There's a new type of fake phone call making the rounds of corporate America, or at least my little corner of it. It's a version of the message that clicks on once the machine generating it has identified a person saying "Hello" on the other end. Sometimes I get the second half of it, as our office has an auto-respond that starts with "Hello" as well, but today I picked up switchboard fairly quickly so I heard the whole thing, and it's insidious. It replicates what you'd expect an actual message left on an answering machine to sound like: "Hi, this is so-and-so, I've been trying to reach you for awhile about such-and-such, could you give me a call at..." Apparently phone-spammers are starting to take their cues from email spammers and mock-personalizing their ads! Easy workaround - if the "person" at the other end doesn't respond to "May I help you?" it's a machine and an obvious spam, even more so if the message doesn't state "Hi, this is so-and-so and I'd like to leave a message for specific-name..." I'm sure there are switchboard operators and secretaries who call these people back, if only out of curiosity, but I can't imagine anyone else being simple enough to fall for it, at least here in the (sub)urban jungle, so I keep wondering how these phone spammers make money.
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