Phone Scammers Getting Smarter...

Got a good one the other day... I never answer unrecognized calls, but this time they left a voicemail. It was obviously a synthetic text-to-speech program:

"This message is to inform you that there is a legal enforcement action filed on your social security number for criminal activities so when you get this message kindly revert as soon as possible on our number that is 864-513-9045 I repeat 864-513-9045 before we begin with the legal proceeding thank you and have a nice day."
 
slacktide said:
Got a good one the other day... I never answer unrecognized calls, but this time they left a voicemail. It was obviously a synthetic text-to-speech program:

"This message is to inform you that there is a legal enforcement action filed on your social security number for criminal activities so when you get this message kindly revert as soon as possible on our number that is 864-513-9045 I repeat 864-513-9045 before we begin with the legal proceeding thank you and have a nice day."
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"Revert"?? A good clue that English is not their first language.

I've gotten similar spams that leave threatening voicemails. Usually they have some vague wording about "your credit card account". I had one the other day threatening to take me to court over my unpaid "student loan debt". (I don't have any, of course.) :rofl:
 
azure said:
"Revert"?? A good clue that English is not their first language.

I've gotten similar spams that leave threatening voicemails. Usually they have some vague wording about "your credit card account". I had one the other day threatening to take me to court over my unpaid "student loan debt". (I don't have any, of course.) :rofl:
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I got one just today that this is the final warning about my credit card account. I check all our credit card accounts online daily, there is no "warning" that will come to me from an Indian spoofing a number in my cell phone's area code/exchange. ROTFLMAO
 
Had a call today from a number purporting to be “AT&T Fraud Alert” that wanted me to key in all sorts of info. Even had the AT&T chime sounds. Number was a known spammer in Illinois.
 
azure said:
"Revert"?? A good clue that English is not their first language.
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My cousin uses "revert" and she was born and raised in the US. The first time I saw it in an email, I had to guess what she meant using the context of the message.
 
Everskyward said:
My cousin uses "revert" and she was born and raised in the US. The first time I saw it in an email, I had to guess what she meant using the context of the message.
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Of course. "Revert" is a perfectly good word, but to use it when you really mean "call back" or "return this call"? Doesn't sound like a choice of words a native English speaker would use in THIS context.

Okay, I just looked it up online... Merriam-Webster just says

1 : to come or go back (as to a former condition, period, or subject)
2 : to return to the proprietor or his or her heirs at the end of a reversion
3 : to return to an ancestral type

but the default Google entry does give "reply or respond to someone", but marks it as INDIAN.

Interesting...
 
azure said:
Of course. "Revert" is a perfectly good word, but to use it when you really mean "call back" or "return this call"? Doesn't sound like a choice of words a native English speaker would use in THIS context.
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That's how she used it, and why I was confused at first.

To me, it sounded like some term you might use when emailing a business colleague, not a relative.
 
Everskyward said:
That's how she used it, and why I was confused at first.

To me, it sounded like some term you might use when emailing a business colleague, not a relative.
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Maybe she spent a lot of time around people from the Subcontinent? :dunno:
 
azure said:
...but the default Google entry does give "reply or respond to someone", but marks it as INDIAN.

Interesting...
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Well, I guess now we know that either the call or the caller came from India.
 
Pilawt said:
Sounds more like the "Telephone Consumer Protection Act" was badly written in the first place.
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Written exactly how the carrier lobby wanted it written. Carriers don’t want you “protected” from call centers, they make a lot of money on them.
 
When it gets to the point that almost no one is answering spammers' and scammers' calls anymore, maybe there won't be enough money in it to make it worthwhile.
 
I've had a couple of calls lately. One funny as it said that the local authorities had a warrant for my arrest and if I didn't call them within 30 min the "cops" would be at my door to arrest me. The call back number was a 900 number so anyone calling it would incure a charge. Another more disturbing is a call from a foreign sounding lady saying she was from Capitol One and that my payment was due and that I had missed my payment from the previous month and tried to hard ass me into doing a payment over the phone using my bank account info. I declined and when I checked I had payed off the balance the month before as I always do.
 
Palmpilot said:
When it gets to the point that almost no one is answering spammers' and scammers' calls anymore, maybe there won't be enough money in it to make it worthwhile.
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The question is, will it ever really get to that point? When the subject comes up with people I know casually, they almost always mention a recent call that they answered that turned out to be a spam. Often they answered it simply because it was from the same area code, even though they didn't recognize the number. When I say that I never ever answer a call from my area code unless I know who it is from, they say "oh but I have to, if it's local it could be a real call!" - which is obviously the psychology behind area code-based spoofing. Clearly there is as of yet no incentive against using it.
 
yakdriver said:
I've had a couple of calls lately. One funny as it said that the local authorities had a warrant for my arrest and if I didn't call them within 30 min the "cops" would be at my door to arrest me. The call back number was a 900 number so anyone calling it would incure a charge. Another more disturbing is a call from a foreign sounding lady saying she was from Capitol One and that my payment was due and that I had missed my payment from the previous month and tried to hard ass me into doing a payment over the phone using my bank account info. I declined and when I checked I had payed off the balance the month before as I always do.
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Very disturbing. How did she know you have a Capitol One account? (Hopefully she didn't and it was a phish, but that sort of thing would make me a little concerned about a data breach.)
 
