A new study predicts 2019 will see 40 billion mobile phone calls, but they also expect about half of those to be from scammers. Tech company First Orion recently announced scammers are picking up efforts in their 2018 Scam Call Trends and Projections Report. Topeka resident Randy Austin said over the years he’s received more and more spam calls.

Many of us are already conditioned to ignore phone calls from unknown numbers. A new study seems to validate that M.O. By next year, nearly half of the mobile phone calls we get will be scams, according to a new report from First Orion, a company that provides calls management and protection for T-Mobile, MetroPCs, Virgin Mobile and others.

The homeless veteran who won millions of hearts last year when he used his last $20 to buy a woman gas is back on the streets despite having $400,000 pledged to him because the woman and her boyfriend are keeping the money from him. Johnny Bobbitt made headlines around the world in November after he used his last money on gas for New Jersey woman Kate McClure.

U.S. authorities have sentenced 21 people in connection with an India-based call centre scam that bilked Americans of hundreds of millions of dollars. Defendants were given sentences ranging from fines and probationary sentences to 20 years in prison, in what U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called “the first-ever large-scale, multi-jurisdiction prosecution targeting the India call centre scam industry.”

Russia is a nuclear power. But an economic power it is not. Last year, the country’s GDP totaled around $1.6 trillion, less than that of the state of Texas. Nor is its wealth growing: Russia’s GDP in 2017 was smaller than it was in 2013, adjusting for price changes. And yet there’s no question of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s international influence. Witness his ability to hack bigger, richer countries’ democratic elections, or, as this week’s Helsinki summit highlighted, to cow Donald Trump.

The next time you use Uber, check your bill. The trip could turn out to be very expensive, not just for the distance but for a type of fraud that is on the increase.

With stiff sentences for 21 conspirators last week in the United States and a round of indictments in India, the Justice Department says it has broken up what appeared to be the nation’s first large-scale, multinational telephone fraud operation. Over four years, more than 15,000 victims in the United States lost “hundreds of millions” of dollars to the sophisticated scam, and more than 50,000 individuals had their personal information misused, the department said Friday.

Sicilian gangs persuaded drug addicts, alcoholics and people with mental health issues to have their limbs broken and then staged fake car accidents to get hundreds of thousands of euros as insurance payouts, according to police, who have broken up the scam.

Last month, a South Korean company known as the Shinil Group announced it had discovered the wreckage of a 100-year old Russian warship, which the company said held 200 tons of gold bullion worth roughly $130 billion USD. Now, South Korean police are investigating the company on the suspicion that the story of sunken treasure was an elaborate cryptocurrency scam.

All traces of Shinil Group are vanishing from the internet.

Divyesh Darji, the head of BitConnect in India, was detained this week at Delhi airport in India. Pertaining to a major cheating case where Darji and other conspirators are accused to wiped off millions of dollars from investors, Darji was arrested by Gujarat Criminal Investigation Department (CID) at the airport soon after his arrival from Dubai.

Be careful when you use your debit or credit card for gas. See how thieves have been skimming gas stations and stealing your information.

Mugshot websites are all still accepting payments on those credit cards a week after credit card companies promised to cut ties.

Peter Clatworthy was searching in vain for a limited-edition Xbox One for his 4-year-old son. So, like many people do as the holidays approach, he found one on eBay for £450, or $734. But when the package arrived, Clatworthy found no Xbox inside—just a picture of a the gaming console.

A TEENAGER has been left fuming after mistakenly buying a photo of an in-demand computer console online. Peter Clatworthy thought he had paid £450 for an XBox One console on eBay, but actually...

Kirsty Cox, from Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, took thousands of orders for the tablet computers between March and December 2012 after claiming she could source them at a reduced price. Teesside Crown Court heard how the 37-year-old was paid for the devices but could not provide them. Cox, who previously admitted four fraud charges, was jailed for two years.

Be on the lookout for a recent $9.84 charge on your debit or credit card. It might be part of a massive, worldwide scam. Thieves are using stolen payment cards to make small charges that could easily go unnoticed. The charges are attributed to generic-looking websites such as EETsac.com, CEWcs.com and EduAcc.in, which claim to offer customer support services.

