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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/
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday September 17 2018, @12:51AM
I get those "neighborhood spoofing" calls all the time. I never answer them, because I **know** they're scams. How do I know this? Simple: I got this phone number when I lived in Arizona years ago. Now that I live on the other side of the country, the only calls I get from that area code are usually scams, and the only one with the same local prefix are most definitely scams.
I didn't plan it this way, I just never bothered to get a new phone number, but it's come in really handy this way.
Now with easy number portability, maybe we should just abandon the entire notion of area codes and local prefixes.