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Best Ways to Spot and Report Phone Scams

If we want to protect ourselves and our family from phone scams that are constantly plaguing us all we need to learn how to recognize them and prevent them from happening again. Remember that it is essential to file a complaint when appropriate and protect your personal and financial information and that of your loved ones.

Unwanted phone calls are a nuisance and invade your privacy. But even worse, phone scams could cost us anywhere from a few dollars to our entire life savings. The best thing you can do to protect yourself is to avoid answering from numbers you don’t recognize. Or if you do answer but don’t know the caller, just hang up and use a reverse phone lookup search to discover who is calling you. But that is not a luxury most of us have, that is why it is important for us to learn how to spot them.

Learning how to recognize phone scams

It is important for us to understand that the telephone scammers often try to hook you with enticing offers, appeals for charitable causes, or claims of being associated with the government. The one thing that they all have in common is the aggressive form that they take. They won’t let you think about what they are saying and will keep on rushing you to make a decision, provide data or money. You need to remember that you are not obliged to do anything especially not over the phone.

So, what is important to keep in mind is that a phone scammer’s goal is to get you to either send them money or provide your personal information that they can use later on to get more data on you or to get more money from you.

What we have done is compiled a list of warning signs that are most common in phone scams -

• The most common opening line is a claim that you have been specially selected for a specific award or prize. That moment of happiness is what prevents us from thinking straight. Otherwise, your brain would just say – I haven’t applied for anything, and more importantly – how do they have my name and number.
• Phone scammers love using high-pressure sales tactics and “limited-time” offers, that you have to decide on straight away. That also prevents us from thinking straight and makes us feel cornered so that we end up making the wrong decision.
• Another common sign is their reluctance to answer questions about the business or the offer. You only get some basic data, but if you ask for their website or additional information, more often than not they cannot provide it. And when they do it is usually a fake site that you can spot from a mile away.
• One of the all-time favorites scams is a request that you “confirm your personal information”. Ah yes, that means that you answer yes and no questions, so they get you on tape saying yes. But even worse is that the main goals are to extract additional information. So if they get your name, and employment record right but they make a mistake with some other piece of data like your social security number, you might simply correct them, without realizing you are providing them with information that they do not possess.
• Next on the list is requesting payments. First, they might ask for payment by means other thana credit card –including cash, gift card, wire, or via a private courier. In this case, they love scamming the elderly, by pretending they are their grandchildren in need of money and asking for a wire transfer. Or, they just go on and straightforward ask for your credit card or another payment mechanism for “shipping and handling”. Smart, aren’t they?
• This is one of the tactics that we find especially awful – phone scammers are completely comfortable with the use of threats if you don’t comply – even the threat of arrest. This is common if they choose to present themselves as a government agency- FBI or IRS most commonly.
• Finally, there is the very clever IT support rouse, they will call you up and claim that you have a virus on your computer or request to log in to your computer so that they can fix it remotely. In that case, hang up and contact your official IT support company and check the situation with them.

On to some basic protection options

Just hang up, use your trusted reveres phone, and have the data on the caller in just a few moments. Then you can easily decide whether or not you want to call back or report the number. However, there are some additional ways you can lower the number of scam calls that reach your number.

The first thing you can do is to enroll for free in the federal do-not-call list at www.donotcall.gov, this should help a bit, but sadly not that much. The fact of the matter is that illegitimate companies and scam artists do not respect do-not-call lists. So even if you are on it there is a that you will continue to get scam calls which means that your alertness levels cannot drop.

You can also use a call-blocking service, it usually comes in the form of an app phot your cellphone but there are call-blocking devices that can be installed directly on your home phone or over the Internet. That way you can block the numbers you know to be scams, at least you won’t get repeated calls from them.

We hope that this article was helpful to you and that you can more easily spot the phone scams and deal with them in the most effective way. It feels like an uphill battle but both government agencies and phone service providers are doing everything they can to fight off the large number of phone scams that seem to be appearing on a daily basis.