Be careful when you have missed calls from unknown numbers, the Guardia Civil has warned about these scams in their social networks. Missed call scam alert. The missed call scam consists of fraudsters leaving a missed call on your mobile phone through a number with a foreign prefix waiting for you to return the call in order to find out the reason for the call.
These calls are one-tone, with the aim of not giving you time to answer so that you have a missed call on your phone and call back. When you call back, you are charged a special rate, from which the scammers take a commission.
Calls are from a foreign number, so it is very important that you check the prefix of missed calls before returning the call, and in turn do not pick up the phone if you receive a call with a foreign prefix as you may be charged for picking up the phone. The most affected group in this scam are especially the elderly or people who have a moderate level of technological knowledge, therefore we recommend you to warn them about this.
In Axarfusión we care about the security of our customers, so we are going to give you some tips to avoid this scam.
Most common prefixes in the missed call scam
The Civil Guard has posted on its social networks which are the most common prefixes used by fraudsters to carry out this scam:
– (+355) Albania
– (+225) Côte d’Ivoire
– (+233) Ghana
– (+234) Nigeria
The authorities recommend that under no circumstances should an international missed call be returned without first finding out where it came from. It is also worth noting that the most commonly used prefix is (+355) Albania.
How to protect yourself against this scam
What to do when we have a missed call from a foreign number? First of all, you should check if any of the prefixes correspond to those mentioned above, and if they do, do not call back under any circumstances.
Facua, an association that fights for consumer rights, advises that if we encounter any type of unknown number in our missed calls, we should search Google for information about it to check where it comes from. To do this, go to Google or any other search engine and type “Who is the owner” followed by the number (example: Who is the owner +34 6***).
What we need to do is to block calls to all these phones. In the case of Apple devices, you only need to add the contact to your address book, and in the options of the same, go down to ”Block contact”. In the case of Android devices, we register the number, click on the three dots on the side and press the same option.
In short, if you want to avoid this scam, always answer calls from numbers whose numbers you know. And remember that you should never call back if you don’t know who is calling you for absolutely no reason.
