Ever since premium cost mobile phone numbers were first made available, there have been scammers offering fake services or services of poor quality, excessive charges or with contracts you cannot cancel.
Today, there are numerous rules to stop these scammers and many countries have regulators to control these premium services, but scammers persist as for them it can be an easy way to make money and then disappear.
The basic idea is for the scammer to lure people into either signing up to a paid service they don’t actually want or to make calls using premium costs numbers not realising they are being charged.
Premium Rate Call Back
Scammers either leave a message that sounds important urging you to call back or leave a text to have the same effect. If you call back you will be charged at a high rate per minute and sometimes the recorded message goes on for ages in the hope the victim will stay on the line.
Alternatively, some scammers phone but disconnect within a couple of seconds i.e. before the call can be answered or may leave no message in the hope the victim will assume it was important and call back.
For businesses, scammers leave a different type of message to create an urgent response e.g. a caller wanting to confirm a booking or a query over a delivery or a late payment etc. They say anything they can think of to get the victim to call back. This scam also used to work with fake fax messages but those and few and far between nowadays.
Premium Rate Quizzes, Surveys etc.
You get an unsolicited text message inviting you to enter a competition for some big prize e.g. the latest iPhone or a TV etc. To enter, you just have to return a text message. But that return message will be at the highest rate the scammer can charge and many people send the message without realising the cost.
Alternatively, the scam text might have a link to click which takes you to a scam website that will try to get your personal information as that can be sold to other scammers and well as charging you.
Answering the questions may take multiple text messages from you and each will be charged.
Where the scammer actually creates quiz questions, the first few questions tend to be very easy and the last one or two that you need to answer correctly to win the prize are virtually impossible to get.
Also common in this scam is a request to fill in a survey for which you will receive a valuable gift or even payment.
The scammers make money by charging extremely high rates for the text messages you send, and any further messages they send to you. These charges will not be made clear to you. You may also be automatically subscribed to ongoing charges and not discover this until you see your next itemised phone bill.
The scammers typically run these scams for a while then shutdown and disappear with the money before the authorities can find them.
Premium Rate Connections
This scam tries to snare people who are searching online for telephone numbers of government services and similar respected services such as breakdown call outs, that are heavily used.
They pay for adverts and try to get higher on search engine listings than the actual government page achieves.
The scam is that they do connect you to the actual government service but charge you for that whereas the call would have been free if you’d called the government line directly. Plus, many of these scam services manage to keep charging for the entire call.
You will be put through to the right advice line, but will be paying a very high and unnecessary connection fee.
How to Stay Safe
- Do not respond to text messages or missed calls that come from numbers you don’t recognise.
- Look out for numbers that start with 19 or 190 as these are premium rate numbers and you can be charged even for reading a text from some of these numbers.
- You can ask your telephone provider to bar premium rate services to and from your phone.
- Do not give your mobile number to websites or in response to unsolicited emails unless you are sure it is safe to do so.
If you are unsure of what it will cost to call back a telephone number, you can find out the cost of a premium rate number at https://psauthority.org.uk/for-consumers/service-checker
There is a UK regulator for premium rate phone charges – and you can complain to them if you feel conned over use of these numbers. The regulator is at https://psauthority.org.uk/
Refer to https://www.gov.uk/call-charges for a list of charges on outgoing calls and texts.
If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.
