NEW SCAM + 5 Common Phone Scams to Watch Out For

scammers these days are getting trickier and trickier and now there is a brand new phone scam out there that everyone should know about it's not that common apparently but it's still pretty interesting and I thought I'd talk about it so in this video we're going to go over five common telephone scams to watch out for including this brand new one so first what is this new scam you may have already seen it mentioned in the news it's often referred to as the can you hear me scam and what happens is the scammer will call your phone number and ask a simple question it may be can you hear me or is this the head of household or something like that and they know that you will answer yes to whatever question they asked or at least they're hoping to and simply by saying the word yes or I agree or something like that now they've got you wait a minute what do you mean they got me I just said yes that's right because this is what happened you see when that scammer called you they are recording that call and they just want you to say yes or some other positive response so they have that recording of you that they can use later then they're going to hit you with some sort of bogus charge to your phone bill or utility bill or something like that for example it is possible for some services to apply charges right through your phone bill such as those hotlines that you know what I'm talking about and the reason they get the recording of you is that they will actually edit an audio clip of them saying something like do you agree to this charge or whatever and then t back on your yes response that they had so now they have a supposed proof recording of you agreeing to charges that you never agree to such as if the phone company ask for proof that you actually did agree to this charge or you go to challenge it later it's very tricky stuff so here's the best thing to do to avoid this type of scam if you get a call that asks can you hear me then obviously just hang up immediately that's the scam but if you aren't sure like if they say is this whoever maybe respond by saying may I ask who's calling and why don't say yes or anything like that then you can probably judge the response yourself if they're legitimate of course most of the time you can just tell if it's a telemarketer or something so I'd say just hang up either way no need to even waste your time you don't have to be nice to the telemarketers and I'm sure you know if you tell telemarketers in general that you're not interested they won't leave it at that they're going to try to keep bugging you to keep you talking even though you're not interested at all so better to just not take the risk okay so that might be the newest scam but what are some other ones to watch out for the next one is the so-called star 72 scam or call forwarding scam and this one is another tricky one that might not seem obvious if you don't know what's going on for those not aware star 72 is one of the many Star codes that you can type into your phone either it's a cell phone or a landline that will perform different functions star 7 72 in particular activates call forwarding so when you type in Star 72 then any phone number it will then forward all calls to your number to the other phone number that you just typed in so in this scam the scammer will try to get you to type in a phone number beginning with star 72 for example they may say we were in an accident and we need you to call an ambulance or hospital and then give you the code and then the phone number and they might say oh well this star code allows you to go get directly to the doctor or something like that meanwhile now all your calls are going to get forwarded to that number there's also another one where they say oh they're calling from jail and they called the wrong number and they only get one phone call can you please call my wife or something like that and then they get you to type it in that way but either way if someone asks you to type in a star code it's a scam and then after you do that the scammer will give your phone number to someone who wants to call them from like longdistance collect so you have to pay for all those collect calls and the two scammers can talk as much as they want while you foot the bill because the collect call is technically being forwarded through you so they just use your phone number to steal calls and they don't have to pay for it no matter how long distance it is so just be aware of what star codes are and don't type any of them in if someone tells you to the next scam is one that is definitely not new but people somehow still fall for it sometimes it's the notorious Windows support scam this is where you'll get a random phone call from someone who claims to be from Microsoft or sometimes from Windows yeah it doesn't even make sense but they'll say something along the lines of your computer has been sending us error messages let me help you fix it and then they guide you through some ridiculous process on your computer that will show supposed errors as proof that your computer clearly is broken but here's the scam part then they tell you that to fix it you need to download a certain program from whatever website they give and of course it's a virus and then after that they have full control of your computer they're going to log everything you type into it and of course use it to steal your money so yeah Microsoft is not going to call you about your computer next up is a more General type of scam which are fake Bank security calls and I thought I'd talk about this because they are kind of tricky because sometimes the bank or credit card company will call you if they suspect fraud is occurring so I thought I'd go over how to be sure that you're not going to fall for this so for example a scammer may call you and claim to be the bank and say that your card has a suspicious charge or something like that they may also leave a message saying call back this number for the fraud department and then before they can tell you about it they need to verify the credit card number which of course involves you giving them their credit card number so what should you do about this what if the credit card company is actually calling you about fraud well what I say is anytime you get a call or message claiming to be from the bank always make sure you call them so go to your bank's website and call the official number there or the one on the back of the card and have them just transfer you to the correct department you can't be sure that the person who calls you is who they say they are or for example if they're fake and they say oh call our fraud department and of course it's not really that so you want to make sure that you're calling something that you know is legitimate now finally I just have to quickly mention the notorious IRS scam calls these are pretty easy to spot and almost always involve someone calling you from the IRS or some other tax agency saying that you own owe a bunch of taxes and if you don't pay up you're going to go to jail now the important thing to know here and the main point is that with this the IRS does not call people without sending a letter first so if out of the blue you just get a message saying oh you're going to go to jail if you don't pay us yeah that's obviously a scam for something that serious the IRS would definitely send you a notice via certified mail so you wouldn't just get it lost in the mail so there's not much more to say about that one they're pretty obvious but just know that the IRS in general doesn't call you without letting you know by mail first so now that you know some of these scams what can you do going forward well first of all if you do get a Spam or scam call don't respond in any way even by pressing a number on the keypad I remember one time I had just booked a hotel for example and just by chance I got a Spam call that very night claiming to be from that company that I just booked the hotel room with so I was kind of thrown off guard it said something like oh here's a free gift just press one to learn more now normally this would be a huge red flag but the timing of it threw me off so just out of curiosity I pressed one and of course it transferred me to someone with a thick accent saying I want a free cruise and it was obviously a scam so I hung up but the problem was and here's my point is because I pressed one initially they now knew that my number worked so they put it on a list of working numbers or probably sold it on a list so for literally months afterwards I kept getting more of the same spam calls every week it took forever for me to stop getting them so don't even interact with these spammers or scammers at all and at best don't even answer it in the first place another thing you can do is there are actually apps out there that will block suspected spam calls the one I've been using is called Mr number I think it's the most popular one and it also is on Android and iPhone anyway anyway something like that will use caller ID and Community reports to automatically flag phone numbers that are known to be scammed or heavily suspected and just block them or at least warn you with the Mr Number app I just mentioned you can also look at your recent call history through it and it will show you reports other people left about that number so it's pretty nifty you can kind of see people say oh this is a spam call they wanted to offer me credit card reports or oh that's this person calling it's just good to know so I guess that's it those are some common phone scams to watch out for and some things you can do to avoid them also hopefully you guys found this video helpful and if you liked it be sure to give it a thumbs up I'd really appreciate it and let me know maybe if you want me to make more videos like this in the future I'll try to keep an eye out on New scams that come out and let you guys know about them also if you want to keep watching I'll put some other videos right here you can click on these even if you're on a phone and if you want to subscribe be sure to do that I make new videos Tuesday Thursday Saturday today and also consider clicking the Bell next to the Subscribe button so you actually get notified from the new videos cuz YouTube is not going to show it to you anyway so I'm looking forward to hearing from you guys let me know what you think and as usual thanks for watching and have a good one

Channel: ThioJoe

Views: 2,150,502

Keywords: technology, tech, thiojoe, thiojoetech, phone scam, can you hear me scam, scams, cons, common scams, computer scams, fraud, scam, scammer, tech support scam, microsoft scam, irs scam, scammers, tech support scammer, windows scam, windows tech support scam, tech support scammers, phone scammer, microsoft tech support scam, new scam

Id: 5zlnI3Bzslo

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2017