It’s certainly not vhat vampires do on a star. Sadly, it’s yet another scam. If you’ve received a call that says the warranty might be up on your car, you’re the recipient of a vishing attempt. Vishing is short for “voice phishing,” and it works just like the online version. It’s a social engineering technique designed to get you to fork over money for a supposed benefit of some sort. According to an article by Marguerite Reardon in CNET today, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has filed lawsuits against two telemarketing firms and another company offering car warranties. Reardon said the organizations collected more than $10 billion after making 1 billion calls since 2007.

Reardon’s article said that these vishers use caller ID spoofing to hide their identities. That means that if you looked at your caller ID, you’d see what appears to be a legitimate number. If you answered it, you’d hear the scammers’ recorded message telling you to call a toll-free number that, if you called, would ask you for personal information and try to sell you a $2,000 – $3,000 warranty for your car.

Although I haven’t gotten any of these calls that I know of, I did get a “your car warranty may be out of date” letter in the mail. I’m guessing that’s the same group running these scams. Would phishing over snail mail be “mishing”?

Anyhow, Reardon said that voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) calls make it easier than before to spoof caller ID information because there’s no hard-wired circuit. In fact, the number is assigned by the user. If you’ve signed up for a Skype account, you know that you have your choice of area codes that you can use. On a grander scale, these technologies can be used for spoofing. Reardon said that one of the telemarketers in the FTC allegedly bragged that he could call everyone in the United States without getting caught on the Do Not Call list.

Hint: Bragging about your ability to evade the law is probably not going to help your case.

Reardon offers a number of tips on what to do if you suspect something fishy (or vishy) is up. Read her article for more details, but in short, don’t trust your caller ID, and if something seems weird, get information from the caller and check them out thoroughly before giving out your personal information.

You can steal a look at some more information on scams in these articles:

How Phishing Works
How Identity Theft Works
How does Caller ID work?