Making call from Google Assistant or Siri can get you scammed -

For those of you who have a habit of making calls to businesses by using Siri or the Google Assistant, then you might be at risk of falling prey to a new scam.

Phone calls which are made with the help of the Voice Assistants can actually cause people to fell victim to the scammer. These scammers have found a creative way of exploiting the dependence of the mass population on Google Assistant and Siri.

How does the scam works:-

When a person needs to call a business, say an airline, but they do not have the number for making the call, they then go to Siri or Google to call the particular business.

However, instead of this call being made to the business, the voice assistants instead of call the scammers who impersonate to be from the company of the same name. This scammer will then try to trick the person into sending them the money.

How do scammers exploit this feature?

As for how the scam works, it is actually a pretty simple one. These scammers buy a lot of search ads which contain the phone numbers for the false company and then pay for these ads to be featured prominently in the search results.

If a person sees these search results on their own they will see and identify these search results as scams instantly. However, the Voice Assistants are not good at making these distinctions. Voice assistants often give the preference to call the result which is ranking high in the search results.

So when a person asks their voice assistant to make the call to a business, they call the one that has the top search results and this connects a person to the scammer.

How to avoid getting scammed?

The best and the only way for avoiding this problem is to double-check the phone numbers that the voice assistants recommend for calling and only call those numbers which have official sources like form the website of a company.

In case there is a business that a user needs to call frequently, then it is best to save that number and then only ask the voice assistants Google Assistant and Siri to dial those numbers.

And if any phone call that sounds like a scam, then you can simply hang up the phone and try another number. Or better yet, find the number yourself instead of asking Google Assistant or Siri.

Google said that they are doing their best to fight off these scammers and once a scam number is reported they remove it from the web.