Question:
Other than telemarketers, have you ever been contacted by a phone scam (or received phone spam)?
Yesterday, when I checked my phone as I was leaving the fitness center, I found a missed phone call from a number and area code that was not in my contact list and that I didn’t recognize. I didn’t try to call back, preferring, instead, to wait until after I got home and could find out where the area code is .
It turned out that the call was from Phoenix, Arizona.
Now, I do know some people who are living in the Phoenix area, but they were people from work who either quit and moved there to work or retired and moved there to work. I wouldn’t expect to hear from any of them.
However, there was a contract coordinator on one of the contracts jobs I did who worked out of Phoenix, though all of the communication with the contract company when I’m not working comes from the home office in Florida. Still, it was worth looking into a little bit more, but not enough to try calling back, yet.
I decided to try to do a reverse phone number look-up. For a price, personal information is available for the name a phone is in for almost every land line as well as many cell phones. There are varying amounts and varying plans that can be subscribed to. However, I don’t often have the need to track down personal information and I wasn’t about to pay for information about a call that might have been a wrong number. When I searched on the term “reverse look-up,” all I found were various websites trying to get my money when I tried to do a reverse phone number look-up.
Then I decided to do a search on the phone number in Google.
Sometimes ya just get lucky.
Some of the comments on one of the pages:
A credit card telemarketing scam! They are trying to get you to tell them your credit card number so they can charge your credit cards.
They keep calling me to my cell phone and I never give them my number,I don’t know how they got my number, they are violating my privacy calling to my cell phone I hope we can do something to stop this.
I get frequent "missed call" notices on my cell phone from this number (
). The caller is always too cowardly to leave a message. As another complaint filer noted, it appears to be a telemarketer. How are telemarketers getting our cell numbers?
The second time they called – same message, and this time I played along.
This is a complete and utter scam
How do I know? because I’ve never applied or carried a credit card – not even a store credit card! I prefer to operate on a cash basis. They have nothing to do with any existing credit card company nor are they calling on behalf of any company from what I gathered from them on the phone they are either a complete scam or an intermediary that will buy your debt from your existing company although he was very hazy and evasive on the phone. So the alarm going off in my head says scam – and under no circumstances should you give these people any information about yourself
They won’t be calling me from that number for a while.
Verizon Wireless lets customers block calls from up to 5 numbers for 90 days. It’s a temporary measure, but, hopefully, our numbers will have dropped off of their system by December 9.
