If you receive a phone call from ‘Fraud Risk’ (i.e. the caller I.D. says “Fraud Risk”) don’t answer it! You may be tempted because you may assume that it’s from one of the services that banks and credit unions use to let you know when your credit card has been compromised, but it’s not! It’s a scam call trying to defraud you.
We wrote a few months ago about AT&T’s new service which will alert you when an incoming call is a telemarketer or a spam risk. And they have also been doing this for calls that they detect to be fraud risks. And they do this by displaying “AT&T Alert: Fraud Risk” where the caller I.D. would otherwise display.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5FdLI_xRLE
HOWEVER! A new round of calls is coming through displaying not “AT&T Alert: Fraud Risk”, but simply “Fraud Risk”.
So you can see how people might be confused, and how they might even think that it’s a call about a risk of fraud based on a credit card or debit card being compromised, especially with the recent Capital One credit data breach affecting over 100 million individuals.
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It’s unclear whether this is a goof by AT&T in no longer including the “AT&T Alert:” when they are trying to alert you to a phone call that is a fraud risk, or whether this is someone spoofing their caller I.D. (very easy to do) so that it reads “Fraud Risk” in an effort to lead you to think that it’s a fraud risk department calling you about a credit card being compromised.
We suspect that it could be a mixture of both, and it almost really doesn’t matter which it is: the fact is that it is leading people to believe that some security agency or office is calling them to alert them to a fraud risk they are facing. To the extent that some of these calls may be AT&T or your non-AT&T carrier attempting to alert you to the fact that the call may be a fraud risk, it’s a massive fail.
Yet, it leaves us with one very clear rule:
If you get a call with a caller I.D. that includes the words “fraud risk”, whether or not there are other words in there, such as ‘AT&T Alert’ or the like, don’t answer it. If it’s a legitimate call (very unlikely, but still) they will leave you a voicemail. And even then, don’t call the number left in the voicemail, because odds are good that it’s still a scam. Instead, call your bank or credit card issuer, or whomever the call claims to represent, directly and ask them if there is a problem.
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