Home Fatherhood & Family Protecting Your Kids’ World

Protecting Your Kids’ World

by Bill Sweeney
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scam phone numbersThis is a sponsored post in partnership with T-Mobile, T-Mobile Foundation, and Ashoka. All opinions expressed are my own.

Protecting Your Kids’ World

Kids today are bombarded with spam email, spam social media, and scam phone numbers. This can all simply be spam or worse. Let’s face it, calls from scammer numbers and direct messages via social media are not only annoying, they can be very dangerous too. It’s just a fact of life that we all need to accept and continuously fight.

While I’ve spoken a number of times about protecting your home computers and phones from some dangerous attacks, I haven’t really talked about phone scams on this site. It’s something that literally effects us all, be in on the home phone or the mobile phone. It’s a really wide-reaching and prevalent issues for millions of people that needs to get it’s due attention, especially when it comes to looking out for the well-being of your children. Parenting has never been an easy job, but it seems to be getting more and more difficult, doesn’t it?

What Are Scam Calls

Phone scams are pretty much exactly what it sounds like. They are fake phone calls that look to defraud you and your kids. They come in all shapes and sizes, from the IRS scam to Medicare cons to “free” travel to credit card scams and countless others. These scam phone numbers and calls are difficult to deal with becuase fraudsters are finding more sophisticated ways to trick consumers, using personal information to lure people in to a false sense of security.

These fraud schemes are also very sophisticated operations, costing Americans billions of dollars each and every year. This isn’t exactly like when you and your friends were prank calling people in the phone book!!

Robocalls and Robo-Spam

These phone scams are run by fraudsters. They are often armed with robocalling technology enabling them to target vast numbers of people. Fraudsters can make tens of thousands of calls a minute with the sole purpose of cheating people. They even can spoof numbers that make it seem like they are calling locally, even from a number that you may already know!

The numbers are staggering. Experts say that nearly half of all mobile calls this year will be robo-spam. Robocall spam has skyrocketed to affect an estimated 5.1 billion people in October of 2018!! That’s an average of 7.1 million calls per hour or 2000 robocalls happening every second. That’s just incredible. Half of calls this year are projected to be robo-spam, and in the last twelve months, Americans have been scammed out of over $10 billion. It’s bad enough to get an unwanted sales call, but the meteoric rise in fraud is truly troubling.

scammer numbersWhat Can Be Done To Fight This

First, you have to be aware of all of the scams going around. Then, you need to be sure to tell everyone you know about it, especially your kids and the elderly. These age groups tend to be the most affected by these scams. Make them aware that such scams exist and to never, ever offer any type of personal information to anyone over the phone. Quickly hang up and block the scammer numbers right away!

As a parent, this simply needs to be a part of what you teach your kids. It’s as easy as that. You need to explain this scams (and others) to them just as you would tell them to study hard, eat healthy foods, look before you cross the street, and be nice to others. Finally, we should use technology to our advantage.  There are continuous advancements in helping the public guard against this fraud and you need to be aware and take advantage of them.

T-Mobile Helps Protect It’s Customers

A few years ago, I switched my mobile phone carrier to T-Mobile for a number of reasons. I’m happy to say that one reason was because T-Mobile always seems like they are hear to help and deliver the best customer service possible. That includes fighting phone scams and robocalls. There are a number of free solutions T-Mobile offers it’s customers to help put an end dreaded robocalls for you and your family. And the verdict seems to be that it really works. The amount of scam calls I see if far less than it was previously, and almost infinitely less than what I see on a daily basis on my landline!

scam phone numbers

What Does T-Mobile Do To Help?

T-Mobile is called the Un-carrier for good reason. It’s pretty simple for me. Along with great service at a fantastic value, they really go above and beyond to offer the best service. How do I know this? Well, how about the fact that T-Mobile gives it’s customers free scam warnings! That’s with no opt-in, no subscription and no app required. Most others in the wireless industry make you get an app (which only protects those customers that have downloaded the app)! That’s a huge deal for me.

