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Nearly half of cellphone calls will be scams by 2019, report says


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Dun dun duunnnnn.

 

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The Arkansas-based firm projects an explosion of incoming spam calls, marking a leap from 3.7 percent of total calls in 2017 to more than 29 percent this year, to a projected 45 percent by early 2019.

 

“Year after year, the scam-call epidemic bombards consumers at record-breaking levels, surpassing the previous year, and scammers increasingly invade our privacy at new extremes,” Charles Morgan, the chief executive and head data scientist of First Orion, said in a blog post last week.

 

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The barrage of fraudulent calls has taken a more dire turn in recent months as scammers have targeted immigrant communities with urgent calls claiming ambiguous legal trouble. Across several U.S. metropolitan areas with large Chinese populations, scam callers have posed as representatives of the Chinese embassy while trying to trick Chinese immigrants and students into revealing their credit card numbers. The scammers told people that they have a package ready to be picked up at the Chinese consulate office, a first step in a ruse, or that they need to turn over information to resolve a legal issue, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

 

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I never answer them, but I get a ton of calls from my "local" area code, sometimes as often as 3-5 a day. I haven't lived there in 8 years, but I just never got a new number. It's nice because I can look at it and immediately know that nobody from 765 ever needs to talk to me about anything and I can just block them. Of course blocking them doesn't matter because a few days later they call with a different number. 

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I can't believe that this isn't bad enough to justify a technology solution. My guess is that the carriers just don't want to solve this problem (at least not for free), and they've successfully lobbied against anything that would come close to solving the problem.

 

My understanding is that phone number spoofing is the biggest culprit, because as long as callers can effectively hide their actual phone numbers, there's no good way to for the receiving party to correctly determine the source of a spam call. A kind of "SSL certificates for phone numbers" has been proposed, but carriers would need to implement it, and before that they'd need to agree to a standard. The FCC is well within their rights to force something like that through, but for some mysterious reason they've made no real efforts to do so.

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1 hour ago, SFLUFAN said:

I actually called back one of the numbers from an "IRS Warrant" scam that I got and connected to a Slavic-sounding woman who I got into an argument with and told her that the CIA would a Predator drone to her house.

 

She hung up on me.

 

One time I got some Indian-sounding dude who I told I was going to report to the FCC and he starting cursing me out about "fuck you dude, don't you threaten me!"

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43 minutes ago, TheLeon said:

I never answer them, but I get a ton of calls from my "local" area code, sometimes as often as 3-5 a day. I haven't lived there in 8 years, but I just never got a new number. It's nice because I can look at it and immediately know that nobody from 765 ever needs to talk to me about anything and I can just block them. Of course blocking them doesn't matter because a few days later they call with a different number. 

 

I installed a call blocker that let me just blanket block all 732 and 908 area code numbers, with the ability to set a whitelist (so that I don't also block my mom, for example).

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16 minutes ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

To where I live. My number is 937, local area code is 804

 

That's one of the scam callers' most basic tricks, making the call come from your area code (often also sharing the first 3 digits of your 7-digits number) to try to get you to pick up.

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My most common calls:

 

1. "Rachel from card services" scam

2. "Based on your good payment history etc. etc." credit scam

3. "Your car warranty is running out" scam

4. "We can totally get you cheap healthcare" scam

5. The Woman calling and asking me to pick something up from the store on my way home.

6. Recording of some dude trying to get  people to go to his pyramid scheme website.

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7 minutes ago, Slug said:

My most common calls:

 

1. "Rachel from card services" scam

2. "Based on your good payment history etc. etc." credit scam

3. "Your car warranty is running out" scam

 

Those are probably my most common. Plus, I get repeated calls from someone trying to warn me about a Toyota recall, when I've never bought a Toyota. Oddly enough, my husband owns a Camry, but he's never received the call.

 

I just generally don't answer if I don't recognize the number.

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6 minutes ago, CastlevaniaNut18 said:

I just generally don't answer if I don't recognize the number.

I have an app (Blacklist Plus) that let's me just auto-reject any calls that aren't from someone on my contacts list.  It used to be great because the auto-dialers hung up if they got a no_answer response or got kicked to voicemail.  Recently, however they've started not hanging up and just leaving their recorded pitch on my voice mail so now while my phone doesn't ring when they call, I have to clear out a bunch of junk voice mails every few days. :/

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3 hours ago, SFLUFAN said:

I'm kinda bored today.

 

Maybe I'll give one of 'em another callback just to argue with someone for entertainment.

 

The problem is that the numbers are 90% likely being spoofed, so you're not calling back the scammer but an innocent person who didn't actually call you. These scammers generally use a computer/app to mask their caller ID with a random number

The number we use for incoming calls at my business has been getting spoofed for like 2+ months now, the phone company said that there's nothing that can be done outside of changing the number (and that the scammer usually moves on to a different number within a few months and to just hold on till it's over). If the incoming call is a weird area-code, I don't answer as often anymore. We get angry VMs from people demanding to be taken off our call list (we don't have one), or when I do answer it's people asking what my business is and what am I trying to sell them - I either attempt to explain that our number is being spoofed or I just say "it must have been a misdial as we only return calls, apologies".

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1 hour ago, Jason said:

 

That's one of the scam callers' most basic tricks, making the call come from your area code (often also sharing the first 3 digits of your 7-digits number) to try to get you to pick up.

 

I love when they advertise that it's a scam call like that. I guess the down side is that like Spork mentioned the numbers are often spoofed so I'm pretty sure that the few times when I've gotten calls from people I don't know claiming I called them when I didn't, it's because they missed a scam call that displayed my number and then called it back. 

 

1 hour ago, CitizenVectron said:

I wonder if the issue is less severe in Canada, because I don't get that many, maybe one scam/spam call every 2-3 weeks.

 

I get them even less. I think the last one, my phone marked it as likely to be a scam.

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1 hour ago, PaladinSolo said:

I've been getting voicemails where the message is in Chinese, or some language from that region, no idea how you can scam someone if they can't understand what it is you're trying to scare them with.

 

There's a phone scam targeting Chinese where they've just been dialing everyone.

 

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/10/609117134/chinese-robocalls-bombarding-the-u-s-are-part-of-an-international-phone-scam

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2 hours ago, Jason said:

 

There's a phone scam targeting Chinese where they've just been dialing everyone.

 

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/10/609117134/chinese-robocalls-bombarding-the-u-s-are-part-of-an-international-phone-scam

 

I did receive a few calls a month or so again with a recording playing in Mandarin, this might have been it!

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