Tech Talk with Jeff - Scam Phone Calls
Today I’m going over a topic I have written about before. It is a very important part of how you protect yourself from the scammers out there trying to take advantage of you.
Phone calls – you might think “Oh, I can deal with someone trying to scam me if I get one of those calls.” The problem is, it is not always that simple. The people who do this are very good at it and have lots of ways to lower your guard. Your cell phone can tell you if a call is a possible spam call. That is handy to help you know when to definitely not answer a call.
The one that always concerns me is when people receive a missed call and call it back to find out who called them. It might just be a wrong number. It might be a sales call. It might be a scammer. They won’t leave a message. My view is, if they did not leave a message, I have no need to return the call. By not returning the call, my risk of talking to scammer goes way down.
Keep in mind that scammers will use local exchanges to call you making it seem like it is a local call, and it might be someone you know. Don’t fall for that. Caller ID is altered easily by scammers. They can even make it look like the call is coming from your own number (I have seen that one).
Also, calling back tells them you are someone they can try to scam at a future time. By calling back you have told them that your number has a live, available person at the other end. That is valuable to a scammer. Along with that, the number you call back might appear to be in the United States, but in fact be overseas. Thus, costing you for just making the call.
Keep in mind that if a message is left for you, you are not under any obligation to return the call if it is of no interest and is not someone you know or expecting to call you. We tend to try to be polite and nice with phones. There are times to not do that.
The short of it is, if they did not leave a message, don’t call back. There is no advantage to calling back. It eats your time and you run the risk of it being a scammer ready to go at you. Don’t give them that opportunity.
Be aware and be safe!
