“When it came on it was a gentleman, nice voice, and he says, ‘can you hear me?,'” Kuczborski said. When Mary Kuczborski of Clinton Township answers her phone, she doesn’t expect to be hit with questions.īut that’s what happened Thursday evening. Goodwin said she’s always just hung up the phone, but she didn’t realize until recently how dangerous those calls can be. “It’s almost instinctual, so that’s what they’re looking for.” “If you hear someone say ‘I can’t hear you’ or ‘Can you hear me,’ the first reaction you have is to say ‘Yes,’” she said. Lori Goodwin, who lives in Tampa, has been getting about three of these calls every week for the last several months. In all the news reports we found, interviewees merely reported having been asked the common question (“Can you hear me?”) but did not aver that they themselves had fallen prey to scammers: As far as we know, phone companies, utilities, and credit card issuers don’t maintain databases of voice recordings of their customers and use them to perform real-time audio matching to verify identities during customer service calls. Moreover, even if such a scenario existed, it’s hard to imagine why scammers would need to utilize an actual audio recording of the victim’s repeating the word “yes” rather than simply providing that response themselves. Primarily, we haven’t yet been able to identify any scenario under which a scammer could authorize charges in another person’s name simply by possessing a voice recording of that person saying “yes,” without also already possessing a good deal of personal and account information for that person, and without being able to reproduce any other form of verbal response from that person.
But a closer examination revealed some questionable elements.
“I know that people think it’s impolite to hang up, but it’s a good strategy.”īut how can you get charged if you don’t provide a payment method? The con artist already has your phone number, and many phone providers pass through third-party charges.Īt first glance, the warning sounded reasonably valid: major news outlets covered it, and a Better Business Bureau satellite office reported the scam as well. “You say ‘yes,’ it gets recorded and they say that you have agreed to something,” said Susan Grant, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America. That affirmative response is recorded by the fraudster and used to authorize unwanted charges on a phone or utility bill or on a purloined credit card. The “can you hear me” con is actually a variation on earlier scams aimed at getting the victim to say the word “yes” in a phone conversation.
Virginia police are now warning about the scheme, which also sparked warnings by Pennsylvania authorities late last year. On 26 January 2017, CBS News reported the workings of the scam thusly: After the caller makes contact they ask the recipient “Can you hear me?” to elicit a response of “yes,” and a potential onslaught of unauthorized charges ensues. According to those reports, the scam begins with an unsolicited phone call to the putative mark. In late January 2017, news outlets across the United States reported on a purported “can you hear me?” telephone scam.
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