If you have ever found yourself in position of using either one of Siri or Google to call a business, or still find yourself doing it, then you can be on danger of falling victim to a new scam.
Phone calls that are made with voice assistants could make the users open to a wide range of scammers – who have found a new and clever way of exploiting the growing dependence of people on both Siri and Google.
So how does it all go down? How do people fall victim to the latest scam? Well, to put it simply enough, if you do not know the number of a business, you would perhaps ask either ask Google or Siri to call the business for you – obviously, by taking the name of the business.
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However, instead of calling the business, the assistant actually goes on to call a scammed who impersonates someone from the company that you thought you had called. With this done, in most cases, the scammer would then try to trick the person on the other line into sending them money.
All in all, the scheme in itself is quite simple. What scammers do is that they buy search ads that contain false “company” phone number and pay to feature them prominently in the search results. And if you see the ads in your own search results, you might quite easily identify them as a scam. However, as far as the case for the assistants go, they are not all that great in making these distinctions, as they often prioritize the results which seemingly rank higher in search.
And so whenever you’d ask your assistant to make a call, it would simple dial one of the top results – meaning that you would inadvertently be connected with the scammer found on the other side of the line.
In order to avoid this, it would be wise to double check any phone number before actually proceeding to make a phone call, or perhaps calling numbers from official sources – like a company’s website.
