Bank transfer fraud happens more often than you can imagine. Fraudsters imitate various offial organisations, including banks, to persuade you to move money out of your account and into their hands.
Scammers use manipulative methods to panic real people into handing over their money and details. Perhaps you receive a call or text telling you that your account has been ‘compromised’ and you need to move your money somewhere ‘secure’. Maybe you have to click a link inside a text message or email and log in to your online banking account to stop a transaction. Of course such messages are more often than not fraudulent, but they can look very realistic. Links in text messages may take you to a spoofed albeit realistic version of your bank’s website, making the fraud almost more believable.
Who doesn’t worry about their money? It’s a completely rational concern. But what happens when scammers play on this feeling? In today’s blog, we will be introducing you to the latest “press 1 scam”, which seeks to exploit your fears and steal your money.
So it’s July, the start of summer holidays of 2019. We are all planning our vacation ahead, personally the tellows team really wants to visit Portugal, Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina… We only hope the holiday could be longer! Anyway, tellows hopes that besides enjoying your holiday, you don’t fall victim to a vacation phone scam! Let’s check out the following Vacation phone scam together.
It is almost March, how time flies! The tellows team has also been busy keeping the information about phone scams up to date. As expected, unfortunately, the number of spam calls, especially related to cost traps, is soaring because of more advanced technology nowadays and scammers having more means to escape from the authorities. Scammers have been taking advantage of taxpayers in last year. According to HMRC, over 100,000 reports of frauds were reported last year and the number is increasing. Last year, HMRC announced that it has been working with Ofcom, Mobile UK, Mobile Ecosystem Forum and Telecommunications UK Fraud Forum together to prevent bogus tax calls. The cooperation was successful and 1050 numbers have been deleted by HMRC, of which many numbers started with 0300. HMRC also stated that the number of phone scam reports has reduced by 25%, which is a very promising sign.
Today we would like to talk about the new features of our Android app!
Since 2014, the year we launched it, our app has grown: we have moved to over 450,000 downloads, more than 6,400 evaluations and 200,000 subscribers. Every day we work hard to improve it and your advice and feedbacks have been fundamental.
Functionality at a glance
Immediately identify who is calling you:
We have improved Caller ID, so that the spam numbers are immediately detected through the tellows app; the tellows score will be always shown on the screen of our mobile phone and, in addition to the rating, you will also be able to find out the name of the caller, the type of call and from which location it phones. You will have all the information you need, so you can decide whether or not to answer calls!
Find any number and info on callers:
With over 180.000 reviewsper day, you can find out who is bothering you in no time. Thanks to your reports, our database is constantly updated and over time it has become a big world family. New countries and new languages are available in the application, no scammers or call centers around the globe will have a chance!
Evaluate and comment on phone numbers:
Commenting and evaluating is now easier and more immediate, in order that you can help us in our mission against telephone scams; just connect to your account and enter in the tellows world from all devices in a simple and free way. It is not required to leave a comment anymore when rating a number which makes it faster to evaluate unknown numbers. Your negative rated numbers are also on your personalized blacklist and can be blocked with premium.
Call barring and Blacklist customized with Premium:
In the Premium version, all dangerous numbers rated by you, are saved on your phone and can be blocked even in offline mode. All is possible thanks to the black list stored and updated locally and also use it without any advertising.
We could not be more proud of our product, but without your support and the trust that you give us every day, we would not have made the giant steps we have taken so far: you, our community tellows, are the beating heart of our app!
The movie ‘You’ve got a mail‘ is one of the tellows’ team favorite movies. But my readers, how many of us can become Joe and Kathleen in real life? Unfortunately, more people are falling victims to ‘romance scams’ regardless of gender, according to the official information* of many countries. Let us have a look at the figure:
The numbers above are surprisingly alarming. In the US, the losses of romance scams rose from $33M to $143M in 2015 to 2018 as stated in FTC. Online dating becomes more popular and common nowadays, thanks to the technology we can meet endless potential romantic partners online. However, we also become more vulnerable when there are scammers try to take advantages of the online dating platforms. 继续阅读 →
tellows database consists of over millions of telephone numbers reported by our users worldwide. As you can read on our API page, we are always open for any collaboration and partnership by offering the access to our database. Recently, we made a collaboration with Ever Apps LLC to support its anti spam call app for iPhone with the tellows database. In case you haven’t heard of this application, here’s a quick overview of our new partner app!
