Sasha Warren – “Scientific American”
“Hey, we were trying to get in touch with you regarding your vehicle’s warranty period,” many of us had in mind, from years of receiving fraudulent automated calls that seemed unstoppable, but the US Federal Communications Commission recently announced that it directed Telecom companies block any calls from a known party that makes fraudulent automated calls related to car warranty.
Despite this, more effort is still required to clamp down on this type of communication, and car warranty calls are just one type of fraud.
Many of these calls are made by companies that sell real products, but they use an illegal marketing campaign to entice consumers to buy them. One of them is in the trap, and then transformed, to talk to a real person who deceives him to get his money.
One of the most important lessons we learn from studying cybercrime is that humans have a superior ability to find new ways to commit a crime. If calls increase, the other option for fraudsters is to use other platforms, and we are already noticing that; They switched to sending messages via WhatsApp or through fake accounts on Twitter, but I think the situation in this case would be better. Telecom companies do not know what will be said when someone answers a particular call, they can use patterns in the network, and they can know where the call is coming from, but in the end they will not know anything regarding its content. In the case of text messages, that content becomes available, and then the problem becomes more like fraudulent emails, and if you use Gmail, for example, the capabilities of detecting fake messages are very good, so that you may only receive one fraudulent message per month .
I think a world where we can trust phone calls once more, or maybe get excited when they take them instead of saying, “Oh my God, someone’s sure to try to trick me” would be a better world, and I think we’re on our way to that. world step by step.
