Category: Phone Fraud

The man who developed a bot that frustrates and annoys robocallers is planning to take on the infamous Windows support scam callers head-on. Roger Anderson last year debuted his Jolly Roger bot, a system that intercepts robocalls and puts the caller into a never-ending loop of pre-recorded phrases designed to waste their time. Anderson built the…

Continuing its campaign against phone fraud operations, the FTC has dismantled two major robocall organizations that the commission alleges were making hundreds of millions of calls over the course of several years to consumers who were on the Do Not Call registry. The FTC filed complaints against two separate groups of defendants, the leaders of which…

Let’s face it: 2016 has been pretty rough year. Things didn’t go all that well for humans in the last 12 months, and computers didn’t make out much better. Lots of things broke, and it seemed like whatever didn’t break was compromised, stolen, or lost. But not everything was terrible. There were some encouraging developments…

The fraud schemes that consumers and businesses face every day are the end result of a lot of research, work, and planning on the part of the criminals who perpetrate them. There are a lot of moving pieces in the background that victims never see, and often the schemes involve many intermediate steps before a…

Carriers are beginning to roll out new tools to help consumers identify and block fraud calls and spam calls. AT&T on Wednesday released a new app known as Call Protect that provides automatic blocking of fraud calls and also can warn users about other potentially unwanted calls. The new service is available on iOS and…

The fraud landscape is a complex one, and the criminals who run these schemes have a wide variety of ruses to choose from. Which one a fraudster selects for a given attack can depend upon the target, the end goal, and the criminal’s particular talents. Almost all of these scams involve some form of social…

Fraudsters who are looking to separate businesses from their money often will specialize in one kind of scam. Whether it’s credit card fraud, 419 scams, or phone fraud, the people behind these schemes tend to focus their energy on one and learn it inside and out. But despite that specialization, there are common skills that…

When discussing financial fraud, people often talk about it as one overarching problem. But the reality is that in today’s environment, fraud comprises many separate, distinct components, each with its own techniques, complexities, and challenges for organizations trying to defend against them. Customers interact with their financial institutions in a variety of ways: in person,…

Fraudsters are always looking for new ways to empty the wallets of their victims, and scammers in the U.K. recently have hit on a novel phone fraud technique that preys on people’s fear of other phone fraud scams. The new tactic involves scammers calling up potential victims and offering them a subscription service that will…

The FCC is warning consumers, as well as marketers, that robotexts sent by autodialers to mobile phones are illegal and the commission says it will be cracking down on the practice. Robotexts are the younger cousin of the robocalls that have been plaguing consumers and businesses for a long time. Whereas robocalls typically are made…