Skype blocking banking calls from China

[roddy]

Hey,

Been trying to solve this issue over the last couple of weeks, thought I'd post up what I have here in the hope of saving anyone else some time.

The short version is that Skype appears to be blocking calls made from China which go to telephone banking services. The error message lead me to this, which mentions 'blocked countries' and 'high fraud destinations'. My bank's a relatively small Scottish one, so if it is affected I'll guess many others are.

Unfortunately the message Skype give you is 'account blocked' and not 'call blocked', which is misleading - calls to other destinations seem to be fine, but as I rarely use Skype I didn't spot this. I opened a support ticket with Skype, still no response after a couple of weeks. One of the admin members on Skype's forums said they'd look into it, still no response. Appears to me that Skype doesn't give a monkey's about helping anyone trying to call telephone banking services from within China - fair enough, would be nice if they'd be a bit more straightforward about it.

Solution: Call through a VPN. Fortunately fraudsters will never think of that

[muyongshi]

Another solution is to use a service like mobalex

[mr.stinky]

is skype doing the blocking, or is the block coming from the banking server? could they

be trying to avoid chinese/nigerian scams?

[roddy]

It's Skype that's doing the blocking, although maybe the banks have said 'hey, no more anonymous calls from China thanks', I don't know. It's been an issue for over a year, see this. Skype obviously don't care - fair enough, it's a business. Would be appreciated if they'd make efforts not to waste people's time though.

I'll continue to use Skype, but I'm also going to make sure I never add more than the absolute minimum of credit as I have no faith in Skype's support solving any issues.

[Shadowdh]

I havent tried using skype to call my bank in the UK but my bank certainly goes out of its way to make things difficult for me to rectify any problems on its own... (often they ask me to "pop into the branch to sort it out"... hmmm yeah thats going to happen....) usually the stock response is that I am a terrorist and want to use my account to destroy the western world... with all of the £3.45 in it... yep just imagine the WMD I can buy with that...!!!

[dan ni er]

does your bank not have a 0207 number you can contact them on. I had the same problem with ringing llyods but then found an alternative 0207 number i can ring them on if calling from overseas.

[roddy]

Actually that's a good point - I'm currently dialing an 0845-prefix number. Found a geographical number on saynoto0870.com and Skype let me dial that.

[ipsi()]

Have you looked at alternatives? There's plenty of cheaper ones around - I use VOIPBusterPro for calling to China (and from China). Its cheaper than Skype last I looked, though I'm not sure what the quality's like. I'd assume pretty similar. The price is 10 euro's/year, plus 0.04 eurocents connection fee to a landline, no per-minute charge. There's a technical limit to the number of hours you can call in a week, but since it's something ludicrous (300, maybe?), it's not a big deal. It used to cut you off after an hour, but that seems to have changed, and wasn't a big deal anyway, given how cheap it was. Would have been fine if they'd advertised it.

The only reason I can see for me using Skype is that it's easy to get a Skype-In number, which would be very handy. Don't think VBP offers that sort of service.