Category: Phone Fraud

The FCC later this month will consider a proposal that would allow carriers to block robocalls that have a spoofed caller ID. If approved, the rule would be a major boon for consumers who are hit with robocalls–many of which are part of scams. Caller ID spoofing is a key part of many phone scams, and…

Last year, we talked to Roger Anderson about his Jolly Roger Telephone company bot, a system he designed to frustrate and annoy telemarketers by sending them through an infinite loop of robot responses. Now, Anderson is taking aim at the Windows support scammers who try to scare victims into calling them and paying for fake…

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,…