I called T-Mobile about this today to discuss it with them. I had put a block on international calls and texts a few days ago on all my phone lines, but today I was told that only prevents me from making international calls and texts, not from receiving them. I was also told I wasn't getting charged for the incoming international calls or texts. CS person at T-Mobile said there is nothing T-Mobile can do, nor any of the phone companies in the US or Canada can do.
Most phone companies these days don't charge you for incoming calls and texts, only when you make outbound calls and texts. I'm not sure if that also applies to prepaid phones though. Even if the phone company could block these numbers from calling and texting their customers, how would they know which are scams and which are legit ones?
They can't. The scammers would only just change the number they are calling or texting from by one or more digits and continue on with their scam. I'm fairly certain this is how it's happening.
I have some very tech savvy friends in telecommunications companies, including knowing some who helped invent VoIP (and I used to be a programmer myself) who taught me about PBX phone systems many years ago. Read on for my theory:
Scammers buy blocks of phone numbers from a PBX phone system or service, which is very cheap to do, btw. Then they program a computer connected to the PBX system to make outbound calls and texts. These calls and texts probably go out to all the other numbers over a VoIP connection, which is again very cheap to run. Then, when someone calls any of the phone numbers back, the computer runs another program to answer the call and carry out the hold command, which then racks up the charges to the people who called in.
Pretty simple really.
Very cheap to implement and obviously lucrative enough to have it going on from so many places around the globe. The calls may look like they are originating from Grenada, Antigua, Barbuda, etc., when in actuality, they could be coming from inside the US, or from China, Russia, some African country, really anywhere in the world!
I once looked into buying a PBX system for my USA company that turned out to be from a company located in Canada. This company had tons of phone numbers listed in my own area code that I could buy in blocks of 25 (so I could have had 25 different numbers for a very cheap price). I could also have bought phone numbers that would appear to come from anywhere in the world, if they had them to sell. They had phone numbers in every area code known in the USA and Canada.
What is a PBX Phone System, you ask?
PBX stands for Private Branch Exchange, which is a private telephone network used within a company. The users of the PBX phone system share a number of outside lines for making external phone calls. A PBX connects the internal telephones within a business and also connects them to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
One of the latest tendencies in PBX phone system development is the VoIP PBX, also known as IP PBX, which uses the Internet Protocol to transmit calls.
Nowadays, there are four different PBX phone system options:
PBX
Hosted/Virtual PBX
IP PBX
Hosted/Virtual IP PBX
IP PBX is a software-based PBX phone system solution which helps accomplish certain tasks and delivers services that can be difficult and costly to implement when using a traditional proprietary PABX.
This is what I'm talking about. I think many scammers are using an IP PBX system that they program through a computer to make the calls and texts for them. Calls and texts are made to any and every other phone number in some random or organized way, depending on the program they've written. Pretty clever and devious as well.
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