You are here Home » Featured » Why are Somalia spam callers finding it easy to reach Canadian wireless users?

Why are Somalia spam callers finding it easy to reach Canadian wireless users?

by Felix Omondi
somalia

For some reason, spam callers from Somalia are finding it particularly easy to get through to Canadians using these particular wireless carriers; Freedom Mobile, Koodo, and Telus.

One victim shared a screenshot of his call logs online, showing he had received more than 10 calls in one day from a number that seems to be coming from Somalia. The number bears the 252 country code for the horn of Africa country.

More Canadians started sharing screenshots of their call logs, all showing calls from Somalia coming in at all hours of the day.

Other took to Reddit to voice their frustrations, with /r/Alberta subreddit saying:

I’ve gotten two calls, one I rejected and one was a missed call. Someone in our town has had 43 missed calls in 4 days. It’s nuts. And everyone says the same thing – Telus can’t help. They’re telling people to change their phone numbers, which obviously won’t help.

People who got the missed calls and called back the number only got connected to an answering machine playing hold music. They were kept on hold, and they believe the purpose of these missed calls is to have you call them back and be kept on hold so you can pay higher phone bills for making long distance calls.

The authorities are advising people not to answer these calls. The interesting bit is that these scammers frequent people with one phone line and plays on their curiosity of having them receive a missed calls and possibly think an important thing or person is calling them from Somalia.

The scam calls are being likened to the ‘Nigerian Prince’ emails, but more version 2.0 that now plays over phone calls. The best defense users have is to block these numbers by blacklisting them from their call logs, but the fact that they are using very many different Somalia number make it harder to block all of them. You might block some, but new ones that haven’t called your phone before will get through.

You may also like