The Scam Caller Who Verbally Abused Me

...and what I’ve done to my iPhone so that I never have to speak to them again.

Well I just had an absolutely charming thing happen, as I sat merrily typing away at my laptop, sipping a mug of hot chocolate (OK, I admit defeat, autumn has started): I got verbally abused. In my own home!

WHILST WEARING CASHMERE!

Not sure why wearing cashmere makes the whole thing seem worse; I suppose what I’m trying to convey is that I was very comfortably in my safe space. Cocooned. Warm and fuzzy and looking forward to a morning of light admin and online pottering before my midday Zoom meeting.

Anyway, my phone rang and the display showed No Caller ID. And yes I know we’re not supposed to pick those up, the unidentified ones, but I was expecting a call about a refund on a bench from a relatively large company and so it seemed perfectly feasible that this would be they.

Bit of context: I am plagued by scam callers on my mobile phone. It’s a real issue. At least four or five calls a day. I don’t know whether any of you are too, but if you are then you will know how badly it interrupts your flow. Even if you do the thing where you stay silent when you pick up, and wait for the other person to speak, even if you quickly realise it’s a scam and shut it down within ten seconds, even if you give them no response at all to go by, it still somehow takes a little chunk out of your day. Injects a tiny dose of annoyance and negativity into your life.

So I know I shouldn’t have answered, that it was against protocol, but what I did do right was to stay silent once I’d picked up the call. This is so (apparently) AI can’t clone your voice and then use it for evil deeds, but I have to say that it is quite difficult to stay quiet when you’ve spent forty-five years giving an immediate greeting.

I’m almost desperate to speak. I managed four seconds of silence but then the bloody Bird Clock that we have on the kitchen wall started hooting like an owl, because it it had turned noon, and the hooting was so loud that I felt suddenly ridiculous holding the phone and not saying anything.

“Hello?” I said, with some degree of relief.

Now. I knew this man wasn’t from American Express as soon as he started talking - not because he sounded too relaxed, though that was part of it (he sounded like he was lying down!) but because he didn’t ask forty-thousand security questions before proceeding with the call. Nobody can talk about anything on the phone, these days, without taking you through a series of security questions.

(Which I also object to, by the way, because how do you know you’re giving your security question answers to a legitimate person? It’s an absolute bloody minefield!)

Anyway, here was his opening gambit:

“We’ve had some activity on your American Express card in the Manchester area, at PC World, and need to check the payments.”

Talk about showing your hand too early! Where was the sense of mystique, where was his attempt to set the scene and reel me in with an elaborately thought-out ruse? It was so blindingly, unbelievably fake.

After a little pause (because I was trying to rack my brains as to whether I might, in fact, have some kind of AMEX card hidden away somewhere, frozen in an ice block or hidden behind a wobbly brick in the back wall, and I didn’t want to completely shoot myself in the foot if he did happen to be from American Express, probability 4.5 out of 100, but still, not nothing) I asked him for his direct number so that I could call him back.

Personally, I thought that this was quite a polite way of dealing with the situation: if he was from American Express, which wasn’t at all likely, I wouldn’t have been overly snippy with him and wouldn’t have to apologise for my terrible manners and if he wasn’t from American Express then, well, I was generously giving him a graceful exit. He could have just made up a number and hung up and we could have both gone on with our days.

Instead he said

“F*ck you, you c*nt b*tch.”

EXCUSEZ MOI?

If I was the sort of person who asked to speak to the manager then I would absolutely have asked to speak to the manager. If phone scammers even have a manager. “Put me onto your Scammer Boss!” Chief Scammer. King of the Rats. Slightly better bluetooth headset than everyone else and more vape breaks.

Honestly, though! It was the phone call equivalent of a slap! I felt completely violated. I haven’t been called that since I moved someone’s towels off an illegally reserved sunlounger at Ikos. (Joke.) I couldn’t believe it! But then, on the other hand, why was I even surprised? I mean this person’s one objective is to deceive, steal and essentially financially ruin an innocent person’s day/week/year/life. Why would they be above swearing?

For some reason, phone scammers have always gotten off quite lightly in my mind; if I were to draw a rudimentary “pyramid of criminals” with rapists and murderers and so on right at the tip, then the people in the phone scamming industry would be bumbling around at the base of the pyramid, carrying clipboards and wearing really disheartened expressions.

I suppose that mentally I’d mixed them up with people who work in call centres, which is a ridiculous error, but also explains why I had let them off so lightly. Because I also worked in a call centre (car insurance!) for a good few years (1996-2001) and it could be very dull and unrewarding at times.

Not so dull and unrewarding, though, that I signed off my unsuccessful sales calls with “f*ck you, c*nt!” I usually gave a disappointed sigh and went for a Marlboro Light out of the fire exit.

God it’s grim, isn’t it. The whole scamming thing. Especially if you’re a trusting person, as I am, who doesn’t like confrontation, and who has so many crazy online things going on that virtually any fabricated story seems vaguely feasible.

