This post was made on 10/04/2018.
Recently I had a very strange thing happen to me. I was at my home eating dinner when I got this phone call. The phone callers number was my number, which I found a bit strange at first. I picked up my phone to be greeted by a bot that stated “Your phone provider has not received any type of payment this month, please click 1 on the keypad to continue and make your payment.” I was confused by this because I had already payed my phone bill for the month a two weeks prior to this call. I had a sneaking suspicion that this was was a scam of sorts because my phone company has NEVER directly contacted me about my phone bill, or at least they don’t call me. So I hung up the phone and logged into my phone account on my computer. I found that everything was completely normal! No bills needed to be payed and there was no sign of any problem at all with my phone provider. At this point I was almost certain that someone tried to scam me, I then looked up ways that people would try and scam you and sure enough I found that scammers can call you with your own number.
Phone scammers, or phishers, use a variety of ways to try and contact you through your phone. They can use a local phone number or possibly even your own phone number to try and trick you into giving them your financial information! Some of these calls can even send malicious code to your phone if your not careful! The phishers usually use bots in this situation to try and get people to spill their financial information. They have a few methods of trying to get that information too! The bots will try and tell you that they need some credit info to check your security or they will tell you you owe money to some company or they’ll say you haven’t filed your taxes and you owe them money. There are more ways than that but you get the idea of how they operate. They just want your financial information.
These calls are illegal and usually use “spoof” numbers to call you. These spoof numbers are usually your area code or your phone number. They do this because it gets around call blocking (blocking calls from sketchy places), and it makes them hard to track down.
Now you may be asking yourself “what do I do in that situation?” Easy, just don’t pick up the phone. If you do pick it up and hear a bot trying to get you to pay something hang up as soon as possible. The longer you stay on the phone with the bot, the more information it will try and get from you. Also never click or dial anything it asks you to. This is likely a virus link that will infect your phone.
Should this repeatedly happen to you or maybe you just don’t want that phisher trying to steal your info again, I would highly suggest you call the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to block that caller. I will leave a link below if you need to do that. I would also keep up with all the phone scams that could happen to you. Luckily I have a link to that as well which will tell you about all the current scams people will try and use on you.
Be careful to who you give your financial information to, you never know who will try and steal that from you!
Links:
Cyberleech 