Someone calls you on your cell phone suddenly and hangs up right away, before you can react. You look at the screen and see an unknown number, so immediately you wonder who was calling you and why. The impulse is often to call back. And that’s probably a really bad idea.
The Caller’s Trap. This scam became famous a couple of years agobut now it seems to be coming back strongly and it is good to remember how it works. This is a scam known as ‘Wangiri’ (ワン切り), a Japanese term that literally means “one ring and hang up.” The mechanics of fraud are as old as it is effective: An automated system launches thousands of random calls a day, lets the phone ring once or twice, and immediately hangs up before the user has time to respond.
The bait of the missed call. The goal of scammers is to play on your curiosity or fear that you have missed some important communication. When you see the notification on the screen, many people can act impulsively and they call back to find out who was trying to contact them, which leads them directly into the fraud.
If you call back, it will be expensive. The real danger is in calling back: without knowing it, what happens is that you will be calling a special rate number abroad that is not included in any mobile operator rates. Cybercriminals often camouflage numbers with strange international prefixes from countries like Albania (+355), Bosnia, (+387), or Ivory Coast (+225) that are very difficult to recognize.
waiting music. And when the call is initiated, scammers activate systems to keep the victim on the phone as long as possible. For this they use fake voice recordingssimulate that the call is on hold or play sounds of a busy line. Every second you listen to those loops, the cost of the call goes up significantly and without you knowing it.
A volume business. Although the amount charged to each victim may be small, the scam ends up being a million-dollar business when carried out on an industrial scale. Cybercriminals use bots and automated systems that make millions of attempts daily at dawn or at unusual times to maximize the probability that the user will not reach the cell phone in time.
It’s easy to avoid the scam. The scam is simple and effective for impulsive users, but there is a very simple way to avoid it: never return a missed call from an unknown number. And much less if it has an international prefix other than +34 of Spain. If there is really an emergency, that person will contact you again or will leave a message via SMS or WhatsApp.
If you have already fallen into the trap. For those who have been victims of the scam, the ideal is to act quickly. The first thing is to check the accumulated consumption in the application of your mobile line and immediately contact your telephone operator. Save the scammer’s number, write down the exact time of the call and ask your company to preventively block charges for premium rate numbers before processing the report.
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