Beware of ‘one ring’ international call scam, where unsuspecting mobile phone users are swindled out of their airtime.
Kenyans have in the recent weeks been receiving calls from foreign countries only to call back and sometimes listen to an automated message or are redirected to premium numbers.
According to an Irish report, the con artists use phones bought on the dark web, call the subscribers and then immediately disconnect the calls.
The Wangiri Fraud as it is commonly known, aims at encouraging those who see a missed call on their phones to call back the number, after which they are ripped off.
Kenyans have been receiving calls from Somalia (+252), Switzerland (+41), India (+91), Latvia (+37) and Syria (+963).
Telecommunication companies, Safaricom for instance has advised its subscribers to report the foreign numbers to 333 and to avoid by all means calling back numbers bearing the fore mentioned codes.
”We have advised our customers to ignore these calls and to avoid returning any missed calls from unknown international numbers,” said Telkom Kenya.
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The scam, whose origin is said to have been Japan, was in South Africa.
”Once you call, you either trigger spam that will either be sent to you or you are often put on hold (the other person won’t talk) and you eventually end up with a high call account,” The Citizen reports.
The calls came from Burundi (+257), Malawi (+265), Pakistan (+92), Russia (+7), Nigeria (+234), Belarus (+375) and Tunisia (+216).
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