Palmpilot said:
When it gets to the point that almost no one is answering spammers' and scammers' calls anymore, maybe there won't be enough money in it to make it worthwhile.
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Unfortunately the numbers work. A call center scamming $1000 out of even just 10 people (and they do way better than that) a day is making $10K a day before expenses.

VoIP and SIP drove the phone system pricing so far down into “commodity” pricing that it’s measured in five decimal points of a dollar per minute.

And a call center can be built somewhere where $10 a day is enough to hire anybody off the street... who’ll happily work for that.

The phone system can even be just software on a cheap PC with a cheap headset... and the entire phone system can be run by a single Linux box running Asterisk...

Can even have people work from home doing it, but most don’t.

That was the biz I was in before the company I’m at now, 3500 agents working from home in a virtual call center. For legitimate calls though.

Our infrastructure hardware had paid itself off many times over in ten or so years, and we refreshed all of it for nearly nothing to new servers and hardware and doubled the capacity before I left.

I actually liked the gig, but we got bought by an absolutely hideous company out of Tampa who couldn’t figure out how to make their work from home division work for half a decade, so it was easier for them to buy than continue to try to build.

They were doing it with Windows and Lucent gear and paying corporate prices for stuff that didn’t work and wasn’t flexible, instead of building it with free software and cheap machines. The post buy-out culture clash was the worst one I’ve ever seen in IT.
 
Because of this thread I've been having fun watching a bunch of YouTube scam baiters waste these people's time, and this is the best one I've found yet.

Notice how the guy is "Windows" technical support and the kid says "Oh it's a Mac Book" and the guy just says, "okay open Safari". ROTFLMAO!

On hold music :lol::lol::lol: I love this kid.

 
azure said:
For some of us, the problem isn't answering the call - it's that it comes through at all. I don't answer the spams either, but I still have to pull the phone out to check if it's a call I want to take. And if it happens while I'm teaching... well, that's just unacceptable. If I could be sure that DND would keep the phone from ringing I'd rely on it, but I already know it doesn't. Not even airplane mode blocks all calls, at least as of last year.*

*That may no longer be true. As of one recent software update to iOS, airplane mode now turns off wi-fi too, I've noticed. But for a long time it definitely did not, so texts and calls could get through that way unless you ALSO turned off wi-fi, by hand. Hopefully this welcome change will be permanent.
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Something I discovered with iOS and wifi calling (I'm on T-Mobile): when I'm on wifi, sometimes the phone will ring, stop for a few seconds, then ring again. That's enough to trigger the "repeated calls" bypass for DND in iOS. Calls in that kind of mode show up as 2 calls on my phone.

Not quite sure why it happens at this point (perhaps it finds the phone faster on the cell service, then when the phone acknowledges on wifi it stops and transfers the call). Annoying, to be sure, but turning off the "repeated calls" function in DND should fix it.

Perhaps yours is doing the same?
 
wsuffa said:
Something I discovered with iOS and wifi calling (I'm on T-Mobile): when I'm on wifi, sometimes the phone will ring, stop for a few seconds, then ring again. That's enough to trigger the "repeated calls" bypass for DND in iOS. Calls in that kind of mode show up as 2 calls on my phone.

Not quite sure why it happens at this point (perhaps it finds the phone faster on the cell service, then when the phone acknowledges on wifi it stops and transfers the call). Annoying, to be sure, but turning off the "repeated calls" function in DND should fix it.

Perhaps yours is doing the same?
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Possibly. I'm not sure whether wi-fi calling was enabled when that was happening. I do know that I had to take it to Verizon where they did a factory reset to enable wi-fi calling during a recent cell outage. I pretty strongly suspect now that something was badly messed up on that phone for a long time, that neither airplane mode nor DND were functioning properly, and it was only fixed by the factory reset. I haven't had any calls come through in airplane mode recently, and I always use that rather than DND now to stop incoming calls and texts, since I no longer trust DND.
 
Here's a new one that I've never experienced before. It happened to me twice this week.

I get a call from a legit number...a business. In this case the local rural electric coop. Conversation happens, call ends. Within 15 minutes I get another call from the same area code and prefix but a different last four digits. I answer the call because I assume they're calling back but on a different outgoing line...one of many...since it's a business.

but nooooooooooooo. It's a scammer.

Makes me think they've hacked my droid phone. How else would they know......
 
timwinters said:
Here's a new one that I've never experienced before. It happened to me twice this week.

I get a call from a legit number...a business. In this case the local rural electric coop. Conversation happens, call ends. Within 15 minutes I get another call from the same area code and prefix but a different last four digits. I answer the call because I assume they're calling back but on a different outgoing line...one of many...since it's a business.

but nooooooooooooo. It's a scammer.

Makes me think they've hacked my droid phone. How else would they know......
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Is the coop number in the same area code as your cell? If so, I doubt they knew, they were just spoofing numbers in your area code and it was just coincidence that the scammer hit the same prefix.

If not... sounds like somebody's phone got hacked - could be the coop though.
 
Hacker may have hacked the Co-Op’s phone system to place calls through it and can see successful calls in their logs for targets.
 
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