Since 2017 I have been warning you about scammers planting phony customer service numbers online and using those numbers to trick their victims into providing personal information or paying them money.  Scammers construct phony websites that appear to provide a telephone number for customer service or tech support of many of the companies with which we do business.  Often the scammers either purchase an ad to appear at the top of a search engine search or they manipulate the algorithms used by Google and other search engines to make their phony customer service number appear high on a search.  Through the use of AI, these phony websites look very believable.

Now scammers are manipulating AI to have their phony customer service numbers appear in Google’s AI Overviews and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.  People unfortunately believe that AI is totally trustworthy and call those numbers only to be scammed.  AI harvests its information from the Internet and savvy scammers will insert their phony customer service number on online review sites, message boards and numerous websites.  The more places the phony numbers appear, the more likely AI will pick them up and suggest them to you when you do an AI search.

TIPS

The best place to look for a telephone number for customer support or tech support is right on your bill or the legitimate website of the company.     Even when you do call legitimate tech support or customer service telephone numbers take extra care to make sure that you are dialing correctly and not calling a clever scammer who may have purchased a telephone number that is a digit off of the correct phone number in an attempt to ensnare people who may misdial the number.

Also, remember you can’t trust Alexa or Siri to provide you with the correct number because they only access the information appearing at the top of a search engine search.  As I indicated earlier, often those numbers are fake numbers put their by scammers.

If you are not a subscriber to Scamicide.com and would like to receive free daily emails with the Scam of the day, all you need to do is sign up for free using this link. https://scamicide.com/scam-of-the-day/