All you have to do is take part in a fake competition once and give out your details and the phone will start ringing.

We repeatedly warn against fake competitions on Facebook. The process is always the same: you have to like, share and comment on a post. Shortly afterwards you will receive a PM congratulating you on being on the shortlist, all you have to do is enter your details on an external site. Problem: There is probably no winnings, but telephone fraudsters now have this data!

Entire call centers are busy with this!

The data received is then sold on, the customers are usually dubious call centers. These always proceed in the same way:
The user is called and receives the general message that they have taken part in “several competitions in retail stores or on the Internet in the last few weeks”.

Since everyone has taken part in a competition at some point, whether legitimate or not, this statement from telephone scammers is often answered in the affirmative, without further investigation as to which competition exactly one would have won.

Valuable price, but…

Next comes the big promise that you have already won at least 1,000 euros. In order to finance this competition and qualify for the final round, where you can then win a trip or a car, you have to take out a magazine subscription. This cannot be done in writing, but must be done immediately over the phone, including giving the bank details to a complete stranger.

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Why not just have fun with it?

Of course, the easiest method is to just hang up. However, these call centers will keep calling. So why not just have a little fun with them? Not only can you be amused by the growing impatience of the telephone scammers, this may also have a pleasant side effect: you will be removed from the database as an “annoying customer” who only wastes your time.

Klaas Heufer-Umlauf shows how you can happily stop such telephone scammers using several examples:

What's nice to hear from the different callers is that almost always the same congratulatory text was recited.
As a little help, there is also a conversation guide from “Late Night Berlin ”: download it, print it out, put it next to your phone!

Another method is offered by the counter script from the EGBG Data Control Group, which you can also download and print out , because here you turn the tables: annoying telephone fraudsters are forced into a counter survey!

Conclusion

Telephone scammers somehow got their hands on personal information. It's not nice, but if you're going to keep getting called by these people anyway, you might as well have fun with it if you have a little time... because every minute you waste their time is a minute that saves someone else from it!

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Notes:
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