Just venting as I’m getting a call per day from these scammers.
If it’s to your mobile, can you block all unknown callers for a few days (literally blocks anything from anyone not in your contacts)? If your number is constantly dead to them then they might move on.
I’ve done this in the past because of other spam calls but had to switch it back to including calls from outside my contacts a few days later in case I missed anything important.
I’ve not been bothered too much by spam calls but had a spate of mobile numbers calling me trying flog stuff or carry out some kind of survey.
I’m beginning to feel very left out as i haven’t had a single call from these fake police people.
I just saw that my phone has spam call protection so I’ll try that in case it helps.
I thought about blocking unknown calls, but I do get calls that I need to take e.g. from the gemeinde etc.
Ha!
Earlier this year I thought it was this scam, but no. It was the real police investigating about a known thief that got caught in the parking at my place.
Hopefully, it’s only a scam.
Did you see the BT AI use case?
They have a random genAI chatbot that speaks to these spammers and wastes their time…
In my case they only spoke English which is a pretty good guide.
I do answer local calls to try to cover this. Most of my spam calls atm are either Swiss mobile numbers (spoofing I assume) or British numbers.
These calls use a recorded message, in American-accented English only, which is easily identifiable. I get one every now and again, but not at nuisance levels, and as soon as I hear the opening words (which are exactly what is in the title) I just end the call.
Recently I got the “HI dad, dropped my phone and it broke. this is my new phone number.!”
A bit of back and forth banter and it still sounded like I was talking to my daughter.
Really generic stuff until: “Can you help me out, need to pay a bill by tomorrow and my app was on the old phone…!”
At that point it was “Fuck off scammer”
A day later I got the same on the work phone and again on my private. That is when I gave a lesson in the english language, never heard back.
I’ve just been informed (in English) by the “Swiss police” that there’s been suspicious activity on my Swiss ID card (?!). As a result, there’s now an international arrest warrant out for me.
There’s a scam email being sent currently asking people to verify their SwissPass account details.
I can see this fooling a few people.
I got only one of those and the telling sign (apart from it obviously being a recorded message) was the VOLUME! I almost dropped the phone, not due to the words but the shouting
The other thing is, why would the Swiss police call me in English? There are enough official languages available. So yep, I just cut the call. It was not from an unknown number so I blocked it and that was it, never got one since.
A plus: I got no naughty grand-children - none at all actually - so maybe they got that info from some data-leak and I’ll be targeted again when they come up with a new scam.
Had a new one this morning, the phone number worked out as RAV Kreuzlingen.
As I have a job and don´t even live near Kreuzlingen, it had to be a spoofed number.
I did send them an email that someone is spoofing their phone number.
SwissPass. A dumb name. One thinks its got something to do with a passport. But it has fuck all to do with a passport.
https://www.swisspass.ch/home?lang=en