The Phone Mafia.

There is this new type of mafia that is currently making its way into the world. Well, it is not new, but is clearly getting bigger and bigger.

The Phone Mafia : To scam people through the phone.

The Phone Mafia are an organised crime group that uses random people to help them take money from even more random people , usually old and easilly targeted, with various scams.

The appeal to the system is that they almost never get cought because they are doing it through a phone and because the middle man does not know who is he employed by and who are their targets.

The entire scam happens in less than a hour.

The scammer calls a random number, then like the actor they are, they pretend to be someone : A relative, the police, a media, law enforcements or a company. They make the people drop money at random locations. The money are picked by the middle man, then dropped to yet another random location.

The country i am from : Bulgaria, is currently a Hotspot for the Bulgarian Phone Mafia. From the start of the year there are over 10000 crimes
commited and is slowly getting into our neighbours. Most of the times the criminals litteraly go in another country then from there they scam the people back in Bulgaria.

Those scams are slowly spreading across Europa and the USA. People see how sucessfulle they are and just keep going and going.


A new site that explains it better than me

Be safe and look out from the phone scammers.

a reply to: ZeroFurrbone

They would call and ask for ransom or bail to release "relatives" of the victims. Arnaudova wanted to make it clear that this is not how police departments or prosecutors work. From the beginning of the year phone scams have ripped Bulgarians of over 5 million BGN (€2,5 Million). And we must take into account the fact that not all scams get reported, meaning that 5 million might be a conservative estimate. Throughout 2017 over 11 000 scams have been reported but only 650 official complaints have been filed.

That sounds pretty horrible... and for a poor country with a population of around 7 million this seems quite a big thing.

a reply to: 0racle

It actually suprises me every time when i hear in the news : An old granny/grandpa gives away 100 000BGN (50k Euro) to phone scammers.

Its' Worldwide and the calls can be originating anywhere in the world - All People of the World are trargets - They will if they can rob [usually by scam], anyone dumb enough to fall for the pitch they usse.

Sometimes they just want you to say "YES" to something - they record this and use your voice for any number of nefarious purposes.

Ths only way to protect yourself is to assume any unsolicited phone call may be a scammer.

If you have caller ID and don't reconize the number, either don't answer - Or answer with extreme caution.

Watch for the one supposeldy coming from Microsoft supposedly becuase you have a computer problem

- What you really have is a hacker/scammer problem !

a reply to: AlienView

Most people in the Eastern Europa does not show who is calling on their home phones, which makes them really easy targets.

I think this phone scam problem has became worldwide problem. I personally still get at least 2 calls from unfamiliar numbers each and everyday. I never answer those calls, though. I usually just Google the number or check it on websites like whycall.me... just to see if people have reported the number as scam, so that I could just block the number without even answering their calls. They are very persistent. I think the best option for us to avoid them is just to ignore them.

a reply to: ZeroFurrbone

i dont mean to mock the situation - but i have to wonder why :

so many bulgarians think that random phone calls telling them thier relatives " need bail " are legitimate ?

IRS agent (uh huh, really): "Send me a check or go to jail."
Microsoft (right): "Your computer is sending us error messages."
Nigerian Prince (awesome): "I have 15 billion dollars I need to get rid of."

There are several suckers born every minute. And all you have to do is find a couple of them.

This ain't the Mafia. They are flim-flammers.

a reply to: anthonyedwards

my mobile provider is awesome - they autiomaticaly downloaded a couple of " phone security " tools to my handset - one of which flags thier own sales call center as " tele-marketing " and advises me to ignore it