Why Do Scammers Ask For Your Phone Number

January 23, 2020October 15, 2021 Doris Jensen

Scamming is a scheme of fraud conducted by any individual or a group of people to deceive people and get something valuable out of them. This valuable thing can be money, any valuable personal information which may include bank information too. The traditional way of scamming is misrepresenting oneself as a person who has high authority and skill.

Do You Know Why Scammers Want Your Phone Number?

In this era where the internet has become part and parcel of our lives, scamming can be easily done through a very medium called email. These emails can be in any form such as lottery scams, requests for information scams, baiting scams and many more. One of the popular scams these days are on the dating websites where the scammers take advantage of innocent people by deceiving them and establishing relationships and then obtaining valuable information from them.

Reasons: There are many reasons why scammers ask for your phone numbers. Some of the reasons are discussed below;

Do You Know Why Scammers Want Your Phone Number ? — Do You Know Why Scammers Want Your Phone Number?

Tracking Your Identity

The first and the most common reason for asking for your phone number by a scammer is that they can track your true identity by your phone number as our phone numbers are fed in the databases of the telecommunication companies. By tracking down your identity, they can easily use your identity to perform any criminal or illegal activities.

Hack Your Social Media

Another reason is that they can easily hack your social media accounts such as Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, etc as our accounts are accessible through our phone numbers.

Get Access To Your Bank Account

They can easily access our bank accounts via obtaining our phone numbers and can perform banking transactions and can also change the passwords too.

Track You Address

By obtaining our phone numbers, they can easily track down our registered address of residence. This can create severe security issues for us.

BlackMail You

As they can access our true identity by our phone numbers, they can easily threaten us and can ask for ransom in return.

Track Your Current/Live Location

By obtaining your phone numbers, they can easily track down your present location. This can cause serious trouble as they can follow you where ever you are going.

Share Your Number And Information With Third Parties

Scammers can also share your information with other professionals in return for other benefits. Although the cost of the benefits is quite low as compared to the level of crime they commit by forwarding personal data to others.

Conclusion

Scamming is very common these days and is inevitable but there are many ways to protect ourselves. The first and foremost thing we need to realize is that we should never exchange our phone numbers with strangers. You should always be vigilant and give your contact number to only those who are known and close to you. You should always report any suspicious activity in the form of calls immediately to the authorized personnel to save yourself and others from scams. This is the only way to protect our data and information from scammers and being misused by them.