Here’s an experience some of us have had. The phone rings. You pick it up and say “Hello. Hello. Helloooo.” But nobody answers. It turns out there could be someone on the other end of the line: an automated computer system that’s calling your number — and tens of thousands of others — to build a list of humans to target for theft.
Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO of Pindrop Security, a company in Atlanta that detects phone fraud, says that in any number of ways, the criminal ring gets your 10 digits and loads them into an automated system. Maybe you gave your number to Target or some other big retailer that got hacked. Maybe you entered an online raffle to win a free iPhone. According to the Federal Trade Commission, these robocalls are on the rise because Internet-powered phones make it cheap and easy for scammers to make illegal calls from anywhere in the world. That initial call you get, with silence on the other end, “[is] essentially the first of the reconnaissance calls that these fraudsters do,” Balasubramaniyan says. “They’re trying to see: Are they getting a human on the other end? You even cough and it knows you’re there.”
Listen to the full NPR story here.
