I may have fallen prey to a phone bank scam/operation.
Last edited Fri Mar 6, 2015, 11:53 AM - Edit history (1)
It started with a call to my cell phone from a photo service company about two weeks ago. Because the person was calling for someone who was not me, I ignored the call. Then a day later, a photograph was texted to my cell phone. I didn't pay attention to the number and just deleted it from my phone. The picture was of a young lady (late teens, early twenties) of ethnic origin, sitting in a parked car.
The photo company called again a few days later, again, on my cell phone. Because I do not answer phone calls from people I do not know, I did not answer the call, and this time, I blocked the number.
Then this morning, someone called my cell phone and when I didn't answer, there was another call that immediately followed on my house number.
Of course, I assumed that a family member was urgently trying to reach me, which is why I got up from what I was doing and went to investigate. When I walked into the room I heard the voice recorder and realized it was a call from Aaron's store furniture and they were asking for the same person that the photo company had called for two weeks before. Setting aside the fact that I hadn't walked into an Aaron's store in over thirty years, I was mostly alarmed because I knew there was no reason for Aaron to have both my cell phone and house number. Now I was worried that identity theft might be involved.
I returned the call on my house number to let them know they had the wrong number and shared enough information to let them know that their customer was probably not a legitimate person.
The guy seemed reasonable. Too reasonable. I would think that he would be slightly concerned that his company might be the victim of fraud, but he seemed very complacent when he said that he would just remove my number from the system.
I thought this was odd, so I went back to my cellphone and looked at the number that had called in that morning. It looked familiar. So I compared it to the Photo company's phone number that I had blocked two weeks ago and noticed they were two digits apart. That's just too much of a coincidence.
Now I'm trying to figure out what I might have tripped into. I think this was a phone bank looking for unused numbers. I have a theory of who might be interested in collecting unused numbers, or just might be interested in fishing around in general, but I would have to learn more about how polling companies validate their information before I could make it stick.
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Now I just have to figure out how they got both numbers. And will they strike again? 
At least I have recorded messages that the calls came in. But it is very unsettling that someone used both my home and cell phone.
