Be Aware of The Scary New Delayed Disconnect Phone Scam

There is a very clever new scam going around that you definitely need to know about or should we say it’s an old scam that’s becoming newly popular again. We’ve seen it being called the “delayed disconnect” scam. Basically, it takes advantage of a lesser-known feature in some phone systems to trick you and the worst part about it is they can trick you even if you do everything right so it won’t even be your fault. Below you’ll find explanation of how it works and steps to avoid it. First here’s how the scam goes and then we’ll go over how it actually works.

It works like this: you receive a scam call from someone pretending to be from your bank. Commonly scammers tell you, that your credit card has been compromised, and they advise you to contact the number printed on the back of your card which is correct thing to do anyway in case your card was hacked. Then you hang up, you call the number as appropriate. Someone picks up and you hear: “Hi, this is “your” bank…”. Surprisingly you are talking to the same scammer now — you have been tricked already.

How did that happen? — Here’s how:

First, we need to clarify that this is only going to potentially happen on landlines. A lot of landline phone systems do not actually disconnect the call right away after you hang up the phone. Depending on how the phone company has your specific system set up if you, as the receiving party hang up the call however the other caller does not hang up on the other end and it will stay connected for a couple of seconds or several minutes until the original caller disconnects or the timer is reached so in the meantime if they didn’t hang up if you pick up the phone again, you’ll still be talking to that same person.

What the scammer does is: after they hear you hang up; they’ll start playing a fake dial tone. When they hear you pick up again to call the number on the back of the card like you’re supposed to, then they’ll just stop the dial tone and pretend to pickup as the bank. It is extremely dangerous about this scam that even if you do right things, you could still be tricked if you were unaware.