That must be what happened to me last week, a nice old lady called me and claimed my number was on her caller ID. I told her I had no idea why her phone would say that, I told her my first name and she told me hers, we don’t know each other and live several counties apart.
If anyone wonders how profitable the Indian scammers are, just take a look at this interesting, 12 minute video by white hat UK hacker Jim Browning. He is targeting the tech support scams specifically, but I’ve found the same boiler rooms for one scam often run others at the same time or sequentially.
Jim shows that one outfit, for 7 months in 2016, grossed $700K+ just through one payer and they may get paid from other sources as well.
If you’ve never seen how these tech scammers work, Jim’s video shows a clear picture of a brief session before he digs into their bank accounts. I love the typical performance where they type at a command prompt, “you are infected!” and then point to the text as proof that you are infected.
I’ve recently installed Hiya on my Android. It works very well!
NoMoRobo has blocked everything thrown our way without exception. Love it.
That happened to me, too. A guy who lives a few blocks away, and recognizes my name but doesn’t really know me, called and said a junk caller just called him using my number. My name and number came up on his Caller ID, so he answered, thinking it might be me calling about something going on in the neighborhood. He was just calling me to let me know it happened, and wasn’t upset at me or suggesting I could do anything about it. We chatted for a couple minutes about the miserable SOBs who pull these stunts.
I get calls that look like local numbers or they show up as “wireless caller”. I sometimes answer, and then usually regret that I did.
I installed Hiya a few months ago and while it does do what it says it’ll do, it’s not totally playing nice with my phone. Whether that’s an issue with the app, in general, or the app and my phone or software, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try nomorobo on my cell phone. Speaking of which, for the people on the fence, Verizon specifically recommends it on their website.
I’m curious why they would do that, it doesn’t seem like it would make a difference to them. Unless the extra rings make them an extra nickel (when it rings the nomorobo servers).
I use Hiya and it’s pretty good, but I do get the fake local number calls every so often. I looked and I don’t see nomorobo on the Google Play store. Is that what it’s called?
NoMoRobo doesn’t work at the phone end. It works at the phone company end. You set it up so that both your phone and NoMoRobo’s 800 rings. If NoMoRobo recognizes the number in their list, they hang up. You get a couple rings on your phone and then nothing.
Your phone company has to be able to allow users to set this up. What the setting is called, etc. differs according to the provider.
Since it appears that telemarketers are using real people’s phone numbers then reporting those numbers is a very bad idea. This would prevent those innocent people from calling anyone who uses NoMoRobo.
For my cellphone, I am trying Mr. Number. It seems to work pretty well so far.