Phone scams and robocalls show no signs of slowing down, with more than 4 billion robocalls targeting phones across the US in January. According to YouMail, an Irvine, CA-based developer of visual voicemail and robocall-blocking software, there was a 3.7% increase over the month of December.
And while most of us have run into scammers both on the phone and online, it’s not always entirely clear to us what we should do when we get one. So to find out, Bored Panda reached out to Alex Quilici, a CEO at YouMail who shared a handful of useful advice.
“People should not answer calls from unknown numbers, and let them roll to voicemail—so that they can see what the call was all about from the message that was left,” Alex said. He also explained that harmful phone calls are often imposter scams—“for example, someone pretending to be the IRS and telling you that you owe money that needs to be settled right away. These scams take away billions of dollars from people each year.”
When it comes to robocalls, Alex said that they, in fact, have dropped since the pandemic started. It’s “because call centers are closed—and the whole point of a robocall is usually for you to press 1 and talk to someone (or call back).” But at this point “they are now fully back to levels before the pandemic as call centers have generally reopened,” he added.
For anyone who’s worrying about keeping themselves safe from suspicious calls, Alex suggests “getting a robocall-blocking app like YouMail so that the unwanted calls are filtered (and your ringer is protected).” The second step would be to make sure you “don’t answer the unknown calls that might get through—let them roll to voicemail.”
“If you have YouMail, we can automatically examine the voicemail that’s left and let you know if it’s harmful (a scam or spam vs. something real),” Alex explained. Moreover, he warned everyone to make sure you “don’t just call back numbers that call you—go to the web site of whoever the caller claims to be (e.g., Chase bank) and call a number you find there.”
Bored Panda also talked to Mike Ferris, the head of communications at Hiya, a Seattle-based company that sells caller profile information to identify incoming calls and block suggested unwanted ones. Mike said that the most common thing that people do when they receive a call from an unknown number is not pick up.
“In Hiya’s recent State of the Call report, they analyzed more than 150 billion calls made on the Hiya network in 2020 and found that a staggering 94% of unknown calls went unanswered. And that’s because most people think that unknown calls might be fraud.”
“But as a result of not answering these unknown calls, people miss important calls,” Mike said and added that “sometimes calls from doctors, banks, and delivery people are unidentified, so opting to not answer these calls can cause real problems—both for the caller and the recipient.”
Mike said that for these reasons, instead of ignoring unknown callers, a better option is to take advantage of an intelligent call protection and caller identification service. “Hiya blocks fraud calls, flags nuisance calls, and provides caller identity so that people know who’s calling.”
It turns out that “this significantly reduces the risk of falling victim to a fraud call and also gives people more information to decide whether or not to pick up a call.”
