How phones can stop fraudsters from contacting you

Published in El Pais: March 13, 2018

For those of you who do not follow up on the latest phones Samsung has just unveiled its flagship Galaxy S9 to be released this month. I will spare you the details of most of its features but there is one feature that has caught my eye and it is one that I hope all future phones, from budget to elite, will include. This feature is what Samsung is calling Smart Call. This feature alerts your phone of incoming calls which are suspected of being spam, allowing you to ignore the call. I also learned that Google has already installed this feature on its phones the Pixel and Pixel two.

Now you might be wondering what the big deal is of receiving these calls, yes, they are annoying, but one simply must hang up the odd time you receive these calls. This may be true for many spam calls but lately they are becoming more and more dangerous as scam artists are utilizing these spam calls to get your money.

Where I live the most common scam going around are “agents” claiming you owe taxes and are threatened with prison if you do not pay up, others involve pretending to fix your computer in exchange for a fee. You may think that common sense could prevent you from falling victim to such scams, but the frightening thing is that these scammers are getting smarter. Simply talking to them can be dangerous as they can record your voice as a tool to steal your identity meaning even the most diligent person can still end up being a victim.

During my time as a fraud analyst I saw many cases where fraudsters can steal thousands of dollars out of unsuspecting victims, meaning if they can just fool one person out of hundred it would be worth their time. If these potential victims have a device that prevent them from even getting in contact with fraudsters millions would be saved not to mention the peace of mind it would bring them.

While only the future will tell if this is a trend that will catch on with other phones, I certainly hope it will stick around and the next time you are in the market for a new phone I encourage you to seek out a phone with this feature, you never know how much it will save you in the end.