A scam that repeats itself in modified forms every few years is once again spreading throughout the United Sates. Don’t be a victim! Criminals target people simply by calling them. Intended victims receive a call on their phones from area code 473 which rings once and then disconnects, thereby arousing the call-recipient’s natural curiosity – “who just called me and from where?”

Interview with the Secret Service agent that infiltrated one of the world's biggest credit card hacking rings.

A group of con artists allegedly ran a boiler room telemarketing scam, convincing 70 investors to fork over $1.7 million to fund a film supposedly set in Paris during WWII and starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.

After the opening ceremony, the Olympics were one long ungroomed trail for Gary di Silvestri and Angelica Morrone, the most-publicized husband-and-wife carpetbagging oldies act in cross-country-skiing history.

Netflix subscribers beware: There’s a scheme floating around the Internet that you should watch out for. If you’re not careful, you could end up about $400 poorer and with a stolen identity.

Criminals masquerading as Internal Revenue Service agents have bilked more than $1 million from thousands of taxpayers in the largest such phone scam the IRS has seen, the agency's watchdog said Thursday. J. Russell George, Treasury inspector general for tax administration, said more than 20,000 taxpayers have been targeted by bogus tax agents who claim victims owe taxes and demand they pay with a prepaid debit card or by wire transfer.

A couple years ago, the comments on my blog started to become overrun with spam, as I'm sure everyone with a blog can relate to. The email alerts were incessant. I had to turn them off, and I stopped paying attention to whether anyone commented altogether. I was essentially run out of my own blog by SEO scoundrels who were trying to game the system by seeding blogs everywhere with links to their shitty sites.

Security is an important factor when it comes to technology, and in most cases you can never have too much. In 2014, our smartphones know more about us than we know about ourselves, and if malware were to creep onto our smartphones then we could potentially suffer some major consequences. As a result, like any reasonable person, we would look to secure our device. This is what Deviant Solutions, the creator of the current #1 Play Store app, decided to capitalize on.

Forty-one people in Philadelphia are facing charges in what prosecutors call an elaborate insurance fraud scheme that used dead deer to fake car accidents. Ronald Galati Sr. is accused of running a $5 million US scam out of his auto body shop.

On Monday, a protest took place outside the General Attorney’s Office in Caracas, Venezuela — like the latest student protests, but this one was different. Those who attended and shouted for hours in front of the government building were victims of one of the biggest scams in the country.

Oh, Dr. Oz. Surely you sorta knew this was coming? The Oprah protégé with the popular daytime show, whose full name is Mehmet Oz, has been criticized in the past for hyping “miracle” weight loss cures on his show, and yesterday, the TV doc got his comeuppance. Oz was harshly criticized at a Senate consumer protection hearing that followed up on the Federal Trade Commission’s $34 million January lawsuit targeting companies that sell bogus diet products.

I recently wrote an open letter to the San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Authority on what I believe to be a “scam” they’ve engaged in by operating with an F-graded BBB collection agency organization that issues collections notices, demanding money for parking citations from people who’ve never actually been to San Francisco. Ridiculous. They currently have 33 complaints on file, with 12 unresolved. I believe this is part of the city’s business model to increase revenue by targeting people who

Last summer, a dozen people, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, crowded into a living room in Aldan, Pennsylvania, a small working-class suburb outs

The son of a bank robber and sister of a psychopath explains how he found his own calling scamming a litany of unsuspecting suckers.

The Secret Service estimates more than 1,000 businesses have been affected by the same kind of cyberattack that scraped Target's cash register system for consumer credit card information, the Department of Homeland Security said in an advisory Friday afternoon.

The constant drive for miniaturization doesn't just apply to consumer electronics: the crooks are at it, too. And when it comes to card skimmers, this tiny thing is pretty much impossible to spot.

Every day, phones are ringing in homes across the country. Maybe yours. On the line: organized teams of con artists trying to bilk you out of thousands of dollars by impersonating your loved ones. One especially lucrative scam targets the supposedly vulnerable demographic of grandparents. A journalist and grandmother sets out to discover who’s calling—and the real reason why the “grandparent scam” works so damn well.

Those phone scammers called back again for round 2.