CARIBBEAN ISLAND AREA CODE WARNING -- DO NOT RETURN MISSED CALLS RECEIVED FROM CARIBBEAN ISLAND AREA CODES !!!!!!
In one current variant of this scam, the caller doesn't have any intention of talking to you. All the scammer wants is for you to get upset enough about the late night call that you return the call, never even noticing that it is from a foreign country outside the reach of US or Canadian laws. When you return the call (at international rates), there may also be a big surcharge added to your phone bill that gets passed along to the scammer. The first wave of these calls came from Grenada (which has a 473 "area code"), but more recently, a large number of reports have been received reporting similar calls from Dominica and several other Caribbean nations.
Here is a warning (which happens to be from Verizon) concerning this scam. Note particularly the subsections entitled "Pagers" and "E-mail" near the top of the page:
http://www.verizonenterprise.com/solutions/pu ... phone/index.xmlSome reports in 800notes.com assert that people who have been called by some of these numbers have received large charges on their phone bills despite never having called the number back.
This scam, at least in the first variant, has a long history. See the Economist at:
http://www.economist.com/node/1367988A few U.S. news organizations have picked up on this scam, but the most recent reports all seem to have required that the news reporter himself or herself receive one of these calls :
KPVI, Pocatello, ID TV
http://youtu.be/eSp9tY1gBW8Toledo News Now
http://www.toledonewsnow.com/story/23695832/b ... huge-phone-billWCAX-TV in Burlington, VT
http://www.wcax.com/story/15581487/check-your ... area-code-scamsKVRR-TV Fox Fargo-Moorhead, ND
http://www.kvrr.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24661&Itemid=57KFYR-TV, Bismarck, ND
http://www.kfyrtv.com/story/24348647/people-on-alert-for-phone-scamKSL-TV, Salt Lake City, Utah
http://www.ksl.com/?sid=28211799&nid=148&titl ... _cid=featured-3KSTU Fox 13 news in Salt Lake City
http://fox13now.com/2014/01/02/victim-officia ... targets-utahns/and
http://fox13now.com/2014/01/02/police-warn-ag ... -473-area-code/KOMO-TV 4, Seattle, Washington:
http://www.komonews.com/news/consumer/One-Ring-241398311.html(Note that 800notes is clearly seen in the background!)
KMOV-TV 4, St. Louis, MIssouri:
http://www.kmov.com/news/local/Mystery-calls- ... -242489381.htmlIf you successfully call one of these numbers back, you may be charged a steep premium, like calling a sex chat line. But even not, regular calls to Caribbean Island numbers are billed at $1.80 per minute or more by most cell phone carriers unless you have paid extra for an international dialing plan.
That's why either:
(1) you can't return the phone call, because even though you would otherwise be able to dial it like an ordinary long distance number, you phone company has a restriction on your placing international calls (which these are). At least some pre-paid cell phone services work this way. If this case applies to you, consider yourself lucky. Or,
(2) when you call back and get through, the operator of the Caribbean phone number tries to keep you on hold for as long as possible to run up your phone bill and their profits.
The scammers don't have to be associated with recent security breaches, such as the recent one at Target stores. They also don't need to "get" your number from anyone. All they do is sequentially or randomly dial a lot of telephone numbers in known area codes. They could even be making the outgoing calls from the US using telephone spoofing technology to make it look like the call is originating from the Caribbean and to make the calls harder to trace. But what you will see (and call back, if you are not careful) is the Caribbean number.
It probably doesn't cost the callers anything to dial you if they hang up before you can answer their call. But it only takes a small percentage of angry and/or curious people calling back for them to make a lot of money. They don't even have to pay for real people to operate a call center -- it can all be done by machines, outside the reach of US and Canadian law enforcement.
So do yourself a favor and don't call these scammers back. You'll also be doing us a favor, because they wouldn't call anyone at all if there weren't so many people who fell for this scam.
(Updated 1/29/2014 to make minor edits, add KOMO and KMOV reports, the observation that reporters seem to need to receive a call themselves to get them to report this scam, and to clarify the fact that the outgoing calls might originate from the US with spoofed caller ID numbers.)
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