I put my number in a secure form for a trusted bank and immediately got spammed

Thatoneguy@sh.itjust.works to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 487 points –

Area code blocked for privacy but it is spoofed from my phones number which I have not lived there in many years

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Smart, I wouldn’t want anyone to know I lived in Michigan either

I really don't understand lazy censoring. You can either not use the thin pen tool or just spend a few more seconds making sure it's unreadable. What's the point of doing it at all if people can still decipher what you're obscuring?

Honestly I didn't try that hard. I don't live there anymore nor do I know anyone or anything that is still there so who cares if people know I guess

I agree with the other reply and would honestly love an answer, if only to get a peek under the hood of people who do this.

If you didn't try that hard because you didn't care, again, why did you even bother? It's like trying to scoop water with a colander, on some level you have to know it's wasted effort, right?

its more than likely "it can't hurt, so might as well" more than anything.

If they really didnt want it, they wouldn't have posted this at all, or like other suggested properly censored it, they simply tried here, deemed "most people won't bother" and moved on from it.

I you know it because you are most probably from there or US.

No, it's because of how poorly obscured it is in the 5th one from the top in particular - there's no other numbers it could be.

Exactly, I was surprised that 989 was even a valid area code tbh, just doesn’t look right

In general I think best practice is to call out “hey, I can see your area code in case you want to edit your post to more fully redact it” then any jokes about “since I wouldn’t want anyone to know I lived in [REDACTED] either!”

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You might want to consider a more thorough wiping of your area code next time. It's pretty easy to figure out what it is through the scribbles

Tip: Always write over things you don't want seen in the same color they were originally written in, if you can't completely redact it. This fucks with our brain's ability to distinguish a pattern, which is all reading really is anyway.

or, you know, just put a black bar over it so the information is just completely gone from the image?

scribbling over is never going to actually work, the information is still there for anyone who wants to extract it. It's like shouting over someone instead of just getting them to shut up.

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Good on you for calling your Mom.

There is one more person whom the OP seriously censored. More than their area codes

I assumed that was their actual phone number. They received a spoofed call from themselves.

Happened to my wife once. Her own number showed up on her caller ID.

Looks like you got phished. Doubt that was the real bank site. Suggest you change your passwords if you logged in to that site, too.

Banks and hospitals sell your information, too.

When my wife gave birth to our son at the hospital, I have to put down my phone number as part of the check in form. Immediately the next day I got call for "Home care services for new mom and baby".

...hospitals sell your information, too.

I feel so sorry for those of you living in places with for-profit healthcare.

Oh totally. But they don't sync that information "immediately". Nor would they ever want to because then the user would know that's where the information came from.

I don't think they really care if it's not actually illegal.

Or they could sell the data in bulk. And the day I put in my number just happens to be the day they sell their database.

I guess it depends on what OP meant by "immediately". If they meant the same day, maybe. If they meant within seconds or a few minutes, which is what I interpreted it as, then probably not. It takes time to transfer data out of a secure network, unless they gave the company direct access to a feed from the website, which would be really risky for a bank to give any organization a direct, real-time feed of any kind that is on the same network as financial data. I mean unless the bank also owned the spamming company, but that seems risky for reputation.

...hospitals sell your information, too.

I feel so sorry for those of you living in places with for-profit healthcare.

Either that or you’ve got some malware.

Are you 100% sure it was a form from a bank?
Everything stinks of a scammers phishing form, leading to scammer calls.

I expect the only time a bank is going to want your phone number is when you initially sign up with them. After that, they should know who you are and your contact details.

I almost got caught out by a "sorry we missed you" delivery message, until it was asking for my date of birth.
Some of these random emails and SMS can catch you off-guard and seem legit

No this was legit. This was a mortgage inquiry form on their website and one of their lone officers called me soon after

I also got a million spam calls after applying for a mortgage with a trusted bank a couple years ago. I suspect that the banks sell your information to mortgage brokers. I'd be curious to see the privacy policy on the form you submitted.

I took out a loan, but the service request was in my partner's name. It's my phone, but now I'm getting crazy crypto spam WhatsApp stuff in her name, along with home security spam and other spam I never got before. Since it's coming to my phone, in their name, either or both companies sold me / us out and we were getting calls within days.

