And testimony of contact tracer whistleblower shows ‘well-trained’ or ‘professional’ are not an accurate description…
Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Jenny Harries was asked during Sunday’s daily press briefing how members of the public could tell, if they received a call from someone claiming to be a coronavirus contact tracer, whether that person was genuine or a fraudster.
Harries claimed that:
It’s highly unlikely with all the confidentiality around the data systems that you will be contacted inappropriately… There has been a lot of input [sic] paid to this particular issue
but then told the member of the public asking the question that the public would be able to discern real from fraud because “it will be very obvious in the conversation that you have with them that they are genuine” because they will “obviously” sound like “professionally-trained individuals” and will have medical supervisors:
Of course, fraudsters manage to fleece people because they are completely unable to sound professional – or to pretend that they have a medical supervisor.
But even if such an idea were not nonsense, the genuine contact tracers say that they are not well trained and do not have access to supervisors:
One tracer, writing in the Guardian, said:
The training was very basic. We saw some slides about our role – the public health website we will use, and a script for what we had to say to people. We were told: do not go off-script, and if there was anything we could not answer, we should ask our supervisor.
…we were left unsupervised for hours. A message then appeared asking us to complete our online training – which was met with a chorus of “I did the training”. The day passed as we waited, re-attempted training, and wrote messages to supervisors and got no response.
To be clear, according to the Deputy CMO there is no number to call, no website to check credentials to ensure calls are from actual contact tracers. If there was, she would have mentioned it.
With a new pandemic wave building, the government’s ‘grand plan’ for contact tracing is a sham – rushed out unready to distract from the Dominic Cummings scandal. And that could not be more clearly demonstrated than by the fact that the supposedly-scientific way the public is supposed to tell they’re not being called by a fraudster is that the caller will sound good.
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Tracers through the phone app system simply need access to the names and full physical addresses of the contactees from the phone service providers so they can confirm their authenticity to those they’re calling, then further confirm their bona fides by giving the time and location of the suspected infection event.
Scammers couldn’t access all that information without fully penetrating the government’s system – not beyond the bounds of possibility obviously, given Tory incompetence, but extremely unlikely.
David who the hell is going to wait for hem to do this and yes scammers can and will break into phones and lift call logs to prove something BTW. Personally I give a voice on the end of the phone less than 30 seconds before I hang up.
If I don’t know them or they can prove who the heck they are and telling me there a contact tracer isn’t proth apart from there a voice at the end of a phone line. That can be anywhere in the world and any person. No evidence I hang up I won’t even confirm, my name or anything until I know there sort of who they claim to be!
Then I am very careful with information there are a legion of scammers out there who are excellent at social engineering. About getting information out of folks that just believe a voice at the end of a telephone is what they claim to be.
“Good morning Sir, this is the government coronavirus contact tracing agency, we believe you may have been close to an infected person at Tesco on High Street Anytown yesterday at 4:30 pm.
Are you disabledgrandad Sir, and can you confirm you were there at that time, whether anyone was accompanying you, whether you are able and willing to self-isolate at 1 Grandad Way, Anytown for two weeks and what assistance you might require to help you do that?”
What’s the problem? They haven’t asked for your bank details, they already had your phone number, your address and where you were yesterday – what more do you need to accept that they’re genuine?
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse…………
Have you seen this
https://davidhencke.com/2020/05/31/why-dominic-cummings-the-goddess-of-chaos-wont-quit/
While the pandemic was gaining pace, Rishi Sunac, the chancellor, gave Dominic Cummings £800m, for a projects he has been campaigning for years – the setting up of a Downing Street Advance Research Projects Agency. Who would want to go when they have received such largesse for their pet project they have slaved over for years. ……
….. There is a final irony. The last General Election was fought on the lines of the danger of a left wing Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn destroying Britain and creating chaos. It worked.
But what we will have now is such a cultural and chaotic revolution under Cummings that will make any threat from Corbyn look like a Teddy Bears picnic
Craig Murray (who has been charged with Contempt of Court):
Well, it is really happening. It is something of a shock to see yourself listed as a criminal for writing the truth. I have a tiny extra glimpse now into the way my friend Julian has been feeling.
Three appeal court judges even at the procedural hearing – though not unheard of, that is not normal. The state is sparing no resources on this; in a sense I am flattered.
