Residents in Blacktown and Mt Druitt are being reminded about protecting personal information, particularly when talking to people on the phone.<\/p>\n
Federal Member for Chifley Ed Husic is warning households of a new scam in which phone callers are claiming to be from a Federal Government Department and offering government grants of up to $100,000.<\/p>\n
Mr Husic said scammers are becoming more and more sophisticated in their approach.<\/p>\n
\u201cI understand the fraudulent callers know the name, address and phone number of the person they are calling, and might try setting up appointments to visit their home and arrange the payment, providing a phone number for the person who will visit the home, as well as a reference number,\u201d Mr Husic said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy office is alerted a number of times each week about suspected scams by switched-on locals who have received similar phone calls.<\/p>\n
\u201cPersonal information has become valuable to scammers and with as little as your date of birth and mother\u2019s maiden name can steal your identity.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Department of Families, Housing, Community Services, and Indigenous Affairs has received several complaints from people who have been contacted and told they are eligible for grants of up to $100,000 for mortgage assistance, under the Household Assistance Package.<\/p>\n
If people are concerned that their privacy has been breached or they have provided personal details as a result of one of these calls, they should report it to the police.<\/p>\n
People can also report a scam and get further information at the Government\u2019s Scamwatch website, www.scamwatch.gov.au, or call the hotline on 1300 795 995. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Residents in Blacktown and Mt Druitt are being reminded about protecting personal information, particularly when talking to people on the phone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}