Telephone: Federal Network Agency: number abuse is declining

2023-07-23 10:18:44

Telephone Federal Network Agency: phone number abuse is declining

Deceptive messages like these are sent again and again. photo

© Sebastian Gollnow/dpa

Complaints about annoying calls at inconvenient times or the like are received less frequently by the Federal Network Agency. However, one particular scammer scam is still booming.

Criminal short messages from grandchildren tricksters, unsolicited advertising faxes or harassing calls: in the first half of the year, consumers contacted the Federal Network Agency complained about phone number abuse.

The number of complaints has almost halved within a year, as the supervisory authority reported on Sunday. The decline can be explained, among other things, by new legal regulations, which no longer allow German telephone numbers to be displayed in the case of dubious calls from abroad to the fixed network, it said.

Grandchild trick scam particularly common

According to the Federal Network Agency, there were particularly many complaints recently because of the so-called grandchild trick. Consumers receive short messages from scammers that appear to have been sent by a relative of the recipient – usually their children or grandchildren – who recently had a new mobile phone number.

In the short messages, the recipients are asked to transfer sometimes large sums of money immediately in order to help the senders out of a current emergency. The Federal Network Agency has already ordered numerous call number deactivations in connection with the grandchild trick, it said in Bonn. The police authorities were also informed.

There were also numerous complaints about harassing calls, for example at inconvenient times and about calls where nobody answered the other end of the line or the connection was lost immediately.

To combat abuse, the Federal Network Agency switched off 7,207 telephone numbers between January and June. A so-called invoicing and collection ban was issued for 928 telephone numbers so that consumers could not be debited or billed for any unauthorized costs.

dpa