[ad_1]
Mobile phone users in the United States are bombarded with fraudulent phone calls and in recent months, fraudsters have added immigrant communities to targets they are trying to obtain credit card or bank account numbers.
According to First Orion, a company that provides phone operators and their customers with call identification and call blocking technology, nearly half of mobile phone calls next year will come from scammers.
The Arkansas-based company is projecting an explosion of incoming spam calls, marking a massive 3.7% jump in total calls in 2017 to more than 29% this year, reaching 45% in early 2019.
"Year after year, the scam epidemic is bombarding consumers to a record high, surpassing the previous year, and fraudsters are increasingly taking our privacy to new extremes," said Charles Morgan, CEO of First. Orion. blog post last week.
The barrage of fraudulent appeals has taken a disastrous turn in recent months as fraudsters have targeted immigrant communities with urgent appeals citing ambiguous legal issues. In many metropolitan areas of the United States where many Chinese people live, the hustlers portrayed themselves as representatives of the Chinese embassy as they tried to trap Chinese immigrants and students by revealing their card numbers. credit. The scammers told people that they had a package ready to be taken care of at the Chinese consulate office, a first step in a trick, or that they had to provide information to solve a legal problem, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
Nation most read and stories of the world
Other major spam calls involve fraudsters pretending to be a representative of a bank, a collection agent or a cable operator.
The Internal Revenue Service has also warned taxpayers against phone scams. Callers use phone numbers that mimic IRS support centers, claim to be IRS employees and use fake names and fake badge numbers. The IRS says that victims are falsely informed that they owe money to the government and are asked to pay by gift card or bank transfer. The scammers can also enjoy the devastation caused by Hurricane Florence, the IRS warned. Scammers can present themselves as a charity, chasing the generosity of Americans who want to help those affected by the storm.
Fraudsters also cause people to answer their calls with a system known as neighborhood spoofing, in which they manipulate the caller ID information so that their actual phone number be hidden. Instead, the calls seem to have been placed locally. A person viewing their caller ID will see a number corresponding to their own area code, as if the caller were a neighbor or relative. As the number sounds familiar, people are more likely to answer the call.
More than half of the complaints received by the Federal Communications Commission – more than 200,000 of them – involve unwanted calls. According to 2016 estimates, the FCC said that Americans have received about 2.4 billion automated and unwanted calls each month.
Charles Kennedy, a senior contributor to TechFreedom Technology Policy Think Tank, said the problem of spam calls was difficult to solve because many offenders were hard to find. It is illegal for telemarketers to call someone whose number is on the National Do Not Call Registry unless they have an existing business relationship or explicit written permission from the owner of the phone. But Kennedy said that people who ignore the list or engage in deception are often hard to hold responsible. They make calls from abroad, hide their locations and spend a considerable number of calls.
Technology solutions, rather than legal ones, are more promising, Kennedy said, as phone operators develop methods to block fraudsters before they reach consumers and unmask their fake numbers.
Some apps may block known scam calls, but First Orion noted that these tools can be ineffective if fraudulent callers use numbers that are not already blacklisted. To fight fraudulent calls and identify the identity of the caller, the FCC has authorized telephone operators to block calls that may be illegal and take action against fraudsters, inflicting hundreds of millions of dollars fines. Earlier this year, the FCC fined $ 120 million to a Florida man who allegedly made nearly 100 million phone calls offering people exclusive vacation offers.
Source link