There will be no jury at the eventual trial, and this worries me. Not least because the indictment (called a “petition”) contains within itself evidence that this process is a stitch up……
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/05/authoritarianism-is-shoddy/#respond
The above link takes you to where the Comments begin (or so I just noticed), so just scroll up the page to read the article, or click on the following link:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/05/authoritarianism-is-shoddy/
I don’t know of a thread where this fits but i’d like to discuss the economic effects of CV and the vast indebtedness that’s expected to hold some of the world’s economies back for generations – the UK looks set to be at the top of the debt pile as well as the deaths pile on current performance.
Someone on BBC News was just talking about changes in education and the huge potential indebtedness of universities.
One has to ask, “To whom will everyone be indebted?” Everyone claims they’re losing money hand over fist but that can’t logically be the case. For every debtor there’s a creditor.
The right wing will reply “pension funds” in the hope that everyone sees them as virtuous and sacrosanct – the very antithesis of capitalists or profiteers – though they’re among the worst kind.
Tories claim we impoverish future generations by over-borrowing today but that’s not true – what impoverishes the future is exhaustion of resources.
The rich find loopholes all the time to avoid their own debts – it’s only the debts they’re owed they see as inviolable.
CV being a worldwide phenomenon, its aftermath might turn into an opportunity first to confiscate the trillions the rich hide in tax havens, and second to blow neoliberalism out of the water.
David – Do you read Prof. Richard Murphy’s blog. https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/
Not religiously, but sometimes. Usually if you or someone else on other sites links to a specific article I’ll read it.
Did you mean to link to a specific piece?
BU but but ,,,,,, get Brexit done ! yessss that’s all that matters , take back control, and the fuckwits voted for this monster.
Mind you the sabotage by our own PLP ,Twatson , Starmer and the staffers all share the blame for this utter catastrophic cluster fuck of a GOvt we now have got
But Rob, it was a good move to withdraw from a massive market on our doorstep and shimmy over to the rapacious grasp of Trump – wasn’t it?
There are people commenting here who are very fond of bleating that “X could never happen.”
A week ago a disgrace of a US plod killed a black suspect.
Today Violet Elithabeth Trunt had to run thcreaming and thcreaming to her emergency bunker at the Very White House, from where she proceeded to tweet her usual pathetic, hormonal rants blaming everyone else for the consequences of her own stupid redneck-stroking policies.
Random shit happens.
This government sound everything is fake and excuse. The concentration is somewhere else.
This was all predictable once Baroness Dildo Hardon was put in charge of “test and trace.”
A headline in Marketing magazine in October 2015 proclaimed: “TalkTalk boss Dido Harding’s utter ignorance is a lesson to us all.”
Harding presided over the loss of personal data of 4 million of her subscribers. When asked if the affected customer data was encrypted or not, she replied: “The awful truth is that I don’t know.”
in some ways Harding’s appointment represents the closing of the circle: the wife of Tory MP John Penrose, she is on the board of the Jockey Club and was formerly on the board of Cheltenham Racecourse. Draw from that what you will.
I don’t mean this in any kind of sexist way, but whose sausage has she been hiding?
‘They’ll sound good.’
Jesus wept. And I thought doctors were meant to be educated? This is the advice we’re meant to follow?
Maybe rh has a point, after all.
Hello MRs Harris , yes it’s your bank manger here Richard Soundgood , we have had a suspected case of fraud on your bank account and I just need your password and user name to make sure all is secure.Its to protect you and secure your account from the IP and it’s static IP addressing system that this very sophisticated team of fraudster have used .
Sounds good enough eh ….. ffs !
Lead by DONKEYS
Looks like twatson,murphy and the speaker have all been rejected for the Lords.Corbyns nominations to a corrupt institution has blown back in Labour’s face.I will not loose any sleep in that little farce that should have been removed years ago along with the royalty titles and establishment gongs.All an insult to any working class personq….Drain the Swamp…!
Eh? You’re in the wrong job madam! You should be Boris’ chief adviser — all you’ve got to do is stretch your neck a little bit!
Perhaps ‘Dom’ knows where the bodies are buried?
yep all 65,000 of them !
Dr Jenny is nobody’s fool! After all, he who the MLM present as a once-Trotskyist ‘hope of the left’ (Sir Keir Starmer) doesn’t sound like a Tory in the least, does her??