No, you are not the only one who receives one (or more than one) call every day from numbers you don’t recognize and that, indeed, are fraudulent. Cybercriminals find ways to call us and, in the worst cases, scam us. However, before you pick up, you can enter the phone number on the internet and find out who it is, so you can avoid answering the call if you discover it’s spam.
With these simple methods that we list below, you can quickly see whether the person calling you right now is a real company or if other users have flagged it as a typical scam (or even one of those where you pick up and no one answers).
How to know who is calling you by entering their phone number
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Search Google with the number in quotation marks.
One trick is to enter the phone number directly into Google search, but always in quotation marks so the search is exact and doesn’t return results for similar numbers.
So, for example, if you receive a call from the number 931202168, the ideal search would be: “931202168”. Because sometimes we’ve found that results led to numbers that were similar (with a different final digit, with one of the middle digits changed…). So it’s always recommended to search in quotation marks, since that tells Google you only want results that contain exactly that information as you wrote it between the quotes.
Many websites collect information about phone numbers and if it is suspicious, you will likely find information that clears up your doubts in the top search results.
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Check specialized websites
Another way to go straight to the point is to rely on websites that compile these phone numbers. They won’t tell you the owner’s name, but they will give you enough information to draw conclusions.
One of the most used is Lista Spam, which thanks to its huge database (and especially its users), allows us to quickly discover if a call is spam before answering the phone.
Simply enter the suspicious number in its search bar and click “Search”.
It will return some data such as the number of queries that number has had on the website (if there are many, you can imagine that it has called other people besides you) as well as the reports it has received. Note that these are not legal reports, but comments other users have left and marked as dangerous.
Because, as we said before, that’s the key to that website: the users. Thanks to users’ comments, you can see whether the number you’re checking is trustworthy or not. Sometimes you’ll find that it’s a fraudulent call, and at other times you can confirm whether it’s from the Post Office, your hospital/insurance, a carrier, etc.
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