Sunday, February 8, 2015

Google - please collect caller id's of fraudulent callers because the banks won't

The cumulative time  I must have spent even on blindly clicking that I know that the bank does not ever ask for pin numbers or passwords must have crossed a working day. Yesterday, I got an idiotic call from my 'bank' regarding my 'atm' card. I wanted to report the number for further action by 'someone' and didn't after recalling my previous experiences.

I had received a call offering me a 'bonus' for an insurance policy as the company had made an excessive profit. I decided to send the details to the insurance company. I got a prompt response that as I knew, these were fraudulent calls and not to give them any information.

But that was not the reason I had informed the insurance company. I was hoping that the insurance company could initiate action against the crooks using the phone number. After all, what is purpose for all the documentation the government insists on before a telephone number can be allotted and used.

Since the insurance company was not interested, I located the service provider to whom the phone belonged but they were not interested either as my number was not from their company. On second thought, such calls may even contribute a significant sum to their revenues.

Google makes it so easy to report phishing attempts on emails. For calls,  the only data that is needed is the caller id and whether spam or phishing. No one need look at this data. A monitoring program can raise alerts as and when a statistically significant event occurs.

So, I can't understand that while the banks make so much effort to tell their account holders not to respond to phishing attempts, they are yet to make any effort to collect the caller id data and then use the data to stop the fraudsters before they can cause any damage.

May be Google will find a way to collect this data and monetize it and I can have the satisfaction of doing my neighbourly duty of reporting a phishing attempt. 


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