Who is listening to your phone calls?

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The interview discusses various scams involving phone calls, particularly targeting Medicare beneficiaries. Scammers pretend to be from Medicare and ask for personal information, such as Medicare numbers, to send a new card. They also exploit the do not call list by connecting calls to agents in the US who obtain information while pretending to offer expanded benefits. Other scams include final expense insurance, medical alert systems, and romance scams. The scammers are often located in India, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Tips for protecting oneself include hanging up on calls with accents, not providing personal information over the phone, and verifying the legitimacy of calls by contacting the organization directly. The interviewee, Wenja92 Scam Detective, shares more information on their YouTube channel. The following interview took place March 21st, 2024, as a copyrighted production of the Caller Radio Communications Group. Who is listening to your phone calls? Your moment of tech is next. Have you been receiving phone calls from Medicare lately, telling you about the new benefits or ID card? Of course it's not Medicare, but another scammer. But this one has a twist that could lead possible ID theft. Here to give us the inside story is Wenja92 Scam Detective, and it's W-E-N-J-A-92 Scam Detective, who's a scambaiter on YouTube with over seven years of baiting experience. First briefly, tell us about your history of scambaiting. Well, I first started back when I was in my late 60s. I'm 74 now, and I was listening to a young fellow named Louis Tack, who was doing scambaiting calls, and he was real good at it. And he was a younger guy, though. I said, I wonder if an older person did it, if maybe the older people would pay more attention than listening to a younger guy tell them about it. So I started out doing it that way, and I learned a lot from him and from a lot of other people now since I've been doing it for so long, but that's basically how I started. So let's get into this particular scam. How does this scam work? You'll get a call saying it's Medicare, and they'll ask you if you've received your new green and white Medicare card. If you don't know, you say, no, I haven't, and then they'll say, well, in order to get it, we need your Medicare number, and they'll ask for your Medicare number so they can say they're going to send you a new card. Well, Medicare isn't giving out new cards. All they want is that Medicare number, which they can sell on the dark web for who knows how much, and there goes your everybody's Medicare suffers from that because it brings up the cost to everybody. What about the new Medicare benefits plan? That is one they're doing now where they'll call and say you're eligible for the expanded benefits, and they'll go through and tell you you can get the dental and groceries and all this other free stuff, and they'll tell you that they're going to connect you to an agent. What they do is they'll connect you to somebody in the U.S., and that's how they get around the do not call list because they'll read off of a script that you're given permission to be called even though you're on the do not call list, but they read the script so fast and their accent is such that you can't understand them anyway, and so you're given the U.S. place permission to call you back, and that's how they get around the list. And also, while you're on the list, if you do get through to somebody in the U.S., they'll stay on the line, and they'll get all your information that you're giving to the agent here. And that's what makes it so dangerous. The agent may or may not know that somebody is listening in the background, and you're giving all this private information to an agent. Right, and in fact, one time they connected me directly to an agent, and he was American, and I asked him, I said, why would I get insurance from you when you use a call center in India or Pakistan to make your call calls? And his answer was, well, that's the way it's got to work. At that point, I told him goodbye. What about other types of these same types of insurance scams? Well, they got the final expense insurance where they'll call you up and say you qualify for final expenses, and all they want is your credit card number because you got to open, you got to start paying by credit card. So all they're doing is getting your credit card number. You're not going to get any death benefit insurance or anything like that. You're just going to lose your credit card number. And also on some of them that I've heard that, yes, they do try to get you with an insurance agent for final death benefits, and we're running into the same problem where they're in the background also from what you said. Yeah, they can also work it that way where they actually do connect you to somebody here, and they'll be listening in your credit card. Once again, one way or another, they're going to get your credit card number. Right. What about a medical alert? Medical alert is a fairly new one that they're doing. They'll call you up and say you qualify for the medical alert, and they're going to send you the equipment for free, and all you got to do is pay the monthly charge. And there again, you got to start paying for your received equipment with a credit card. And they say that the monthly charge is like $40 a month or something. And there again, they get your credit card number, and either your credit card number is gone and they're using it, or you get some piece of junk medical alert that's not really medical alert that comes to you that if you fall down, you're on your own basically. One good thing though that I've seen is the Social Security is finally giving warning notices of the scams on the yearly reports if you get the paper reports. So that's nice. Yeah. So Wenjia, what do we know about these scammers? Most of them are located in India, Pakistan, the Philippines. They do a lot of the publisher clearinghouse calls from there. And I don't do these, but they also do the lovelorn emails and stuff asking for money so they can come here and be with you and all that stuff. They're mostly running out of the Philippines. Right. I think that has a term of what, pig roasting? Yes. That's where they try and con you into investing in Bitcoin or whatever? Well, that too. Yeah. Yeah. They'll try to get you to invest in that. But this would be somebody acting like if you're a male, they'll act as a female saying they want to marry you and come to the United States, but they can't afford it. And you send them money and you never see them or your money. So how can we guard against these types of scams? The easiest way is to tell your loved ones, especially someone who's susceptible to this, is if somebody calls you and they have an accent, just hang up the phone. And also, Medicare will never call you. Medical Alert even, I don't even think they call you. You call them. I mean, the real ones advertise in magazines and things like that. You call them. And where I am, the hospital will provide you one. So there's no need to even talk to these people. Just hang the phone up right away. Talk about phone number spoofing. Spoofing is, they'll use a local number. It's a software program. They're calling from a computer and they can put any number they want in there and make it look like they're calling from an actual insurance company, social security. And they can put any number they want in there, which when you answer the phone, it looks like a legit phone number. But even if it looks legit, hang up and call the real number that you find for the place that's calling you and call them and they'll tell you right away, no, we don't call people. And again, what is your YouTube channel? My YouTube channel is Wenja. It's W-E-N-J-A 9-2 Scam Detective. And I usually try to put a video out every Monday and that's about all I do. I don't do a lot of videos. I do once or one a week. So please protect yourself and the people you care about. For Your Moment Tech, this is Jay Melnick.