We are happy to announce that tellows has released a new update of our Caller ID & Block App for iPhone with brand new features! In the new version, it’s now even easier for you to protect yourself from nuisance calls. As you probably already know, the tellows app can help you to find information of telephone numbers all over the world. We have finally created new features, such as free real-time identification and automatic update of the caller ID, so you can enjoy even more benefits, free of charge! So which are the new advantages you can get after the new update? Check it out below!
tellows Score Display on Incoming Calls
The so-called Lite version of the tellows protection, which is the free version where users won’t be charged at all, now offers automatic identification on any incoming calls. The tellows score will be displayed on the incoming call, indicating the potential risk of the call. The score 1 means that the number is trustworthy, whereas score above 7 refers to potential risk of the number. With this new feature, it’s even easier for users to decide whether they should pick up a call and whether the number is possibly dangerous or not.
More scores – more details!
From now, your phone will not only identify dangerous calls. You will also benefit from information of positive rated numbers, such as trustworthy companies or service hotlines. The new app version will identify numbers from score 1 to 9 to provide you with more information for better security.
more and more frequently consumers are victims of telephone spam or frauds, or are simply provoked by frequent unwanted calls. They use various tricks to pull our money out of our pockets. Here in our community, many phone owners report and rate the numbers that called them, sharing their experiences with other users to protect you and themselves. This works in an easy and uncomplicated way.
The heart of us is the tellows score. It is calculated from all previously stored ratings for a specific phone number. Users of the community can report and rate phone numbers on a scale of 1-9, where 9 means that a very dangerous or very annoying phone call is on the line and 1 is a rather harmless one. So you can rate and categorize each phone number on a scale from 1 (trustworthy) to 9 (dubious). From 7 on, the corresponding phone number is placed on a blacklist of the community and is thus blocked for everyone using the tellows products by itself and provides an appropriate protection. Depending on the rating, you can then assess the seriousness of a called number. In this way you can inform yourself online about the experience other users have already made with the respective number. And if there is a cost trap or telephone fraud behind it, you can know it because of the negatively rated number before they call you back again. Additionally, you can create your personal blacklist and add unwanted numbers that are not yet rated or don’t appear in the blacklist. If you rate a number negatively, it will be added to your personal blacklist and will be blocked the next time you receive a call. Even if the overall rating assigned by other tellows users of the phone number is different, it will still be blocked.
In order to be able to benefit from the collected assessments and experiences at an early stage, for example even before a call is answered, the successful tellows app for devices with Android or iOS was developed. This already indicates during the ringing, how trustworthy the calling number is by using the reports of the community. Thus, when the call is received, the tellows score is displayed. 继续阅读 →
tellows is versatile and the tellows data can be used for different systems. We developed an API that suits all kinds of projects and allows you to access the database and use the number details as preferred.
Today, we want to introduce a student project from the UPMC University in Paris, which was realized with the help of the tellows API.
For the students, the task was to build an Android App with an API. The idea was to develop a caller ID that identifies French numbers and shows whether a number is dangerous or trustworthy. With the help of our API, they managed to build the App in just a few weeks. As soon as a call comes in, it shows the respective tellows score that indicates if the number is dangerous or not. Opening the app, it will show a list of all recently received calls. Furthermore, it displays the number, score and country.
The final result was presented within the class and turned out successful. We are happy that we could be part of it and help to realize the project. However, a publication of the application is not possible.
tellows is happy to collaborate with companies and developers to create projects for commercial or research purposes. The collaborations are broad. For example, we have been working together with an organization but also with other Apps
If you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment.
If you need more information about our API, please visit this website.
