A 3-hour phone call that brought her to tears: Imposter scams cost Americans billions
It was a Monday in the middle of the day when Valeria Haedo got a phone call from a number she didn’t recognize. She doesn’t normally pick those up, but she did that day. The caller said his name was Officer Robert Daniels from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and he had a warrant for her arrest.
He told Haedo she could verify him by Googling his name and department. She did, and it checked out. But what Haedo didn’t realize in that moment is she’d just been targeted in an intricate scam. She was kept on the phone for more than three hours and eventually brought to tears.
The scam is known as an imposter scam and is the top fraud in the U.S. right now. It involves the perpetrator impersonating an authority figure and using scare tactics to reel in victims. While these scams have been around forever, they’ve become more believable because con artists use real names of law enforcement officers that show up with caller ID from an actual office and even local accents…
Like millions of Americans, Emmy Ross has a bunch of student debt. So when she started getting phone calls from people offering to help have the loans forgiven, she was immediately interested.
The problem? They were scammers asking for things such as her account details or credit card number.
Ross figured out the con pretty quickly. But her mom, Jing Su, was also getting the calls.
“I thought it was serious because they are so persistent,” Jing Su said. “I said, ‘I got a call again. So what is the story?’ You know?”
Ross tried to tell her mom they weren’t real.
“Every time we would get on the phone, she’d be like, ‘Oh, did you call the student loan people yet?’ And every time, I’d be like, ‘Mom, it’s not real. It’s a scam,’ ” Ross said.
Thankfully, the callers didn’t get any information or payment details out of Ross or her mom. But not everyone has been so lucky.
This winter, the Federal Trade Commission warned about an increase in student loan scams. Those scams prey on confusion. President Biden said during his campaign that he was open to forgiving some student debt, but that hasn’t happened yet…
Criminal groups have been sending threatening messages in the past couple of months to companies that manage broadband phone services all over the world, promising they’ll flood the digital phone lines with traffic and take them offline unless the targets pay a ransom.
What those extortionists have discovered is that the number of phone calls that take place at least partially over the internet has quietly and dramatically increased in recent years — and there’s a lot at stake when major providers go down.
Like landline providers, companies that manage digital phone calls, also known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, are required to transmit audio in real time, facilitating personal, business and even emergency calls.
It’s probably a bigger part of our lives than many people realize. It’s much cheaper and often more accessible and scalable, a staple of working from home during the coronavirus pandemic. Small companies and people living overseas might have been using purely digital phone lines for years to reach customers, friends and family abroad. Large carriers and telecommunication companies often use VoIP to handle calls or connections between providers, while smaller carriers are routing tens of thousands of simultaneous calls over the internet. Call center companies handle over 1 million digital calls a day.
But if those companies that manage digital phone lines come under attack by a tsunami of fake callers, the behind-the-scenes mechanisms for beaming voices online begins to crumble fairly quickly.
“The challenge is that when you put all of the phone system on the internet, it exposes it to all of the other things that can go wrong on the internet,” says Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare, a company that provides protection against the kinds of attacks currently hitting internet phone providers…
Busy week? I had news meetings, family stuff, and interviews, of course. And then I got a call from an officious, digitized voice that said they were the IRS. It informed me they’ve noticed suspicious activity on my account. Not a good start to the day.
Soon, more bad news. A call from a similar-sounding robo-voice — maybe they’re siblings — said they’ve noticed suspicious activity on my credit card account.
But good news, a minute later: a peppy, friendly, recorded voice, told me my spotless driving record entitled me to receive a great new deal on car insurance.
Then I remembered: I have no driving record. I have no driver’s license, although that did not discourage another genial recorded voice who called a few minutes later to offer a great new deal on a car warranty because of my immaculate driving history.
By the way, I also have spotless record in performing brain surgery.
I take no poetic license when I say that on any given day, I get dozens of calls to say that I’ve won a vacation, a home alarm system, or discounts on scores of pharmaceuticals. I get calls to warn me of suspicious activities on my Social Security or credit card accounts, and calls imploring me to donate to groups that sound faintly familiar, but are likely just cleverly monikered scams. 40% of robocalls reportedly are…
Walt Hickey is a senior editor for data at Insider. Recently, he has been getting a bunch of phone calls about renewing his auto warranty, but Walt doesn’t even have a car! Where is all this spam coming from?
Cell phone spam calls have been on the rise for a few years now. Americans receive billions of robocalls per month. Most people, like Walt, just hang up as soon as they find out it’s a scam robocall. So why are advertisers, even scammers, spending money on them? Turns out, robocalls are so cheap that even luring in a few people is worth paying for billions of calls, and even though these spam calls are technically illegal, the government hasn’t successfully clamped down on robocallers.
On The Indicator, Walt helps us explain the economics behind how robocalls have become such a nuisance, and what this year holds for the dreaded robocall.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a 2015 law allowing federal debt collectors to make robocalls violates the Constitution. That’s because those debt collectors were allowed to make automated calls while other groups weren’t given the same treatment.
