If you’ve gotten a missed call from an overseas number, don't ring them back – it’s a scam.
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The so-called wangiri scam – which has hit some people in the Illawarra – involves scammers from other countries calling numbers, letting the phone ring once and then hanging up.
What the scammer wants is to get people curious about the call, and ring back.
What happens then is the scammer tries to keep their victim on the line as long as possible – by being put on hold, talking to the victim using poor English or playing music.
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Deputy chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Delia Rickard said the money-making part of the scam comes from the cost of the call.
The calls come from places like the Ascension Islands, Anguilla, Chad and Cuba.
“These are all countries where it’s very expensive to make calls into so we suspect the scammers have got some deal with dodgy mobile phone operators so the fee gets passed onto them,” Ms Rickard said.
The longer they can keep the victim on the line, the more the call costs and so the more money the scammer can share with the phone operator.
Ms Rickard said the calls are “flooding the country” at the moment.
“I’ve had several this week,” she said.
“My kids all have had them, they just seem to be everywhere.
“There’s rarely a time when we don’t have more than 100 complaints a month about these but we’ve seen a huge spike of them in the last few weeks.”
She said smartphones will tell you which country a call is coming from, while older phones will have a plus symbol before the number.
Ms Rickard’s advice is simple – if you don’t recognise the number and aren’t expecting a call from that country, then don’t ring back.
She said people didn't need to be concerned that their phones had been specifically targeted by the scammers.
“They use machines that randomly generate the numbers and I presume these machines can generate Australian numbers,” she said.
“I suspect that’s what’s happening at the moment. The scammers can also buy lists of numbers on the dark web. There are lists of contact details out there that are sold all the time.”