I’ve had two fake police phone calls in my life. The first: In 2001, while hosting the servers for friendsrenunited.co.uk an officer wanted the personal details of the founders, so I took his details, looked up his stations phone number independently and phoned back, only to be told no officer of that name works at that station. Then, yesterday around 7pm, I missed a phone call from a Detective James Hunt from a valid Kent police number: 01622 690690 Call screening got these details:
“Hello, good evening. Apologies for the latent unannounced call. My name is Detective Constable James Hunt of Medway Police Station in Kent, uh contacting Mr Mike Hardcastle.” I put the number in my contacts so I would see if they called back. I just got a phone call to my mobile from the same number, so I answered it. This time the caller said they were DC Nigel Atkinson, Badge Number: HR55019, email: nigel.atkinson@kentpolice.gov.uk I queried the domain because all police in the UK use .police.uk he said I didn’t understand, so I gave him the extremely abridged version of my career stating “I founded the commercial Internet in 1989 and I have previously run a TLD”, he understood the significance of this and he assured me the domain was correct. I entered it into a web browser and nothing returned, so I entered into WHOIS and it is a valid, but inactive domain. He then went on to explain that they had arrested somebody at Heathrow Airport today who had 14 passports one of which was mine. I asked how come I got a phone call about this yesterday. He was shocked and made multiple incorrect assumptions about this until I clarified that I had call screening and DC James Hunt had phoned me at a similar time yesterday. He then changed his story to say that the person had been arrested yesterday and was calling me today. At this point, I told him that I was 99% certain that this was a scam call and he had 30 seconds to tell me why he was phoning. He continued to talk as if reading from a script. As I counted down, he asked if I was about to hang up the phone on a police officer. I replied, no I’m hanging up the phone on a scammer. What surprised me was that they had my mobile number and name (they called me Mike, not Michael, which is who the phone is registered to if they had obtained the number from the cellular operator), so clearly there has been a data breach. I am reminded of the recent Revolut data breach, so I asked ChatGPT to research it and it turns out it is. I share ChatGPT’s findings for reference:

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