spoofing

LINK: spoofing

I get a lot of spam calls. It’s rather annoying but sadly enough, I’ve gotten used to it.

Reasons why I don’t answer my calls and am horrible with texts:

• because I’m busy working
• because I’m sleeping
• I genuinely loathe talking on the phone
• scammers will identify that the phone number is active and it will only encourage more junk calls in the future
• they’re trying to have me say “yes” so they can steal my identity or record/clone my voice for other fucked up purposes
  • I’ve had a patient tell me that they heard their daughter on the other line saying that she was kidnapped and begging her mom to wire money otherwise they unalive her. Luckily, that patient had the wherewithal to go to her daughter’s room and saw that she was fast asleep and not in any distress whatsoever. She then immediately hung up on the scammer.
• once they get me on the phone, they will try to rattle me — to prevent me from thinking clearly, making me more likely to be a victim to fraud
  • I’ve had patients who are highly intelligent get scammed out of money because of this.
• scammers will also randomly send texts like “Hi, how are you?” They’re trying to engage and build a rapport with you so that you will lower your guard.

The other day, I I got a call from this unknown number. Usually, it’ll alert me that it’s a potential spam call but not this time. I google’d the phone number and it was the phone number to U.S. bank’s card member service line.

I’m naturally intrigued and sus’d by this cause I don’t use this bank or credit card. So of course, I had to dig more extensively about this online.

Waushara County in Wisconsin clocked this U.S. bank scam way back in 2020.

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Please watch the short reel above if you are able to. According to internet, scammers are spoofing bank phone numbers to take over and drain bank accounts.

If you get anything suspicious about your bank accounts, you should log into your account through the app to verify your hunch. Do not click on any links on an e-mail or text that was sent to you. You can also call the bank directly, again, not through any links or e-mails, and talk to a real bank agent.

The BBB (Better Business Bureau) has a site where people can report scams and you can search their database on all the different types of scams that have been reported. And there are thousands of them…

Le sigh. It’s so sad that we’re at an era where we can’t even answer our phones because the caller on the other end is most likely some sort of scammer asshat. But this is the world we live in and we have to stay vigilant.