Why is it better not to pick up the phone if they call from an unfamiliar number?

Each of us is faced with a situation when we receive a call from an unknown subscriber on our mobile phone. In such a situation, the question arises whether to pick up the phone or not. The thought immediately comes to mind that this could be an important call, for example, from an old acquaintance, from the company where the resume was submitted, or from the school where the child is studying. At the same time, we understand that this could be simple spam or even telephone scams. What decision should be made in this case?

According to statistics collected in Russia over the past couple of years, up to 70% of incoming calls from unknown numbers are banal spam. The study was conducted by the developers of the Kaspersky Who Calls application, for whom fighting unwanted calls has become their profession.

In the first half of 2021, app users reported 70.4% of calls from unknown numbers as unwanted. The lion's share of these annoying calls are offers from various credit institutions to take out a “profitable loan.” Such calls account for 46.3% of calls. The second place in activity - 27.1% - is occupied by collectors or people who pose as them.

There are other options, for example, telecom operators have been extremely active lately, selling their services to subscribers. Very often they pester you over the phone with all sorts of surveys - about the quality of services, attitudes towards certain brands, and even about political topics.

Unfortunately, scammers also call from unknown numbers. Their activity is growing every year and in 2021 they harassed Russians 17% more often than in 2020. In total, calls from scammers make up 6.2% of all incoming calls from unknown or undetectable numbers. This increase in activity can be associated with prolonged quarantine restrictions, forcing criminals to leave the real world and go online.

Separately, it is worth mentioning dialing numbers in order to collect databases of active subscribers. To perform this task, it is enough to set up automatic dialing and record the moment when the subscriber who picks up the phone says something. This is followed by an immediate reset, since the caller received what he needed - he learned that the number was assigned to the subscriber.

Databases collected in this simple but very annoying way are sold for good money to various organizations, spammers, advertisers and, of course, attackers. By picking up the phone once and saying “Hello,” you can become a target for hundreds of calls that will fall on your phone after the number appears in the database.

In connection with all this, Kaspersky developers believe that the only reasonable choice is to ignore such calls. This option is not suitable for everyone, because some people make money from sales and constantly receive calls from new clients, while others are forced to communicate with strangers at work.

In these cases, you can protect yourself a little using databases of compromised numbers. Such databases are available in many applications that protect against telephone spam, for example, in Kaspersky Who Calls. Or you can actually do it like the Briton Lee Bomo, who learned how to earn income from unwanted calls.