Yesterday, the Reykjavík Police Department wrote a Facebook post warning people of phone calls from a foreign number, which has been linked to scammers.
The number +88184810428 has been popping up in “missed calls” lists across the country and the Facebook post has almost 1,200 shares with hundreds commenting that they had received a call in the past couple of days. One person commented that he had thought the call was work related and had, therefore, called back. The call caused his phone to freeze for a couple of minutes and later he discovered that he had been charged 4,000 króna.
Check your phone bill
Unless you have prepaid credit, you might not realise immediately that you’ve been had. So, if you have called this number back you would be well advised to check your phone bill. Speaking to RÚV, Þorleifur Jónsson, head of the technical department for the Post and Telecom Administration in Iceland, said that people can be left with one incredibly expensive phone call.
“This has been going on for a long time. People receive a call, which is immediately hung up, with the caller hoping that the person calls back,” said Þorleifur. “The chances are you are unknowingly calling a premium-rate number.”
Not all calls are scam
We all need to be careful, there are a lot of people out there who want to scam us. But we have to keep in mind that most strangers are actually nice. For instance, we at the Grapevine recently got a call from a very friendly Nigerian lawyer, who told us that everyone in the office had just lost a distant, but very wealthy relative who had left us millions of dollars.
The only thing we had to do was to pay a couple hundred thousand Icelandic króna in tax. We’ve just used Western Union to transfer the money and we can’t wait to get filthy rich.
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