OSF - 2.15 - scams - robot press 1
The next scam that I would like to address is also one that tends to come by phone. Although there are variations on this scam that will come by email, and sometimes even text.
It is difficult to isolate a particular identity for this scam. The call may purport to come from your bank, your credit card company, or a business with which you may (or may not), have an existing relationship. The call may purport to come from the government, particularly a taxation department, or even from law enforcement. The identifying factor that I tend to use is that, for some reason, the call always starts out with a robotic voice. You are being called by a robot, a machine.
As I say, the call may purport to come from a variety of sources. Very often the initial message will say that a charge has been made to your credit card, or a payment is being made from your bank, or an invoice for a business has been charged to your credit card, or you are delinquent in your taxes, or you are *so* delinquent in your taxes that law enforcement is ready to arrest you, and take you to jail. The call, as I say, usually starts out with some kind of machine based, or recorded message. The gist of the message is that you owe money to somebody, or have agreed to pay money to somebody, and you are then, most often, presented with two options: press one to accept the charge, or press two to dispute the charge.
Sometimes the message only presents you with an option to press one to dispute the charge. It really doesn't matter. The reality is, of course, that you have not agreed to purchase anything, and no charge has been made to your credit card, and you are not delinquent in your taxes. It doesn't matter whether you press one to accept the charge, or two to dispute the charge: whatever you do you are going to be connected to some kind of a call center, where somebody is going to start to work the scam on you.
Probably in most cases you will want to dispute the charge. The person that you are connected to for the duration of the phone call will probably be very polite, very helpful, apologize for the error, and try very, very hard to get your credit card or banking information so that they can rectify this problem. Of course, they are not going to rectify the problem; they are going to try and steal your money, either from your bank account, or from by making charges to your credit card.
There is, of course, some social engineering going on here too. Probably the reason that the call is initiated by machine partly has to do with the cost of having a machine place to call, which is almost nothing, versus the cost of having an actual person making the call. But there is an additional factor with regard to the machine making the call, and that is that the robotic or recorded voice makes the call seem more legitimate and official. We do have a tendency to associate, these days, the use of technology with large corporations. If the call is being made by a computer, then it must be an expensive computer that is owned by a large company. That, of course, is complete nonsense these days: computers capable of making these calls can be bought or built very cheaply. And, in any case, as previously noted, most of these scams are highly organized, and the person that you were talking to, eventually, if you press either one or two, is probably in a call center somewhere, with number of other people who are doing similar calls.
There are some additional social engineering factors at work. Most people don't keep track of all the purchases that they may make. Many of the companies whose services you have supposedly purchased are companies which you may, in fact, already use. It may be a fee for the use of PayPal, or your Amazon Prime account, or the Norton or McAfee security software, which tend to be the ones that most people use, because they tend to be the ones that are packaged most frequently with new computers. So it is highly likely that you may deal with these services, and are not completely familiar with the anniversary date for your annual payment, and may instinctively want to continue the service, and are there for possibly predisposed to ensure that you do pay.
Even if the purchase is not one that you would want to make, and you may not know whether or not you have made this purchase. Therefore you may wish to get more information about the purported purchase. And, of course, when you talk to someone on the phone, in order to give you more information about the purchase, and purely for the purposes of ensuring the security of your account, they will be asking you a lot of questions about your account, such as your account number, your name, your address, the security PIN that you use for this account, and so on and so forth. All of which of course they do to fully record, and sell on to the people who are going to use your credit card, or bank account, to make purchases and steal your money.
There is yet more social engineering involved: as I say, if you dispute the charge, they will be polite helpful, apologetic, and really eager to help rectify the problem. And, of course, in order to rectify the problem, they will want to have all kinds of banking information and the information about your credit card. For the purposes of stealing from you.
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/online-scams-frauds-and-other-attacks.html
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