“You’re ringing about the seventy cans of Mutti chopped tomatoes that were ordered on a credit card? Well now that you mention it, yes that was me!”

“There’s been unusual activity, someone ordered three different wizard outfits? Sounds about right.”

I know two people who have recently almost come a cropper to huge scams involving money transfers and VAT bills, and these are quite savvy, business-minded people who are not elderly and have the digital know-how to be able to cross-check things and sense something amiss. Imagine how easily you could be scammed if you didn’t really know how to use a computer? Or online banking?

Ugh.

But I have found an answer to these scam calls interrupting my day and it is this:

How To Stop Scam Calls on Your iPhone

(You will have to Google to see if there is an Android equivalent, if you’re Android, because I have no idea how to use anything that isn’t Mac. I have only ever used ios operating systems which is why when my Mum asks me how to retrieve a photo on her Samsung phone she may as well ask me to draw the Stations of the Cross using hieroglyphics. And a quill.)

On iPhone, go into SETTINGS.

Then scroll all the way down to APPS. (Important, that - don’t go into Mobile Settings or Carrier Settings or what have you, it’s not in there.)

Scroll through the seventeen thousand apps in the list, including all the ones you downloaded on a frenzy in 2021 that have never been opened again - I have an app that’s a spirit level! never used! - all the way to PHONE.

In PHONE, go down until you see a section called Screen Unknown Calls. There are three options: Never, Ask Reason for Calling, or Silence.

If you have Never ticked, which is the default setting, then all calls, whatever they are, will come through to your phone and your phone will ring. If you answer it, and it’s a scam call, you’ll have to deal with getting rid of them.

If you tick Silence, then any calls from an unknown number or with Caller ID withheld will get sent straight to voicemail. This is not a bad option, really - a great interim setting if you don’t want to go the whole hog, below. If it’s a scam, the chances are they won’t leave a message and if they do then you’ll probably pick up on the fact it’s a scam. If it’s someone genuine who needs to get hold of you then they will leave a message and a number for you to call them back.

Good, isn’t it? You don’t have to pay for this service, by the way - I was paying an extra £2 per month to EE on top of my contract for a scanning system that tells you when it suspects spam, but the problem I found with this was that I could see the number on the screen and part of my brain always thought “but what if it’s the fabric shop/school/dentist’s/car service department?” And then it still took a chunk out of my day, albeit tiny, because I’d be wondering whether I recognised the number.

(The scanning is pretty accurate, I think - it does it in real time apparently, so it’s fast at picking up and logging new scam numbers.)

So that didn’t work for me. I cancelled it. What did work (until I took it off because I was expecting a few important calls and didn’t want to miss them, but then forgot to turn the setting back on, duh!) was the iPhone Screen Unknown Calls options.

There’s a final one called Ask Reason for Calling. This is the most extreme and sets up a sort of free concierge in your phone that asks any callers not in your contacts list their name and reason for calling. This information then appears as text on your screen - the caller is still on the line, it’s all very quick - and you can decide whether to answer or not.

I have to say that when it was on, I found the whole “phone ringing and text appearing at the same time” really quite panicky and stressful, a bit l was in an action movie and tasked with hot-wiring a car whilst making a decision on a million dollar crypto deal. Although it’s the most impressive option, as it puts a nice layer between you and the potential scam caller, it’s also the most busy. There’s something comforting about Silence in that it takes it all out of your hands, diverts it directly to voicemail (only if it isn’t a known contact, by the way, anyone else gets through!) and basically deals with all of your problems efficiently and quietly without you even being aware of it.

I imagine it’s what it’s like being J-Lo or someone, where you have staff who are paid to deal with the chaos around you so that you can just stroll around in a relaxed manner. Two metres to the side there’s a guy with a life-size cut-out of you where the hands and feet have been cut off and the eyes are routed out and he’s spraying in your direction with a water pistol filled with his own blood, but you and your cream leather Hermes Birkin are sauntering along, none the wiser.

Personally, I think it’s a great free function on the iPhone. The reason I turned my setting back off again was that I became paranoid about missing urgent calls, but honestly if someone you don’t know is trying to get hold of you and it’s that important, they will absolutely leave a voicemail saying CALL ME BACK IT’S YOUR DELIVERY DRIVER AND I’M ABOUT TO THROW YOUR NEW DISHWASHER OVER THE GAAAAAATE! and if it’s even more important than that, say a hospital appointment or similar, then they will email too.

I wish I’d never reverted back to default. I’d have had a lovely, relaxing day today, rather than being called a “c*nt bitch”. The worst thing about it was he promptly hung up - I didn’t even have right to reply!

God damn him. The Scam Caller Who Verbally Abused Me. Sounds like the next Bond movie! Bit like The Spy Who Loved Me, but with a man lying down next to a table of burner phones, instead of Roger Moore in a suit.

When I told Rich about it he said, “there must be a way of tracing the call,” and we both spent a while trying to find out, though Rich’s mission was to report the number for abusive behaviour, whereas mine was to call it back and have the final word.

“BASTARD!” is what I would have shouted, for what it’s worth. Very old school.

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