The scam goes like this: Through some means, a telephone scammer gets enough information about you to steal your identity, particularly access to your bank account. The most common trick: You are persuaded into giving up financial details in order to facilitate some sort of monetary transaction, like a lottery payout.
But that’s old news, really. The really clever part begins once the thief starts draining your account or using your stolen credit-card information to buy things. This stage involves tying up your phone line completely through a seemingly endless procession of junk phone calls, from telemarketers to recorded messages advertising some product or another to nothing but silence.
It doesn’t matter what the substance of the calls is. Rather, it’s the fact that your phone line is being tied up so that you can’t use it.
That’s important, because, meanwhile, the crooks are busily running up the bills. Scammers have wised up to the fact that banks will quickly catch on to fraudulent charges, so by now you’ve surely experienced what is supposed to come next: Your bank calls you to ask about “unusual activity.”
But with the scam in full swing, the bank can’t get through to you. It receives a busy signal, and, depending on the bank, the bank may let the charges continue until you turn them off — so the tally keeps rising.
Another, simpler trick: A scammer simply changes your phone number with the bank once he has access to your account. Thus, the bank can’t reach you at all since the number is wrong.
The only real thing you can do if you think you’ve been targeted with this scam is to start contacting financial institutions immediately through another phone number and put a freeze on the account, either using an alternate line like a cell phone or even by going to a friend’s house. Start with your most critical financial institutions and credit-card providers and work down. Remember, a single telemarketing phone call does not a scam make, but if you’ve gotten a handful in a row, one after another, the odds are good that you’re under attack.
Once you’ve done that, you really have little choice but to ride out the attack. Chances are, once your accounts have been frozen, the calls will cease and you’ll be able to resume your life again. At this point you’ll have some cleaning up to do, including investigating your credit cards for false charges, ensuring your bank account balances are correct, freezing your credit report and, most importantly, changing passwords.
— Christopher Null is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.
