Sad to say, but I got scammed by a win-back offer

Yep, it happened to me. I know better, but I was in a vulnerable place (over my data cap) and the promise of a good deal got me. Here’s what happened.

During one of my last press trips to the U.S. I accidentally watched a 40GB 4K movie over Plex on my mobile hotspot, and by day two of the trip, I was over my 50GB data limit and stuck using throttled speeds. I was able to make it with an eSIM I bought from Airalo, but at the end of the day I wasn’t happy since I knew when I got back to Canada, I’d still be out of data for another two and a half weeks.

Then, on the last day of the trip, a few hours before my flight, I got a call from someone claiming to be with Rogers’ win-back department. The conversation was a little sketchy, but I switch plans via win-back deals often and it always feels a little sketchy, so I decided to press onwards.

It started out nice enough, with the person asking what my current plan was and then making a counteroffer of basically the same plan at a lower price. For me, this was 100GB of Canada-U.S data for $37.

Things started to go south when the person on the phone asked for my personal information but didn’t transfer me to a secure line or send a link to a secure site for me to input it. During this process I gave up my address, driver’s licence number and credit card info (including the three-digit code on the back, which I learned after is not needed for a credit check).

By the end of that exchange I was getting really paranoid so I asked for the person’s employee number and the deal number, and to my surprise, they gave me those numbers, but then they told me another person would call me in a few days to let me know how to get my SIM card. Since I’d already given them my address, this felt really strange.

So I get off the phone with them, use the RBC app to put a pause on my credit card and contact Rogers proper to see if the employee number or deal number I was given were in their system. The first person I talked to was unable to find them and told me that I was most likely caught in a scam. From there, he set up a call with someone higher up at Roger’s who should be able to verify beyond a doubt if it was a scam or not.

A few days later, they call me to say that, as far as they can tell, it was a scam call. However, for my troubles, he offers me the same deal as the scammer and then tells me that someone from the win-back department will reach out to me. A day later they do, but they don’t offer me the deal and instead question me about an attempted purchase of an iPhone 15 Pro Max. I assume the scammer is the person behind this but since I’d canceled my credit card at this point, the deal didn’t go through. At the end of this call I was offered a different phone deal that was more expensive than my current Freedom Plan so I decided that I was just going to leave it at that and move on.

Overall, this was a pretty brutal experience and while I knew better, it just goes to show that anyone can be the victim of a scam. Make sure you can verify that the person calling you actually works for the company they say you do and to never give out your credit card numbers over the phone.