You’re almost certainly familiar with vishing, a phone-based scam in which cybercriminals leave messages on your voicemail in the hope that you’ll call them back later to find out what’s going on.
In fact, if you have a long-standing phone number, like we do, you may well get more of these scam calls (perhaps even many more of them) than genuine calls, so you’ll know the sort of angle they take, which often goes along these lines:
[Synthetic voice] Your Amazon Prime subscription will auto-renew. Your card will be billed for [several tens of dollars]. To cancel your subscription or to discuss this renewal, press 1 now.
Sometimes, they’ll read out the number to call them back on, to re-iterate not only that it matches the number that shows up in your call history, but also that it’s a local number, right there in your own town or country.
The crooks do this to “prove” that caller is local too, rather than sitting overseas in some scammy boiler-room call centre, far from the reach of law enforcement and the regulators in your part of the world.
BazarCaller – the malware gang that talks you into infecting yourself
Scam Me If You Can
