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MCOTA64's profile

Tutor

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3 Messages

Monday, May 6th, 2019 7:36 PM

Sierra Leone Calls

WHAT ARE YOU ALL DOING TO HELP CUSTOMERS THAT ARE BEING BOMBARDED BY THESE SIERRA LEONE SCAM CALLS????? SURELY TO GOD THERE IS SOME SORT OF TECHNOLOGY AVAILABLE TO YOUR CUSTOMERS THAT YOU CAN BLOCK THESE CALLS RATHER THAN LEAVING IT TO US TO HAVE TO DEAL WITH.  

Accepted Solution

Official Solution

Community Support

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2.7K Messages

5 years ago

Hi All,

 

There is a new uptick of spam calls coming from Sierra Leone. The FCC has warned those receiving these calls, not to answer or call back

 

Remember, AT&T will never ask you to send us your personal or account information via email or text message.

 

At times, it can be hard to determine if a call is legitimate so AT&T created the Call Protect App. It notifies you of suspicious calls and allows you to report them. Below, you will find additional AT&T resources that will:

  • help you identify & report suspicious calls.
  • provide tips to help protect yourself from deceptive calls.
  • make you aware of some of the tactics fraudsters use

 

Protect Your Call Experience

Download the AT&T Call Protect app. (for Android and iOS)

Download the AT&T Mobile Security App.

 

Protect Your Online Experience

Be CyberAware & Improve Your Security  

 

Phone scam tactics (things AT&T will not do and what you should ignore)

Phone scams can be difficult to detect, so pay special attention to calls that:

  • Request that you verify personal data (such as your Social Security number).
  • Request that you visit a website that appears to be affiliated with AT&T or another company.
  • Use an automated voice instructing you to return their call.
  • Instruct you to return their call at a different phone number than the one shown by Caller ID.
  • Claim to be a computer technician with a technical support company requesting remote access to your computer.
  • Claim you have won a sweepstakes, contest, or other item of value.
  • Claim you owe a debt or fine and ask that you take care of it today.
  • Request to verify a PIN code by phone without you having personally initiated an update to an account, service, or profile.

Protect yourself from deceptive callers

  • Use caution when giving out or verifying personal or financial information over the phone. Initiate the call yourself and only call a phone number that you can verify as legitimate.
  • Never use your myAT&T account information to sign in to any website other than the AT&T website listed on your statement.
  • Register your phone number with DoNotCall.gov.
  • Stay informed and know your rights by visiting the FCC Consumer Help Center.

Resources & things to know

Check out our Fraud & Security Resources to learn how you can protect your personal information and how to report concerns. Check out what the FCC is doing

Learn more about what AT&T is doing to stop these robocalls.

 

ChrisZ, AT&T Community Specialist 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ACE - Expert

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14.1K Messages

5 years ago


@MCOTA64 wrote:

WHAT ARE YOU ALL DOING TO HELP CUSTOMERS THAT ARE BEING BOMBARDED BY THESE SIERRA LEONE SCAM CALLS????? SURELY TO GOD THERE IS SOME SORT OF TECHNOLOGY AVAILABLE TO YOUR CUSTOMERS THAT YOU CAN BLOCK THESE CALLS RATHER THAN LEAVING IT TO US TO HAVE TO DEAL WITH.  


You have the capability of blocking numbers on your phone. 

ACE - Sage

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116.6K Messages

5 years ago

Sierra Leone?   

Every one gets spam calls.  Don’t answer unknown numbers.  

Tutor

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3 Messages

5 years ago

No kidding. But in case you DON’T READ, the scammers are calling at all hours. Now, would you like them targeting your elderly relatives repeatedly?

Master

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3.5K Messages

5 years ago

@MCOTA64 They're not really "targeting" those people, or anyone, really, it's more that they buy a "list of known working numbers", from someone else (all done outside the purview of any US laws, for the most part), and then they just robocall them.

 

As others have mentioned, you can set up blocks, or simply not answer, these, as I do.  

Reporting them to the DoNotCall website, will help too, in some cases, at least those where they are local to the US (this is a diminishing number, IME).

 

ACE - Expert

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16.5K Messages

5 years ago

@MCOTA64 wrote:
No kidding. But in case you DON’T READ, the scammers are calling at all hours.

I find it much easier to read when it's not ALL CAPS, thank you.

 

Now, would you like them targeting your elderly relatives repeatedly?

What is the point of that question? Of course, the answer is NO.

 

 

 

 

Tutor

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3 Messages

5 years ago

I get what you are saying. And I have blocked each number that has called in (4 so far). However, there are those who are getting the calls at 1 am, or who do not know how to block. You would think that a service provider would be able to identify robocaller patterns (Sierra Leone perhaps) and assist the customers before it gets out of hand.

ACE - Sage

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116.6K Messages

5 years ago

For home phones you can get nomorobo.  For cell phones, you can set do not disturb, and exception “contacts list only”. 

Carriers have tried many methods to curb spam calls.  As fast as they figure it out, is how fast the scammers get around the blocks.  It’s been in the news constantly.  There is yet to be a consistent working fix.  I’ve used a few apps, and now none work.  The best method is to not answer the phone if the number isn’t identified.  

 

Master

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3.5K Messages

5 years ago

@MCOTA64 Yeah, the issue is, that text is often not quite what it seems.  It might be using a "i", from another language (different character set, looks the same, more or less)

This means that instead of seeing something like "Sierra", which should be (ASCII, for simplification, no Unicode here today...) it would look like "115 105 101 114 114 097", to the logic looking at the number/ID info (there's usually a LOT more data that's not shown).

Even something simple, like a character set from Latin1, for example, makes the code conversion to:"115 69 101 114 114 097".  Some phones might not have this character data available, so you might see something more like "S~rra", just as an example.

Hopefully this gets the idea across; as you can probably imagine, the number of permutations on this can get very large, very fast.

 

Anyway, there are tools out there, as @lizdance40 mentions, that do use more advanced (even some with AI constructs) "interpretation" of the incoming call strings, and work okay, until they don't ;-]

Keep in mind though, that ALL the processing for this, must happen in a very small amount of time, computationally.  It's one thing if you're drawing lines, in a tight loop of code, but yet another to be comparing hashes (a quick mechanism to match sets of data like this), a LOT of them, in a matter of a few hundred milliseconds, given that the phone needs to ring (or not, in some cases).

 

My rule is, if I don't recognize the name, and the number is from outside our local area codes, I pretty much never pick up (unless I'm expecting a call, obviously).  I figure most legitimate businesses that need to reach me should *at least* have a valid caller-ID-data-set, hmm...

Master

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3.2K Messages

5 years ago

How is AT&T supposed to know that you don't want calls from Sierra Leone at 1 AM? If AT&T just guessed you didn't want that call and blocked it, customers would be angry that the call from their mother overseas was being blocked. All AT&T can do is deliver calls to the phone.

 

You make it seem like your elderly relatives just randomly started getting calls from scammers overseas. I've never had that problem in over a decade of having cell phones, and most cell phone users don't. At some point, your relatives did something to get their names on a list of phone numbers for scammers to use, and there's pretty much no hope of getting that number off. Do Not Disturb is a great solution. Changing their phone number is another.

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