RACHEL RICKARD STRAUS: How to avoid falling prey to phone scams

My mobile phone provider has been calling me every few days to try to flog me a new deal. At least I think it has.

The phone calls may be genuine. But they could also be from scammers. I honestly can’t tell.

Scammers often call their victims purporting to be from their phone company, bank, HMRC or another trusted provider. They win their victim’s trust by sounding genuine and then trick them into handing over their personal information or bank details.

I’ve been studying scams for years and have come to one sad conclusion. The bitter truth is there is no foolproof way of knowing whether you are speaking to a genuine, trusted company or a scammer posing as one.

There used to be a few key tests that you could use to spot the real from the bogus.

But scammers have thwarted every last one of them. It used to be that a call was genuine if the caller knew your personal information or account details.

But now scammers frequently have access to this information and will parrot it back to you to gain your trust.

It used to be that if the caller was phoning from an official number you could be confident they were genuine. But now scammers use a trick called spoofing to change their caller ID to make it appear as if they are phoning from an official number.

They also use something called ‘smishing’ to add bogus text messages to the end of chains of genuine ones from your bank or other provider — making them indistinguishable on your phone.

Companies such as banks, insurers and phone providers usually have security processes to help their customers identify when calls are genuine and when they are being impersonated. But, these can create confusion.

For example, some condescendingly state ‘we would never ask for personal information over the phone’, while others blithely ask you for your date of birth, mother’s maiden name and countless other pieces of personal information when they call you.

Some companies tell customers ‘we will never ask you to share your PIN’, while others will not speak with you until they have sent you a security code by text message or email and asked you to read it out over the phone.

So, what can we do to sort the genuine calls from the scammers?

Well, there is some new regulation in the pipeline that may help a bit. Pension cold calls are already banned, which means that if you receive an unsolicited call about your pension you know it is illegal and you should hang up.

But proposals for a similar ban are expected to be announced in the coming days on all financial products. 

That way, if someone phones you out of the blue to try to sell you any financial product — from investments to cryptocurrency — you’ll know to hang up.

The technology enabling scam-mers to send thousands of bogus text messages at once also faces a ban. That, too, should help.

But these regulations won’t fully solve the problem.

I think the only foolproof way to ensure you are not scammed over the phone is not to engage with companies who telephone you.

If my bank, phone provider, insurer or any other company phones me, I hang up — politely, mind. Then, I find a genuine phone number for them and call them back. But before I phone back, I ensure that the previous phone call has definitely ended.

That is because scammers can stay on the line and still hear you so that even when you think you have made a new call, you are still on the old one.

You’re on the case

Reader H. M. from North Yorkshire has been in touch with an excellent idea to help us spot genuine calls from scam ones.

‘When a customer contacts their bank, they are asked a number of security questions to prove their identity,’ she says. ‘But what about having the same process the other way around?’

H. M. suggests that all customers should have a ‘communication password’ that they have chosen and that is securely stored by their bank. 

Then, when they receive a call from their bank, they can ask ‘what is my communication password?’ to check if the caller is genuine.

A great idea worth exploring.

Do you have ideas for cracking down on scammers? How do you work out which correspondence is genuine and which is fake? Let me know.

r.rickardstraus@dailymail.co.uk