We had a zoom call with a very well reviewed, recommended broker local to us. Next day I get a spam call pretending to be the bank we talked about the most as a lender, but that we currently have no business with. My paranoia has been at 100% ever since

It's not paranoia if they really are trying to kill scam you.

IMHO you probably now have the right amount of scepticism.

Banks' system are probably already compromised and don't even know it.

Can't wait to get $10 and six months of credit monitoring from a random settlement in 5-10 years

I had an employer that uses Santander for pension, within a day of them adding my info into Santanders systems my email that has never gotten spam before in over 10 years (custom domain, only every used for government stuff or employment stuff) got 20-30 spam emails. It keeps getting 10 or so a day since then.

Big banks WILL sell your info.

My kids complain about Mom spam too.

When, Today?

Yesterday. They like to remind me that Mom on a keypad is 666.

Ahhh... Just noticed that was you calling your mom, not your mom calling you. Good job!

Start answering. Use a heavy accent in whatever you can do. Agree with them and go along, keep working up the ladder. Then give one of the higher ups the most schizo sexual nonsense you can come up with.

Never answer, the scammers sell data to each other. As soon as you answer, they know they've got a live number and the number of calls will multiply.

Also there's millions of them, pissing off a couple doesn't really do anything.

I think the scam calls are annoying, but it takes basically no effort to ignore them when I'm not in the mood to mess with them, so I don't mind them so much.

I figure though if I can keep one tied up talking to me for a few minutes that's one less chance for them to be scamming someone's grandmother. It's a tiny drop in the ocean, but it's still potentially one less person getting scammed that day, and that's worth something.

Set your voicemail to the pickup of a fax machine.

Yes and no, if you scambait hard enough your number can eventually be added to a blacklist for larger scam organisations that bought your data for use in multiple scam attempts.

In my experience that has really cut down on the calls.

In 2020 the department of human services accidentally posted my personal phone number on a list of support services for people experiencing housing or food insecurity. This number was then circulated by every major news source in my state. I couldn't change my number at the time because I had no legal ID (still don't... Can't figure out how to get ID without ID, but I have a new number now at least) at first I didn't really notice the ratio of spam calls to genuine calls for the wrong number (ie, people calling my number because they needed housing/food) . I just remember getting 40+ calls a day at many stages.

But as the actual number for the food relief service was circulated, I eventually stopped getting genuine calls and I was getting 3-5 scam calls every single day.

After a year of scam baiting, I was getting 2 a week.

Now, I'll do something online that requires sharing my current number, within a few hours I get a scam call because my data has been sold, but I bait the heck out of that first call and I usually don't receive any further calls which suggest my number was blacklisted by a larger scam organisation, and I won't be hassled until my data is sold again as a new item.

It's hard to avoid getting your number on scam lists when the largest health insurance company, and the second largest telecommunications company in my country both had major data breaches where millions of customers identifying information was accessed and sold to scammers....

Go to your DMV with your birth certificate, social security card, and a utility bill with your name and proof of address for a replacement id.

I just hope they actually have their social security card. A quick googling told me that you need a current ID to get the social security administration to issue a replacement card. Talk about a vicious cycle!

Lol, yeah, just cuz you answered means good data. I'm sure they love wasting time and money on known scambaiters. I get maybe 1 scam call every other month for the last 5+ years from US scammers. Zero Indians after I told that one guy a decade ago I was uploading him to YouTube. But you do you. I'm just going to keep enjoying not getting spam calls.

For bank stuff and government documents I use a prepaid number I got on ebay on an old flip phone I remove the battery from.

Cool story

Think they’re offering a privacy(“”) tip:

Spend ~$50/yr to avoid spam calls.

Less if FreedomPop works. $0 if Google Voice works & if Alphabet products are acceptable.

Same happened to me when I signed up with a mobile carrier

You really need to tell Mom to stop spamming you.

I get the same crap from doctor visits out here. Guess the assistants arent paid enough to properly police their bosses systems

Lucky. All I ate BS recruiter spam. I have no idea why; I've been disabled for years

What?! That's impossible! Banks are credible, reliable, trustworthy! Cryptocurrencies, those are the baddies.