idea this was a fraud until he started calling me all these names. I just thought it was Google. I trusted what I had looked up on Google.”
The gardaí advises people with any suspicions about potential scam callers to contact their local garda station.
“Be extremely sceptical of any uninvited call received and do not rely on phoning back the number to verify authenticity,” they said.
