Ways to con common people with phone scams is getting more rampant and creative by the day. The new sort of fraud is leading recipients to return the calls to draw their names, phone numbers and other personal information.
Many Korean-Americans agree that they are receiving more calls from unknown phone numbers than they have in the past. Commonly, those calls are ignored, but the likes of business owners cannot simply dismiss any call.
“I often ignore calls coming from out of state,” said Korean-American Jeong, 35, an employee at an advertisement agency. “I often call back when the call came from within Southern California. When I made the call back recently, I was asked to provide my identity from someone who claimed to have been working for a travel agency. I could have given away all of my personal information.”
New ways have been made by the conmen to lead call recipients to make the call back. By using Robocall, the fraudsters make calls until they hear the voice of the recipients. Once the call is answered, they often hang up immediately.
Some phone scams are plotted by fake utility companies forging names and numbers of the callers.
More than 400 phone scams have been reported this year alone, according to Suthern California Edison (SCE).
SCE explained that many scams disguise the caller as a utility company and approach their targets accordingly.
“The fraudsters will request information of the recipients SCE accounts, social security numbers, credit card numbers and other confidential information,” said Carie Gardner, a manager at SCE. “There is nothing we can do on our end to stop people from doing that. We advise our customers to be alert at all times.”
Recipients of such calls are advised to be conscious of calls that request for money or personal information, arrests of family members and other forms of threats.
By Hyoungjae Kim
