By David F. Rooney
Telus is coming through for St. Peter’s Anglican Church, whose long-held phone number had been hijacked by scammers.
Darlene Beatty of the telecommunications giant’s business escalation department said the number — 250-837-3275 — could be quickly re-installed for the church.
“You can go almost anywhere in the web and download software that allows you to hijack other numbers,” she told The Current last week.
And that’s probably exactly what happened to the church three months ago when Lay Minister Cathleen Busch said “someone pirated our phone number and used it for telephone sales.”
“It was a really bad situation,” Cathleen said, adding that all parishioners in town were familiar with the phone number, which church wardens cancelled after their phone system became clogged with bizarre voice mail messages.
Beatty said that because this was an Internet problem, and not a telephonic issue, Telus could not track down the individuals who had pirated the St. Peter’s number.
“I had no idea how bad it could be until I started to investigate (this and other complaints),” she said. “Unfortunately, there was not much we could do about it.”
The scammers, whoever they are, have likely moved on to some other unfortunate person’s number.
