Phone Scams

I don’t usu­ally get a lot of phone scams on my office phone, prob­ably because it’s unlis­ted. But I did get one today. Being April Fools’ Day, I was­n’t sure wheth­er it was a prank or a scam; after hunt­ing around a bit on the web I think the latter.

It was a brief call, an auto­mated sys­tem claim­ing to be from Visa, say­ing they had a charge for $1000 for per­fume “for my stinky armpit” (no joke, that’s what they called it). The auto­mated voice told me to press 8 to accept the charge, or 9 to decline it. I hung up instead (I’ve had real calls from my bank about unau­thor­ized charges, so I know what they sound like). Hunt­ing around on the web showed a bunch of people claim­ing that press­ing 9 allows the per­son to make long dis­tance calls from your num­ber some­how; Snopes says that’s only par­tially true. Oth­er people also say the dial 9 scam isn’t a scam, although the lat­ter link points out “some com­pan­ies have indeed used decept­ive prac­tices to trick recip­i­ents into mak­ing premi­um rate calls”, which could add up, I guess. Seems like a lot of effort to go to for little reward — maybe it was an elab­or­ate April Fools’ Day joke after all. Any­one want to ‘fess up?