Congress generally isn’t allowed to favor certain speech over others, but that’s precisely what Congress did, wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the six-member majority. “A robocall that says, ‘Please pay your government debt’ is legal,” Kavanaugh wrote. “A robocall that says, ‘Please donate to our political campaign’ is illegal. That is about as content-based as it gets.
“Congress has impermissibly favored debt-collection speech over political and other speech, in violation of the First Amendment,” Kavanaugh wrote. Political groups “still may not make political robocalls to cell phones, but their speech is now treated equally with debt-collection speech.”
For nearly 30 years, robocalls have generally been prohibited under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. But in 2015, Congress passed the Bipartisan Budget Act, amending the law to let debt collectors make automated calls to collect money owed to the federal government, including many student loan and mortgage debts.
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The Supreme Court challenge was brought by political advocacy groups who didn’t think it was fair that only those debt collectors could make robocalls to cellphones. The groups, including the American Association of Political Consultants, wanted to make robocalls to discuss candidates and issues, solicit donations, and encourage voter participation. So they tried to argue that the entire robocall ban was invalid, a suppression of otherwise permissible speech.
The court allowed the general robocall ban to stand. But the 2015 exception for debt collectors was a violation of the First Amendment, the court said.
“Although collecting government debt is no doubt a worthy goal, the Government concedes that it has not sufficiently justified the differentiation between government-debt collection speech and other important categories of robocall speech, such as political speech, charitable fundraising, issue advocacy, commercial advertising, and the like,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan dissented, saying they thought the government had justified special treatment for federal debt collectors. “The speech-related harm at issue here — and any related effect on the marketplace of ideas — is modest,” Breyer wrote for the dissenters.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai commended the court’s ruling. “Thanks to the Supreme Court, the carve-out is no more,” he said in a statement. “Today, the Court found that the last Administration’s attempt to create a special exemption for favored debt collectors was not only bad policy but unconstitutional. I am glad to hear that Americans, who are sick and tired of unwanted robocalls, will now get the relief from federal-debt-collector robocalls they have long deserved.”
August 1, 2019
The Federal Communications Commission took another step on Thursday in the ongoing battle to end the scourge of robocalls Americans receive. It would bar spoofed calls from overseas scammers.
Your phone company may start blocking robocalls without your needing to ask for it.
On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission passed a ruling that allows and encourages phone companies to block robocalls by default.
“We think these actions will help consumers in the near term and the long term to get the peace and the quiet that they deserve,” said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.
At the moment many phone companies offer services that block robocalls, but consumers have to specifically ask and often pay for it. The ruling requires companies to inform consumers of the change and give them an option to opt out of having their calls blocked…
Source:https://n.pr/2EXGmQF
The spam calls keep coming, offering you loans or threatening you with jail time for IRS violations. By some estimates, they make up at least a quarter of all calls in the United States.
And as the problem continues to grow, it creates a whole new set of related nuisances for people like Dakota Hill.
He estimates he gets hundreds of unwanted spam calls every month. But Hill says he also gets calls from people who think he’s spamming them.
Source:https://n.pr/2MwXz9A
Robocalls at any time of the day or night are becoming increasingly common. Some in the federal government are working on solutions, but they have to overcome technology and interest-group objections….
Source:https://n.pr/2WZi03f
May 10, 2018
If you live in a part of the country that has a large Chinese immigrant population, you may have recently received a robocall in Mandarin — or even several of them. The calls seem to be blanketing certain phone exchanges without regard to the national origin of the recipients. Presumably, this is how the New York Police Department ended up on the call list.
NYPD Officer Donald McCaffrey, who works in the Queens grand larceny division, is investigating the calls in New York City. He has also been receiving them on a daily basis…
March 13, 2018
Last Tuesday, the Internal Revenue Service said people were being being bilked out of money by criminals pretending to be from the tax collection agency. Two days later, I received a phone call that my provider said was probably spam. They left a message saying they were from the IRS and I was in big trouble.
“(After 24 hours), you will be taken into custody by the local cops as there are four serious allegations pressed against your name at this moment,” said the automated voice in broken English…
January 11, 2018
A fatal police shooting in Kansas late last month focused attention again on how so-called swatting — prank 911 calls designed to get SWAT teams to deploy — puts lives at risk and burdens police departments.
There are more than 7,000 911 centers in the U.S. and, according to the National Emergency Number Association, they receive about 600,000 calls a day. Authorities don’t track swatting calls nationally, though the FBI has been monitoring the practice of those types of fake calls for about a decade…
September 4, 2017
Fraud is the latest threat facing victims of Hurricane Harvey, as well as the volunteers who are helping the relief effort. NPR’s Ari Shapiro talks with Corey Amundson, a U.S. Attorney who heads the National Center for Disaster Fraud…
June 22, 2017
Federal regulators on Thursday said they’ve identified “the perpetrator of one of the largest … illegal robocalling campaigns” they have ever investigated.
The Federal Communications Commission has proposed a $120 million fine for a Miami resident said to be single-handedly responsible for almost 97 million robocalls over just the last three months of 2016…