Missed a Call From Antigua or Jamaica? Do Not Call Back.
Screenshots courtesy of Will Oremus
If you get an unexpected missed call from a Caribbean number, don't call back. It could be a hoax. An oldie but goodie called the “one-ring scam” is gaining momentum again and leaving people with fraudulent charges.
As independent analyst Richi Jennings points out, the scam takes advantage of a part of the North American Numbering Plan
that gives three-digit area codes to certain Caribbean countries.
People can connect to these numbers from U.S. phones that don’t have
international calling plans even though they are actually “premium rate”
numbers.
In the one-ring scam, a robocaller only lets a call ring once before
hanging up to maximize the chance of creating a missed call without a
person picking up. If someone does pick up, the robocaller disconnects,
and there is less of a chance that person will be drawn into the scam
and call back.
The Better Business Bureau
lists calls from Antigua and Barbuda (268), the Dominican Republic
(809), Jamaica (876), the British Virgin Islands (284), and Grenada
(473) as potential scam threats. People who do call back could be
charged something like $30 for the international call, depending on the
carrier, and see fraudulent service fees showing up on their phone
bills. This process of “cramming,” when third-party scammers sneak bogus
charges onto legitimate phone bills, is ever on the rise, according to
the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission.
Between text message
scams and Web hacking it can feel like nothing is safe, but this trick,
though annoying, is fairly easy to avoid. The first step to protecting
yourself is just ignoring the calls, but if you’ve called one of the
numbers back by mistake, alert your carrier and watch your phone bill to
make sure unusual charges aren’t cropping up.
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