BBB reports on strange “can you hear me?” phone calls – what is going on?

Our thoughts on the “can you hear me?” scam that the mainstream media have been reporting on recently.

We should perhaps preface this article with a quick disclaimer; identity theft is real. Criminals can and do try and use the telephone to orchestrate these scams. As such, you should always be careful when receiving a call you deem suspicious. If you believe someone who has called you may be trying to phish sensitive information from you or elicit certain responses, then you should hang up the phone.

With that said, this week the media have jumped on a particular scam that asserts criminals are calling victims and saying “can you hear me?” over the phone in order to elicit an affirmative response from the victim. Armed with the recording of the victim’s affirmative response, various media outlets claim that criminals can then orchestrate various types of identity theft, such as obtaining your personal data or can even cause financial loss.

What’s true; The BBB (Better Business Bureau) have reported a number of instances where victims have received suspicious calls where the person at the other end of the line asks questions such as “can you hear me?” and “are you the lady of the house“? Soon after replying, the connection is dropped, presumably by the caller.

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In turn, media outlet CBS News reported on these calls in January 2017 and vaguely claimed that answering “yes” could result in various charges made against you. As other media outlets reported on the same issue, details of the apparent scam became even more unclear, and as a result, confusion ensued.

Much of the confusion lies around one particular point; If a criminal manages to get a recording of you saying “yes”, how can that be used against you?

It is this salient detail that many of the media reports or indeed even warnings coming from authorities seemed to be somewhat lacking. Yes suspicious phone calls are being made, but what comes after that?

It is perhaps important to note one thing – simply having a recording of a person saying “yes” doesn’t provide a ‘magic key’ into their various online accounts, nor would it allow a crook to make purchases on their behalf . (If that were the case, those who regularly appear on television or radio would find themselves perpetually at the mercy of such a scheme). We have made a point of stressing this since many of the online reporting of this scam seems to have been misconstrued in this way.

Anyone who has ever needed to phone up their bank, credit company or phone company will know that they need to confirm their identity by confirming several details about themselves that will include a piece of data only they [should] know, such as a login pin or password. You cannot simply confirm your identity by saying “yes”, since these sorts of companies do not employ any biometric voice recognition technology.

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In fact we can think of no scenario where a recording of someone saying “yes” could directly be used to authorise charges against anyone, at least not by itself.

Again, while the BBB reported on the suspicious phone calls, they themselves conceded that there have been no documented cases of people losing money as a result of the phone calls –

So far, none have reported money loss, but it’s unclear how the scams will play out over time, or if the targets will be victimized at a later date.

So again this brings us back around to the burning question – what can the criminals actually do with this recording? The CBS report mentions towards its conclusion that criminals could both trick a victim by editing the “yes” response to make it appear as if the victim authorised a purchase by playing back the edited response and subsequently threaten the victim with “legal action” if they do not go through with it.

That would essentially make this scam akin to extortion. However the same CBS report didn’t confirm that any scam matching that description has even taken place, and neither has the BBB, and we cannot find any documented cases where victims have actually been extorted in such a way. As such, for the time being this appears to be mere conjecture.

That type of scam would also mean it wasn’t the response “yes” that resigned a victim to being the target of a scam, rather the latter part of the scheme that would lure them into paying for something they didn’t authorise, under the threat of punitive action being taken against them if they didn’t. In which case, if we were to educate the public about such a scam, why focus on the “can you hear me” part of the scheme and instead educate the public on not blindly trusting scammers who assert over the phone that the victim authorised a purchase by playing a “yes” recording?

It is those important details that are lacking with this report that renders many of its claims dubious, or “half cocked” at best.

With all that said, we will finish this article on the same note to which we started it. If you believe an unexpected phone call is suspicious, and that the person on the other end of the phone is trying to elicit certain responses or trying to trick you into parting with your personal information, hang up the phone.