
Americans lose $50M to phone scams in the last year - elorant
https://www.kshb.com/news/national/americans-lose-50-million-to-phone-scams-in-the-last-year
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mcrae
My girlfriend was speaking to her father (mid-60s?) who was complaining about
what a pain in the ass it was to get his new iPhone configured. He had called
Apple support who would come the next day, but now he had to go to Wal-Mart to
pickup the giftcards to pay for the service.

Wait. What?

So I guess he had Googled for iPhone support and got some bogus phone number.
Aside from the potential monetary loss, the scary part was that had they come
to the house, he likely would have let them in.

The world and the way in which we do business changes quickly, and red-flags
for some aren't red-flags for others. But I'm really curious what search term
lead to the fraudulent phone number in the first place -- how are these
platforms so gameable?

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grandmczeb
No data to back this up, but at least in my experience victims finding a phone
number directly from a Google search is actually pretty uncommon. Although,
sometimes you’ll see fake numbers posted in the comments of news articles or
YouTube videos that rank highly for search terms like “fix virus iPhone.”

The most common way people get targeted is either via a pop-up while browsing
(e.g. “Your iPhone has a virus! Call xxx xxxx now to fix”) or just random cold
calls. Scammers also circulate lists of phone numbers/personal information of
victims to previous scams, so once you end up as a victim of one you’re much
more likely to be a target for new/more sophisticated scams.

~~~
herenorthere
Probably not the norm, but I have worked alongside a tech company that has 30+
million user accounts, and as such, has a pretty much constant stream of
scammers wishing to take advantage of our user base.

The customer support dept. has a phone number to call, which is listed on the
website. But you'd be amazed how many people are willing to call some random
number so long as it shows up in a google result. Normally, it's older folks
that fall for this type of scam.

The fraud dept. sends a handful of take-down requests to google per week; but
it really doesn't do much to stem the incoming flow of support hotline scams.
Once a number is taken down, they just create a new website and new fake
number.

To reply to your comment more directly, I have no idea whether or not this
scam type accounts for a significant portion of scams overall, but for my
particular industry it sure is. In any account, the way people are scammed on
our site changes all the time depending on what's available/easiest for the
scammers, so the methods they use are constantly changing/adapting.

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grandmczeb
Note this is reported scams. In some cases the victims may never even realize
they’ve been scammed, and even those who do are frequently too embarrassed to
talk about it openly. Many victims are also very old or recent immigrants and
may not know how to report the scam. There are even scams that specifically
target undocumented workers who may not want to report for fear of bringing
unwanted attention to them by the government. I personally know half a dozen
separate people who were either a victim or very nearly a victim of phone
scams, so I have a very hard time believing the number isn’t much higher.

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koolba
That's barely $0.15 per person which seems way to low. This is only the direct
loss though.

The real amount would include the millions of hours we collectively spend
deleting voicemails from " _Rachel from card services_ ".

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ricc
It's also quite common here in Germany especially with the elderly... But
sometimes: [https://www.dw.com/en/seniors-outsmart-con-men-posing-as-
pol...](https://www.dw.com/en/seniors-outsmart-con-men-posing-as-police-in-
cologne/a-50515716)

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jagger27
That’s not a staggering number, to be honest.

~~~
newnewpdro
Agreed, it's lower than I expected.

But I've heard multiple stories of people being scammed for large sums of
money over the phone and they tell nobody outside their immediate family. It
goes unreported. They're too embarrassed.

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dredmorbius
Given that this comes from scams _reported to the FBI_ , my read is that this
number is likely low by 10-100x.

The personal scams are only a part of this too: scams against business are
also running rampant.

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everdrive
Phone scams are definitely getting worse. It's small measure, but I've
disabled my voicemail. I still get the scam calls, but they're that much less
annoying.

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B_Throwaway
Alternative headline:

Americans lose on average 16 cents to phone scams in the last year.

~~~
stubish
Yes, you can play with statistics that way if you want to sweep the problem
under the carpet. If only the victims could get their potentially life
changing losses amortized over the country's population somehow.

~~~
pryffwyd
_Chicago citizens were on average murdered .0002 times in the last year_

