Yesterday, after we closed, we received a phone call which automatically went to voice mail. Since I was still sitting at my computer, I saw the call come in and I listened to the message.
What I heard was a computer voice asking me to call their number. The message was repeated and then the call ended.
I hadn’t recognized the phone number so I decided to look it up on www.whitepages.com. I went there and reversed the phone number. This is what I found:
As you can see, there’s plenty of reason for me to not call this number! When I scrolled down the page, I found comments from people who had actually spoken with the caller. Turns out, this is the scam that, unfortunately, recently victimized one of my customers.
“Claimed to be giving refund because the company was ordered to close down.”
Just for the fun of it, I decided to reverse our phone number for the office – 772-408-4425. Here, with highlighting added on one sentence, is the report:
Notice under “You can call with confidence.” the option to report a number if you received a spam phone call from it. That’s how people reported what happened to them with the spam phone number shown at the beginning of this post.
Moral of this post? If you receive a phone call and you’re not sure if it’s legit, go to www.whitepages.com, click on “PHONE” above the search bar at the top and enter the phone number in question.
One word of caution when using the White Pages website. Like many of us on the web, we try to find ways to pay for the services related to keeping us online. When you search for someone on White Pages, you will see options to check a person’s criminal record, etc. Options like that are not free. If you choose those options and want the results, you’ll have to pay a fee or subscribe to some service. I’m all for supporting good websites like White Pages (and 4KCC.COM, of course) but just don’t go there thinking all information will be free.
What is free, however, is your ability to leave a comment or question below!
Update
Here’s the report on another call we just received this morning:
And here are some of the comments from people who posted on the White Pages site:
Just a reminder that there are lots of people who want to trick you over the phone. Remember, we call that Social Engineering!