All Posts Tagged With: "voice mail"
Beware of the missed call scam
Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Thu, Dec 03 2009 | 4 Comments
While the scam is fairly old, you really have to watch out sometimes when it comes to letting your guard down. There is a scam going on right now that is picking up steam. Known as the missed call scam it runs fairly simply.
A computer generates a list of numbers and calls them. The phone will ring one time and hang up or they will call and hang up immediately once the person picks up the phone. This makes sure that you see a missed call on your phone or that you’re aware that someone is trying to reach you. What the scammer is banking on is that you will call the number back and listen to them give you some kind of sales pitch.
What you don’t know is that they’ve already got you.
What is happening is they have made you call a “premium” number. Meaning, you’re being charged anywhere from $2-$5 or more per minute these people keep you on the phone.
This seems like a pretty easy way to scam people and there are plenty of scammers out there making serious money doing this to unsuspecting people.
There are a few ways to avoid being scammed like this:
First, do not answer calls that are from numbers that you don’t recognize. This might sound a bit harsh, especially if you’re expecting a call from a number that you don’t recognize.
Second, if you have to answer a call you don’t recognize let it ring through to voice mail first. If they leave a voice mail, that’s at least good enough to where you can tell who it is that called. On the other hand, if they don’t leave a voice message, proceed to the next tip.
Third, Google the number. If it’s a scammer’s number the chances of you being the first person to ever be scammed like this is slim. If someone has been scammed by the same number in the past, it will likely be on Google or WhoCallsMe.
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Tags: first person, voice mail, steam
Google has to do something about this problem
Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Wed, Oct 21 2009 | 0 Comments
So, Google Voice is a really neat thing to use if you really don’t have a great calling plan or you like features like voice mail to be in your inbox like an email rather than having to go through every single voice mail on your headset.
Well, it turns out that that’s not always so great.
What’s the one thing that Google does really well? It seems like the company is pretty well known for its really popular search engine. The search engine on Google is integrated so well throughout Google’s other projects that it has actually been making private voice mails that people have left for other people on Google Voice search-able through the public search engine.
Luckily, it wasn’t long before someone at the company decided that they had to change this. All Google had to do was change the way it indexed sites to ensure voice mail transcripts would not find themselves in search results.
News reports about this spread all across the internet on Monday. By Tuesday night the issue was fixed. It turns out that the searches were pulling up voice mails and transcripts that people actually posted to be public, but nevertheless, Google wanted those search results to stay omitted.
Even though it was only a small snafu, it is still kind of worrisome for that day or so to think that people could have been searching through my voice mails. It really made me think for a minute about my Gmail account. This is my only email account right now and if someone could search through that, I would really be unhappy.
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Google and AT&T should kiss and make up
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Tags: snafu, transcripts, public search engine
