Fighting Spam and Scams
It’s tempting, but I don’t actually use an air horn to discourage spam callers. And I don’t want to buy a program that claims to help. My phone recognizes what it calls “Potential Spam,” which leaves me with a dilemma. The phone doesn’t officially declare it to identified spam, so I always fear missing a call I want to answer because my phone is mistaken. But I do know a couple of ways to thwart the spammers and scammers.
One not-so-secret I’m willing to share is that saying, “Hello” when you answer the phone is a bad idea. If it is a call from a spam boiler room, this triggers their system to route the call to one of their agents. I have sympathy for people who are forced to make a living this way, but not enough to listen to them begin their spiel.
Instead of “Hello,” I identify myself (“This is Janet”). It’s a polite enough greeting just in case it’s someone I might actually want or need to talk to. My second response is similar — ”What is this in regard to?” It’s a good question even if someone does start talking after “This is Janet.” If there’s still no one on the line, I say, “Is anyone there?” After that, I simply say, “Goodbye.”
This system works well for me. It takes only a couple of seconds. And it avoids the “Hello” trap.
Another thing I know about spam calls is never to say “yes” to any question. Unscrupulous callers can record this answer and use it to “prove” that you agreed to make a purchase. One of the most common questions designed to evoke a “yes” is “Can you hear me?” For that, I reply, “I can hear you.” Sometimes, they ask twice, hoping that the next time I’ll say, “Yes, I can hear you.” You have to be alert to make this work. Spam callers can ask a lot of yes/no questions, hoping that you’ll slip up.
Other spam calls, the more dangerous kind, are ones that are designed to get you to whip out your credit card and give them money. They usually try to make their call sound frightening. For example, they say, “This is the IRS.” That’s enough to alarm nearly anyone. However, the IRS never phones. They send threatening letters, sometimes the kind that you have to sign for.
Another scammer scheme is to claim that they are from IBM (or Microsoft or whatever) and claim that you have malware on your computer. They then say that they can take care of the problem and ask for your credit card. Or they say they’ll give you instructions that will let them take control of your computer to remove the malware — an even worse idea. At least one guy I know was suckered into doing it. I also know a 96-year-old woman who didn’t fall for it, bawled them out and threatened to call the cops on them.
Speaking of computers, scammers also try to catch you via email. Once I received a communication that said that I was being charged several hundred dollars and, if I hadn’t actually bought anything, I should get in touch. Alarmed, I did. But then they went too far. They said that to solve the problem, I would need to download a software program. Well, I wasn’t born yesterday. I knew that was a bad idea and declined to do it. Then I reported them to the computer crime and fraud hotline. When I got another communication of the same type, I simply ignored it.
Another email scam is to contact you and say that a friend or relative is in trouble somehow and needs money right away to solve the problem. I got one of these claiming that someone I knew was stranded in Germany and needed help. It was remotely possible, as he had a daughter studying in Germany. But before I did anything else, I called his wife. She said that he was indeed out of town, but visiting family in Michigan.
Once I actually was in the position of being in a foreign country and needing funds. When I contacted a friend, though, I provided an obscure piece of information that only a close friend would know. That’s another good strategy. “If you’re really Roger, tell me what was on the corner when you lived near me.” If he doesn’t say “a vet,” he’s probably a Nigerian prince.
