Telemarketer scam?

[senseless]

I've been getting quite a few calls at work from foreign sounding telemarketers that are "just verifying your address" for some kind of "free listing". Since I hang up immediately, I'm not exactly how this pitch would progress, but I am curious.

 

[borisiii]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Why don't you see what they have to say? Obviously don't give them any details but there's no harm in hearing what they are trying to get from you. You never know - you might just have won the Ugandan lottery!

 

[Macman45]

I get these a lot, they seem to go in phases...won't have one for weeks, then a whole lot in a couple of days....I just ignore them, and NEVER pass details of a private or personal nature to them.

 

[niuniu]

I tell them everything, slowly. Starting with early childhood 😀

 

[iBlue]

Unless I was specifically expecting a call I refuse to give out ANY information to someone calling me. I've had them say some fairly convincing things and get pushy with threats of service disconnects, etc but that just tells me it's even less legit. I know the numbers of all accounts I hold and I will contact THEM if there's a problem.

I get a fair few scam phone calls every week. Some just get the hang up and some I torment by wasting their time. I get one where people with very thick accents try to tell me I have a computer virus. (and they can tell this from my phone number... how?) I let them blab and then I ask them to get specific and of course they can't be. They hedge their bets by saying Windows, which of course is extra amusing since I haven't even touched that OS in years. When they know they haven't got a sucker, they hang up themselves. I feel bad for old people who get calls like this because you know they are probably clueless about it all.

TL;DR - Don't take the bait. Never give out your information, no matter how trivial, to someone calling you.

 

[MorphingDragon]

I tell them everything, slowly. Starting with early childhood 😀

First sexual encounter in excruciating detail, especially if you started young is a sure fire way to get someone arrested.

 

[Happybunny]

People here get less of these calls, one of the perks of having a language that practically no body else speaks.

 

[OutThere]

My office gets calls like that pretty often since the number must be listed in some kind of business database...anyhow I picked up once on a boring day and decided to try to figure out what their angle was. They asked me to confirm a few details about the business, which they already had and which were publicly available so I wasn't giving away anything, then they asked for my name, so I told them it was Bill (it's not and there's nobody named Bill at my company). Shortly after giving them my fake name I had to take a call and never did figure out how they were planning to make money from us. Well, ever since we've been getting calls like, "Hi may I speak to Bill please?". Little do they know they're giving themselves away! "Please hold Bill be right with you." 😀

 

[ejb190]

Well, ever since we've been getting calls like, "Hi may I speak to Bill please?". Little do they know they're giving themselves away! "Please hold Bill be right with you." 😀

I did something similar with a magazine subscription. I used a creative misspelling of my first name just to see where it would show up. Now I get all kinds of junk mail with that spelling. Makes it interesting to see how connected all the advertising companies are.

As far as telemarketers, I love it when they call my work phone. I work for the State of Indiana. I just ask to collect their information so I can vet them through the Indiana State Attorney General's Office... (they have a reputation of being aggressive against telemarketers.) I usually get a hang up pretty fast and never hear back.

 

[FanOfMR]

The foreign accent does not mean anything.
I had some well spoken people try to scam me.