Missed Call Mystery !

[Russellhni]

I remembered a proverb , after falling prey to another ruse :
" If you Fool me Once - It is a shame on you ! But if you fool me twice, It is shame on Me ! "

Yes ! You are right ! I was fooled again ! Shame on me ! This time the missed call was from 99 -4404 130 112 99 EQUATORIAL GUINEA on
9th Mar 2016 about 9.30 am . Same methodology. Single ring technique I know, like the palm of my hand, it was a scam.

Any how, Is it not some great man said “ When you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave” .

I wanted to be brave, Try and Investigate, if there is a phishing scam involved in this missed call !.

So, with a “To do or Not to do” dilemma ticking in the background, I rang back. I know it is Foolish but a brave action.

The same result. Same gibberish. Sort of recorded voices! No one was trying to phish me for any confidential data or financial information. It looked , The whole idea was just to confuse me and keep me on the hook.

So I moved on to damage control , disconnected the call immediately and this time, I was a bit faster and charged just Rs.20/- !

I raised a complaint to Airtel about this spam. I also made a request to Airtel to debar my prepaid mobile number from making international calls. They flatly refused, said it is a basic or default service, hence cannot be debarred.

Now my questions to the forum are these !

People in Telecom or friends in knowledge circle, please clarify for the benefit of the forum and friends !

• Is it that I am being targeted, because I called back once? But the calls are from different countries? Is that also fake ?
• Customer like me are the suckers, but who is really benefited? The individuals of the call origin , do they get paid. If so by whom?
• Contrary to my belief, there does not seem to be any phishing attempt. Is it correct? Or , as usual, I am wrong?
• Is it possible, even remotely, the telecom carriers, both the countries carriers split the loot ? Will giants like Airtel /BSNL resort to that cheap tricks, like Salami ? But considering the large base of mobile customers, it is a tempting opportunity .

.......

Here I think it is worth to mention about Salami Logic (Salami technique or Salami Slicing) , an innovative way of looting gullible people.

Salami slicing (courtesy Wikipedia) : In information security, a salami attack is a series of minor attacks that together results in a larger attack. Computers are ideally suited to automating this type of attack.

An example of salami slicing, also known as penny shaving, is the fraudulent practice of stealing money repeatedly in extremely small quantities, usually by taking advantage of rounding to the nearest cent (or other monetary unit) in financial transactions. It would be done by always rounding down, and putting the fractions of a cent into another account. The idea is to make the change small enough that any single transaction will go undetected.