This number called and after a few moments a very badly recorded message started about my mortgage being lowered or some such. Then after I hung up they called two more times right after each other.
Five minutes ago (1:55 pm), I received a call from this number, identified as "wireless caller". When I said "Hello", I got silence. I said if there is someone there, speak up or I'm hanging up. A man (foreign accent (India?)) said something about lowering my mortgage payment and was forwarding me to a representative who needed some information. Suspecting it was a scam, I had my husband get on the extension to listen in. He told the man we were not interested.
The man tried to keep my husband on the phone; my husband repeated that we were not interested and said he was
hanging up and that man on the line was to also terminated the call on his end.
This number has called three times in the last hour, yesterday they called twice. It appears as a wireless number, I of course check with the white pages and see it is in Georgia.
Our answering machine picks and they never leave a message.
Our local news station just did a report on the newest scam. It is called the one ring scam. Someone calls your number and only allows one ring. This leads some people to call back the number... BIG mistake!!
The below paragraphs I copied from two websites which describe the process.
"It works like this: Your phone rings once, leaving you notice of a missed call from an unfamiliar number. When you call back, you're charged $19.95 for an international call, plus $9 per minute for however long you stay on the line.
What keeps the scam going, Adam Levin, chairman and founder of Idenity Theft 911, tells ABC News, is the average person's "unquenchable curiosity" about a mysterious call.
"These are robocalls," says Levin, sent out by the thousands by computer. The scammers assume--correctly--that a certain percentage of people will respond.
Patrick Morrisey, attorney general of West Virginia, says, "This is a national scam. Calls seem to be coming from Caribbean countries such as Antigua, Barbados, Jamacia, Grenada and other island nations using area codes such as 268, 876, or 473. But calls also may be from domestic numbers."
The best advice, he says, is to be cautious about answering or returning phone calls from numbers and area codes you don't recognize. "If someone calls and doesn't leave a message, chances are fairly good they didn't need to reach you that much."
How To Avoid Gettin’ Scammed:
If you don’t recognize a number, don’t call’em back.
If you really want to call back, Google the number first. Check the area code to make sure it’s not long-distance. Check the full number, too; in many cases, you’ll find a page full of results saying “Do not call! It’s a scam!”