Hi everyone, new here. I work from home in the US for my friend’s small business. A portion of my work is to answer incoming calls from customers, most of which are in Illinois (where the business is located, my boss advertises only in that general area so there’s no reason why we should get calls from outside that area really).
Every few days I’ll get a call with caller ID showing up as something like “LAW OFFICES” or “STATE OF ILLINOIS”. When I answer, I hear someone with an Indian accent asking to speak to the owner of the company. Frequently I can hear a VERY busy call center in the background. If I respond with “may I ask what this is about?” they hang up. Recently I responded differently, saying that I’m the owner’s assistant and can take the call. The person then says they’re offering financial assistance for COVID relief or something like that, in which I hang up.
I’ve never heard of these types of calls as scams, as they’re not your typical Amazon/refund calls. Has anyone ever gotten these before, and are they scams? If they are in fact legit then I don’t want to be a fool and call them a benchod just because they have an Indian accent, lol.
Here is one of the numbers that called recently: 636-323-5687
Welcome @Porygon. They most definitely are scam attempts in order to extract financial info. The loan crap usually comes from a 917 prefix, but they may well have moved on to other #'s. And they can spoof anyone’s number so don’t go by what’s in the caller id. I managed to swipe some info from a MS popup chode this morning and then he called back 5 minutes later with a spoofed MS number claiming I took one of their tech’s tools, but he called with the same voice. Moral is be dubious about EVERYTHING!
Thank you for clarifying. That all makes sense then, it sounded super fishy as I would receive them but they can’t stay on the line the second I ask what it’s all about. This site will be a fun way to post the numbers that come in, once in a while I’ll get a Scamazon call. Eventually once I do enough research I’ll join in on the scambaiting fun.
Welcome to TSU. Yup, those calls do smell “phishy,” even from here.
I was checking to see if some toll-free numbers from which I had gotten calls from some fake “political action committees” were still in use by those “PACs,” and one number now is answered by a recording that yacks about small business loans. I’m not saying it’s a scam, but . . .