By Jess Santacroce
Writer/Editor: The 315
The scam call filter on our phones is a great tool, but it can cause some missed important calls. Once in a while, you have to answer anyway, especially if you’re expecting calls about gigs, day jobs, side hustles, or anything else important from numbers you may not know.
Should you need to check, or if the scam filter fails or is nonexistent on your phone, the scam you’re most likely to encounter this summer is the “credit card balance scam.” This is an old scam, but it appears to be in heavy rotation once again.
At first, the call appears to be from a legitimate, local number. When you answer, the caller asks for you by name, and identifies themselves by their first name and “member services.” Asking what company they’re with gets their name and “with member services” repeated. They then add, “Our records show you have been making your payments, but you still have over a $7,000 balance on your credit card.” This short dialogue alone contains enough red flags to let you know this is a scam.
The call is unsolicited and outside of the area of focus for credit card companies
Credit card companies almost never cold call customers about their balances these days. You’ll get a paper letter in the mail or a message in the inbox of your online account page first. When you are contacted by a credit card company, it is usually because you missed payment deadlines or there was suspicious activity on your account. Credit card companies don’t reach out to tell you how bad they feel that your balance is high even though you’ve been making regular payments. Regular payments on a high balance are exactly what credit card companies hope for. It means you’re paying a lot of interest.
You’re greeted by someone with a robotic tone to his or her voice
Scammers have long been able to spoof numbers, calling anywhere from across the street to across the state to across the world from a number that looks like a local one to where you are currently living. Today, scammers can also use AI generated voices and background noises that mimic the typical accent, age, word choice, and environment of the typical bank or credit card company employee in your area. You could be talking to a group of thirty-year old men in a crowded call center in Lagos, Nigeria, while the background noise and voice sounds like someone slightly older sitting in a quiet corporate office an hour or two away.
The giveaway tends to be that the voice has a slightly robotic tone. Real people with legitimate jobs making cold calls of any kind are fully aware that they’re being annoying. They tend to go out of their way to sound warm and friendly. A robotic or flat tone, one that sounds human but slightly annoyed or bored, is probably AI generated.
Information about the company is vague
There is absolutely no legitimate reason why anyone would not know what company they were working for. Even if you’re a freelance virtual assistant, taking customer service calls for multiple places from your home office, the name of the company you’re working for at any given moment is going to be right on your screen. If you ask what company they’re with, or what account this is in reference to and all they can do is repeat that they’re with “member services” or “member services for your Visa card,” it is a scam.
In the rare case that you would receive a phone call from your credit card company, the agent making the call would be able to tell you the specific name of the corporation that issued you the card.
The information they have on you also lacks detail
The amount of your supposed balance may or may not frighten you. Some people are perfectly comfortable using credit cards, carrying large balances, and paying interest. Their actual balance may be well over ten grand, and someone calling and announcing they had a balance “over $7,000” would not phase them for a second. Others would absolutely panic if they even thought they might have allowed a balance to grow to even a few hundred dollars, never mind several thousand.
Either way, someone legitimately working with you on your account would have your exact balance available. And they would not need to say “you’ve been making regular payments.” They’d have your exact payment amounts and dates in front of them.
The goal of this particular scam is simple. The scammer hopes you will mentally fill in the details, and begin discussing your account with them in order to get them to lower your rate, offer you a statement credit, or forgive a payment. As with most scams of this nature, they’ll tell you that they “just” need your credit card information to “verify” that they are talking to the correct person. Once you give them the information from the account that sprung to mind when they said “member services” and that vague balance, they have all they need to start charging things to the card and even open up other cards in your name.
The easiest way to end the call and avoid offering the scammers any information is of course to hang up without saying a word. If they get as far as the balance, announce “No, that is not me,” as soon as they throw out that vague balance. This will trigger the response, “Sorry to bother you,” and a hang up. Never ask “What card?” or “Can you tell me my exact balance?” This only prompts them to talk to you more, and the longer you talk to them, the more chances there are that you will accidentally share usable information with them. At the very least, they will see you as a potential mark, and you’ll get several callbacks from scammers at the same call center throughout the rest of the day.
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