Telephone number to call: you will pay dearly: a simple thing to remember

So-called “Wangiri” attacks, where people from exotic countries are called and an additional charge is made to try to redial, continue this year, the media said. The last such attack on the Telia 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. Therefore, while we controlled the attack, part of the evaluator’s calls reached our clients. We see all this information and automatically reimburse the costs incurred by our clients, “says Darius Meizeraitis, Director of International Business at Telia.

During the attack, individual Telia customers were able to receive calls from phone numbers with the Burkina Faso 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 living in these countries, just don’t answer or redial these phones, or even blacklist them. “

Last year, the Telia Group was one of the first in the Baltic and Scandinavia to implement a technical solution in the world to block 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 avoid phone scammers as they use ever 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 the other and, after one or two rings, helps the phone, even if the owner of the number does not answer. Such “beacons” can be repeated multiple times.

One-touch calls are generally made from foreign numbers, and the purpose of these scams is to receive a call back. After all, 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.