Top Technology to Block Scam Phone Numbers

In 2017, T-Mobile introduced technologies to protect T-Mobile and Metro customers from phone scams with Scam ID and Scam Block. This advanced scam protection is built into the network to keep customers safe from scammers. Patent-pending technology analyzes every call on the T-Mobile network – in milliseconds – for 24/7 protection. Machine learning and AI to analyze call behavior on the network, not just check against a database, and update every 6 minutes. This constant update, analysis and scale of protection is not possible in an app

With Scam Block, scam calls are stopped on the network level, before they ever reach the phone. No alert of a Scam Likely call, they just disappear completely. Scam ID automatically alerts customers when an incoming call is likely a scam – designating the call as “Scam Likely”. It feels good to decline those spammers.

Because T-Mobile analyzes call behavior, as part of Scam ID, T-Mobile also give customers protection from number spoofing. Spoofed calls on the network will show up on Caller ID screens as “Scam Likely.”

There’s also something called NAME ID app which gives customers additional controls over incoming calls. You can see all the calls that Scam Block is stopping. You can also block and unblock callers from your call log. Customers can even manage entire categories of calls such as Telemarketers, Political Surveys and Charity Solicitations!! I mean, you can even reverse look up calls from unknown numbers (even if they aren’t in your address book!). Name ID is included in the T-Mobile Magenta Plus Plans, or can be included for other customers for $4/month.

scammer numbersGetting Results

With the industry’s best engineers using advanced machine learning and AI to update the entire network every 4-6 minutes, only T-Mobile is providing next generation protection, and in a way that an app could never hope to deliver. As of July, 2019, The Un-carrier’s industry-leading technology has now blocked 3.5 billion scam calls and warned customers of 15 billion ‘Scam Likely’ calls.  The Un-carrier is now warning customers about one billion ‘Scam Likely’ calls a month – or 23,000 every minute! And scammers aren’t slowing down.

Find Out More and Join The Twitter Chat

I love that my mobile service is so Un-Carrier that it does all of this to help me and my family be a but more at peace. The move to T-Mobile just keeps getting better and better! If blocking scam phone call fraud is important to you, be sure to find out all about what T-Mobile offers it’s customers in Mobile Security and more by visiting them on Facebook, Twitter, and at Tmobile.com!

Be sure to search and share on social media with hashtag #TMOScamBlock as well!! This coming Thursday night, 10/17, there will be a really great Twitter Chat from 9PM-10PM ET!!

This post is sponsored by T-Mobile.

Protecting Your Kids’ World was last modified: October 15th, 2019 by Bill Sweeney

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11 comments

Emman Damian October 16, 2019 - 4:59 AM

You guys look so cute! I hope I can try this ScamBlock feature! Seems very helpful!

Reply
Colleen October 16, 2019 - 5:50 AM

I LOVE that feature! My husband and I have both been getting a ton of spam calls on our phones over the past several months. I guess the days of our cell phones being safe from robo/sales calls are well and truly over. I love that T-Mobile helps fight against them.

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Emily Zielinski October 16, 2019 - 8:28 AM

Good post, I get inundated with spam calls from all over the world! The good thing is that I have everyones number stored in my phone that i want to talk to so anyone else that rings I dont answer!

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Roger Willis October 16, 2019 - 8:39 AM

The ScamBlock feature is something we can use on our plan. While our caller ID will come up as “Spam Risk” or “Telemarketer”, we could use all the help weeding out the rest of the garbage calls.

Reply
Brianne Tursi Manz October 16, 2019 - 7:26 PM

Spam calls and emails are the worst! I agree that we need to use tech to our advantage to get rid of these, not only for us, but for kids and the elderly too!

Reply
joy October 17, 2019 - 12:33 AM

i love T-Mobile! That’s so great about the scam warnings. Really appreciate all the things they do that other companies don’t seem to care about.

Joy at The Joyous Living

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Ntensibe Edgar Michael October 17, 2019 - 3:51 AM

You know, this is a good thing but then, won’t I lose out some calls simply because the phone has tagged them as spam?

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WanderlustBeautyDreams October 17, 2019 - 10:08 AM

This is such a good thing to point out. It’s so important to be aware of any kind of scam especially those robo calls. Thanks for sharing.

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Tiffany La Forge-Grau October 17, 2019 - 1:48 PM

It is a pretty wild world out there anymore. The kids need to be prepared to handle it when the time comes.

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katrina Kroeplin October 17, 2019 - 9:34 PM

i love the new feature that they have now. robo calls are horrible. i get so many a day and i don’t answer the phone unless i know the number.

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Melanie williams October 18, 2019 - 9:25 AM

In this day and age protecting kids is becoming more of a challenge. Anything that helps is welcomed x

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