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posted by chromas on Saturday September 15 2018, @05:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the http://www.archersecuritygroup.com/dont-fall-double-digit-phone-scam/ dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

By next year, nearly half of the mobile phone calls we get will be scams, according to a new report from First Orion, a company that provides calls management and protection for T-Mobile, MetroPCs, Virgin Mobile and others.

The percentage of scam calls in US mobile traffic increased from 3.7 percent last year to 29.2 percent this year, and it's predicted to rise to 44.6 percent in 2019, First Orion said in a press release Wednesday.

The most popular method scammers use to try to get people to pick up the phone is called "neighborhood spoofing," where they disguise their numbers with a local prefix so people presume the calls are safe to pick up, First Onion said. Third-party call blocking apps may help protect consumers from known scam numbers, but they can't tell if a scammer hijacks someone's number and uses it for scam calls.

"Year after year, the scam call epidemic bombards consumers at record-breaking levels, surpassing the previous year and scammers increasingly invade our privacy at new extremes," First Orion CEO Charles Morgan said in the press release.

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/almost-half-of-us-cell-phone-calls-will-be-scams-by-next-year-says-report/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 16 2018, @10:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 16 2018, @10:57AM (#735610)

    Someone must be paying for these calls to go through in one way or another, is it just so cheap that the scammers are doing it?

    In US or Canada, the *receiving* party of the phone calls pays for the phone call. so, if you are on a cell phone, you can pay $0.20/minute (on a pay-as-you-go plan) to receive and to make phone calls. But the calling party that makes phone calls pays that same to call landline or the cell phone. So if they buy their time at $0.002/minute (or 1/5th of a cent per minute), then they can make a lot of phone calls before the charges add up.

    In most other places around the world, the *calling* party pays to make a phone call to cell phone or land lines. In Germany, it costs a lot more to make call to cell phone than regular line. Even with VoIP, it's like $0.01/minute for cell phone but half that for land line.

    So what is the main problem with US scams on cell phones?? The recipient *pays* for the scam attempt! Which means you don't pick up phone calls from random places because they are mostly scams. It's fucking sad. In Germany, no scams. I wonder why?