Warning scam artist!!!

[tomthebaker]

I've been on the national do not call registry since 2009. It doesn't seem to make any difference.

 

[dennishoddy]

I've been on the national do not call registry since 2009. It doesn't seem to make any difference.

Me too, but the scammers out of the country don't have to go by that.

 

[tRidiot]

Me too, but the scammers out of the country don't have to go by that.

So how do they get their numbers to show up as local numbers? Is it similar to using a proxy server for your internet routing stuff?

My grandmother got caught on the phone with one of the "Your computer is malfunctioning" scams recently. They convinced her to get on her computer and put in some kind of command that locked it up, then tried to make her give them her credit card info to get it unlocked. She finally wised up and hung up and had to call Microsoft (presumably) to get things restored and working properly again. But, now the scammers call her number all hours of the day and night to try different schemes on them. They called once while we were out there visiting them this week (they're in Arizona) and my grandpa went off on them on the phone, but of course, it makes no difference.

You'd think there would be some kind of provision to help prevent this. The various law enforcement cyber crimes divisions don't really seem to have any way to deal with it, I guess.

 

[dennishoddy]

So how do they get their numbers to show up as local numbers? Is it similar to using a proxy server for your internet routing stuff?

My grandmother got caught on the phone with one of the "Your computer is malfunctioning" scams recently. They convinced her to get on her computer and put in some kind of command that locked it up, then tried to make her give them her credit card info to get it unlocked. She finally wised up and hung up and had to call Microsoft (presumably) to get things restored and working properly again. But, now the scammers call her number all hours of the day and night to try different schemes on them. They called once while we were out there visiting them this week (they're in Arizona) and my grandpa went off on them on the phone, but of course, it makes no difference.

You'd think there would be some kind of provision to help prevent this. The various law enforcement cyber crimes divisions don't really seem to have any way to deal with it, I guess.

The news did a report on this very subject tonight on NBC. Its called call spoofing. They make the phone number look like its originating in the US, but it's actually coming from overseas.
The NBC report said that the FCC was now going to allow phone companies to start blocking those calls, vs in the past where the FCC encouraged phone companies to allow all calls no matter what. The report said we should see far less calls in the future.
https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/blog/2011/06/23/caller-id-spoofing-whos-really-line