THOSE ANNOYING ROBOCALLS ARE MOST LIKELY SCAMS, TOO
11% of U.S. consumers were tricked out of money last year
What you think are robocalls by aggressive marketers are more likely scams by crooks.
The top three phone scams targeting consumers this year are Google listing scams, loan-related scams and fraudsters offering free vacations, an information security company found by masquerading as unsuspecting customers.
These calls cost Americans as much as $7.4 billion a year, a survey conducted by the Harris Poll found. In 2015, 11% of U.S. consumers reported they lost money to a telephone scam.
The fraud calls begin as robocalls, then escalate when the victim picks up the line.
“These guys actually have call centers that just make fraud calls all day long,” Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO of Pindrop, told USA TODAY.
Pindrop is an Atlanta-based antifraud company best known for helping banks and insurance companies weed out phone scammers. It recently analyzed the fraud calls coming into nearly 100,000 land lines. The lines received on average 500,000 fraudulent calls a month, which allowed Pindrop to analyze the most common types of fraud robocalls.
The callers are often calling from foreign countries but use spoofing software to make it look as if the call is coming from within the United States, Balasubramaniyan said.
The top five phone scams targeting consumers and small businesses Pindrop has observed so far in 2016:
uGoogle business listing scam. The top scam was one directed at small businesses, which were told their listings on Google were not up to date or were at risk of being removed from the top page of search results. The fraudsters, who have no affiliation with Google, promise to help the business owner in return for a fee. There are variations focused on Yahoo and Bing. uLoan scams. This scam offers its victims help lowering loan rates or sometimes threatens that loans are past due. The callers sometimes use information they’ve gotten from legitimate online loan applications to trick the victims into believing they are from their loan provider. Scammers threaten victims with arrest to frighten them into handing over money. uFree vacation. If you get a call saying, “You’ve won a free vacation!,” hang up. The fraudsters use high-pressure tactics to get people to hand over credit card information to pay for “taxes” or additional fees such as food and beverage packages. uPolitics. Some fraudsters claim they are doing political surveys, often with a “prize” of a cruise for some lucky winners. Others ask for donations, some claim they need personal information to allow the person to re-register to vote and some even say they can allow the person to vote by phone. uLocal map verification. A robocall tells small businesses their firm has been flagged for verification in online maps verification and that only by giving personal information will it continue to be listed on online maps.