For security, we have to stop picking up the phone
Today's scams can be as simple as picking up a phone call. To avoid the next fraud, there are good reasons to let your calls run to voicemail.
How do you know that the person on the other end of a phone call is really who they say they are?
Earlier in July, a Ferrari executive was flooded with a barrage of WhatsApp messages that appeared to come from his boss, the carmaker’s CEO, Benedetto Vigna. But the Ferrari executive didn’t recognize the number, and he couldn’t be sure it was really his boss.
Suspicious of the flurry of messages from the unknown number, the Ferrari executive still took a call with the person who claimed to be Vigna. Despite the fact that the purported CEO had Vigna’s southern Italian accent, the executive still felt something was off, so he asked the caller something only Vigna would know, something the two personally discussed days earlier.
“Sorry, Benedetto, but I need to identify you,” the executive said. And then the call abruptly ended, and a potentially colossal fraud was avoided, as reported by Bloomberg earlier this year.
If you think the Ferrari executive is a rare edge case for scammers, think again. For as long as we’ve had telephones, there have been people trying to trick someone into thinking they’re someone else. Now, as with the case of the attempt against Ferrari, voice AI tools make it so that scammers can clone someone’s voice and trick victims into thinking they’re talking to another person.
All of these attacks involve the phone, or rather, picking up a phone call. Once you pick up the call, scammers and fraudsters can use tactics designed to pressure and force you into acting quickly and hastily in a high-stress situation.
You’ve probably heard of some of these scams already.
Look, the police (or the feds) are not going to call you to claim that “you have a warrant out for your arrest” or to demand a payment to invalidate the warrant. If there is an arrest warrant out for you, the police won’t leave you a threatening voicemail; they will come to your house.
It’s unlikely that your healthcare provider will call you to demand payment over the phone without first sending you a letter or a paper bill. The FBI says that healthcare fraud can affect anyone and ranges from scammers impersonating healthcare providers to fraudulent claims that you owe a balance on a nonexistent bill.
And, yes, you actually should be wary of the person on the other end of a phone call who claims to be from your bank, or from your workplace, or from an online tech company calling you to “verify your personal information,” or asking you to hand over a security code that was sent to your phone.
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