You might think that phone scams aren’t something you need to worry about. Yes, you may have received weird calls in the past, but you’d never fall for any of them. There’s the IRS scam and free giveaway scams, but it’s pretty evident to you that these are scams. What if you got a different type of call though, one where someone claimed to have kidnapped your loved one. What would you do? The kidnapping phone scam is the latest (and scariest) phone scam happening in the United States.<\/p>\n

What Is The Kidnapping Phone Scam?<\/h2>\n

The kidnapping phone scam targets families. In this scam you will get a call from someone claiming to have your loved one, usually a son or daughter. You may hear screaming in the background and the caller may know personal information like family members’ names and the area that you live in, all this makes their call more believable.<\/p>\n

The caller will demand you wire them money immediately, or your family member will be injured or even worse killed. This is all designed to make you panic.<\/p>\n

The caller will often get the information on you and your family from social media.<\/p>\n

Protecting Yourself From This Scam<\/h2>\n

The best way to protect yourself from this frightening scam is to keep your social media accounts private and only share information with people you know and trust online. Refrain from publishing posts that divulge a lot of information publicly.<\/p>\n

Another thing that you can do to protect yourself is keep a cool head, although this is very difficult to do.<\/p>\n

\n
• Ask the caller personal questions about the person that the person they say they have would only know.<\/li>\n
• Try to get in touch with the person they say they have. While on the phone with the caller try to text the person they say they have or get someone else to call the person that they claim is kidnapped.<\/li>\n
• Contact the police. Though the caller will tell you not to contact authorities, be sure to contact them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

  If you ever get a call like this be sure to call your local authorities immediately. You can also filter your calls that you receive by running them through a white pages iPhone app<\/a>. These apps will help you see if there are any phone scams associated with a certain phone number. There are many option in the App Store and in Google Play so give a few a try!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  You might think that phone scams aren’t something you need to worry about. Yes, you may have received weird calls in the past, but you’d never fall for any of them. There’s the IRS scam and free giveaway scams, but it’s pretty evident to you that these are scams. What if you got a different […more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,2],"tags":[7,6,9,8],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.creativejapan.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.creativejapan.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.creativejapan.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.creativejapan.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.creativejapan.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.creativejapan.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249,"href":"http:\/\/www.creativejapan.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions\/249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.creativejapan.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.creativejapan.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.creativejapan.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}