Scam phone call or just Scam calls are one of the most popular frauds out there, especially in India the numbers of Scam phone calls is rising day by day.
I’ve been in these kind of incidents almost two or three times.
So in this article we will discuss, why these kinds of frauds happen, and how to figure out if the caller is speaking the truth or not, common practices used by these fraudsters and many more things.
We will also discuss how these scammers get your contact number. But before we get to that let us first see the mechanism behind these kinds of fraud calls.
What is Scam Phone call?
Scam call or Scam phone call is a type of telemarketing fraud call, where the caller will pretend to be a bank employee or a someone from NGO i.e Non Governmental Organization, and will try to draw out personal information from you. That includes your bank account number, pin and password.
They will also try to make you transfer the desired amount to their own bank account.
There is no motive behind, usually they just want to earn money as fast as possible, so they use these kind of methods.
The technique used by these scam callers
The technique used by such kind of scam callers is known as “Social engineering” or to be more exact its known as “Vishing” in which they pretend to be someone they are not and try to extract information in order to commit the further crime.
How the mechanism works?
Let’s take an example, assume that person A is a scam caller trying to extract information from person B, the information that he is trying to extract is your bank account details. So the first thing he will do is research his target and will try to extract as much information as possible.
There are many ways, through which he can get your information. Once he gets the hands on the desired information that he wants. He will call you from the number (which he has already used for countless of scam calls) and pretend to be the bank employee and will extract the details he needs.
He also changes the information on Truecaller, every time he calls a different person. So the next question arises, how to figure out whether this scam phone calls are fake or not.
Difference between real/fake
Always remember to be aware, because majority of these scam callers are amateurs, and their way of speaking will tell you that they are fake or real.
- First, they will directly get to the point – Bank employee usually knows everything about your account, so they won’t ask you for your account number or any other detail but if they do keep in mind that they are fake. If they are from NGO, they will ask for money transfer or donation, try to avoid those calls or ask the name of their NGO and google search it, if you find any information of its existence then they are real or else they are fake.
- There is no professionalism in their way speaking – Usually when you get a get a call from NGO or Bank then you will find a politeness and professionalism in their way of speaking, fraud calls don’t have that, unless an until the caller is exceptional.
- Make sure they get the name your bank right – Amateurs, that don’t research their targets, usually get your bank name wrong while speaking to you, and that alone will give you the information that if the call is fake or real.
How to avoid the scam phone call?
If you ever get a scam phone call or a phone, where you can’t figure or out if the call is legit or fake, then always avoid it by giving some or the other reason. Don’t try to give the information he wants and cut the call immediately. If the caller is pretending to be someone from the bank, then you can verify the details of that call at the bank itself.
Once done verifying, you can block that number to avoid future scam calls.
How scammers get your contact number?
1. There are countless of ways scammers can get their hand on your contact number, Every time, you fill any online form for any website, even on social media website.
You are opening yourself to solicitations. They can even get your details, by getting in touch with your relatives or friends pretending themselves as your close person.
2. Even putting your contact number on the email signatures can be risky.
3. Smartphone applications are growing day by day and every application has something called “Terms of use” which we usually accept them without reading or understanding.
So always read it and see what information the application want to access after it gets installed on your phone.
4. Big data is one of the biggest reason – Big data is a concept of managing and sharing huge amount of data from one service to other, this data has countless of information about you even more than you know about yourself. Including what you like, what you don’t like, whom you called or had an online chat with.
Companies like Facebook & Google work on this big data concept. In big data “Web crawlers” are used to crawl or gather huge number of data in the matter of seconds.
5. Data leaks can happen anywhere, once you know how to extract information from various sources.
I have explained all the things above, however, there is one more way through which these scammers can get hand on your contact number. Every now and then, we get a call, where on the other side there is no one speaking. No matter how much your try to speak, you will hear no one.
Such kinds of call you get records everything on the other end. Often this can be used as a process to find out your phone number. There is something known as “Automated Dialing“. This kind of automated dialing can call all possible phone combinations and it even includes the list of number that are unlisted.
6. Some organization may leak your contact number and other details themselves, just so they can earn extra cash.
7. Online email and phone number database website can give email and contact number from a particular area, city or country, if you register and pay for their services.
Wrapping
Being alert! of these kind of scam phone call is the only way through which you can stay safe from these kind of scammers.
However, just by staying alert you may won’t be able to keep yourself safe. Hence its necessary to know the working mechanism behind these kind of things.
If you have any questions or any kind of views on this, feel free to comment on this post, i will answer all your doubts at the best of my abilities.