A phone number that will pay dearly for a call: a simple thing to remember

So-called “Wangiri” attacks, where people from exotic countries are called and charged extra for trying to redial, continue this year, the media said. The last such attack on the Telios network took place in early July.

“While we have a special system in place to protect our network and clients from Wangiri’s attacks, scammers do not exploit or improve the methods they use either. The latest attack was more sophisticated than previous attacks of a similar nature and some calls overlooked our Filters. So while we controlled the attack, some of the evaluator’s calls came to our clients. We see all of this information and have reimbursed the costs incurred by our clients, “says Darius Meizeraitis, Director of International Business for Telios.

During the attack, individual Telios customers could receive calls from phone numbers with Burkina Faso’s country code +266. According to D. Meizeraitis, this is only a clear sign that scammers are working: “Attacks of this type are carried out using telephone numbers from exotic countries such as Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Botswana, Guinea, Guyana and others. If you haven’t waited for that call and don’t know anyone who lives in these countries, just don’t answer or redial these numbers, or even blacklist them. “

Last year, the Telios Group in the Baltic and Scandinavian countries was one of the first in the world to implement a technical solution that blocks Wangiri’s attacks. This system identifies Wangiri’s call traffic and automatically blocks calls to and from attack numbers for a limited time.

Experts estimate that this technical solution has helped control more than 50 percent. Wangiri’s attacks. However, it is extremely difficult to completely prevent phone scammers as they increasingly use new methods and techniques, such as changing the numbers and country codes used for calls.

The Japanese term “Wangiri” means “a sign”. The scheme devised and widely used by interpreters works as follows: the automatic calling system dials random numbers from different countries one after another and places the handset after one or two signals, even if the owner of the number does not answer. Such “beacons” can be repeated multiple times.

One-tone calls are generally made from foreign numbers, and the purpose of these scams is to receive a callback, because in this case the caller already pays the connection fee for the international call. Part of this fee is generally received by the scammer himself.