Do they call you and hang up? This is what you should do when you receive a 'ghost call'

So who is on the other end of the line? The majority of calls come from switchboards: internet operators and insurance firms fight daily to acquire new clients through offers of all kinds; campaigns that often arrive camouflaged as surveys or are directly articulated through deception. The Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU) has on several occasions denounced operators of gas or electricity companies who, with the excuse of a false change of distributor, confuse the customer to get them to abandon their longtime electric company.

Then there are, of course, the fraudulent calls made by cybercriminals through the technique known as 'phishing': they collect our data (through the multiple leaks that occur on the internet) to gain the trust of the victims while posing as their respective banking entities or a transport company. This is when they convince them to install malicious apps on their devices, provide passwords or make timely payments, which can ultimately empty their checking account.

What if I pick up and no one speaks?

For some time now, however, the predominant anonymous calls are those in which, when you pick up, no one speaks. What's more, after spending a few seconds talking on the air, the sender suddenly ends the call (sometimes this can happen just a second after having answered, after hearing a strident beep).

Cybersecurity experts have coined the term 'ghost calls' to refer to this type of conversation, with many wondering what they hide: do they harm the recipient in some way by simply answering them? Sometimes. The key is not to contact the number that called us again, when the type of scam known as 'wangiri' or the missed call would take place: scammers make calls for a few seconds or call directly and hang up. repeated to the victim's phone; Thinking that it may be an emergency, the latter ends up contacting the criminal through what is actually a special rate number. The result is a large charge on your phone bill, which you won't discover until you receive your statement at the end of the month.

Of course, 'ghost calls' can also be due to an automated 'marketing' technique: a 'bot' (a computer program) is responsible for calling a list of telephone numbers en masse to discard those that do not respond. Those who answer, however, become part of a new list: that of the users who will preferably be contacted to send them all kinds of commercial proposals. Thus, if we answer an unknown number and there is no one on the phone or they hang up on us immediately, it is most likely that we have told a machine that we usually do the same thing when someone calls us: pick up; so we are suitable to continue receiving telephone advertising.

On other occasions they may call and hang up on us, without saying a word, in order to know what time we are usually available. The aforementioned 'bots' dial a series of random numbers and record the time the user answered; This information then adds to a database that the operators of certain companies use to know what time of day we are most likely to answer.

These last two assumptions do not entail any economic risk for us, of course, but they could lead to a barrage of annoying and insistent sales calls. To avoid this, the OCU recommends signing up for the well-known Robinson List, although some users are wary: they continued to be harassed by phone even months after formalizing the registration. The only effective option, then, seems to be to block all those unknown numbers that contact us (if we verify that they belong to a switchboard or that they return silence in response).

Identify a 'spam' call

Fortunately, most Android phones come pre-installed with an application that automatically detects spam calls and marks them as such on the screen, without the need for us to answer. These warnings have a high degree of accuracy, since they are often based on reports from other users.

For their part, iPhone users can cut it short by automatically silencing any incoming call from an unknown number (via the 'Phone' > 'Mute strangers' section, within the 'Settings' menu). By enabling this option, these communications will automatically be sent to voicemail and displayed in the 'Recent' list.

As an alternative, we can download one of the many applications designed to identify unknown numbers (not hidden ones, which are impossible to decipher). One of the most used is 'TrueCaller' for iOS and Android, which has more than one billion downloads in the Google application store. It is equally legal to enter the number in the Google search engine (surely someone has written about it) or go to web pages such as 'ListaSpam' or 'Who called?', where thousands of numbers are stored along with the comments. from other users.