They can be targeted. A group was monitoring my social media and targeted my grandparents for money with specific information.
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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I guess nowadays you don't even need to be monitored like that anymore. Just feed a social media profile into chatgpt and have it summarise vulnerable attack vectors.
Maybe not chatgpt but a local model would happily do that.
There's huge outfits of scammers.
They buy data. Phone numbers, emails, sometimes passwords etc.
They phish, they smish, they vish.
When a fish ends up on line they try to reel em in
I was targeted because my personal information was leaked by a bunch of Bitcoin exchanges that ended up being shady and going out of business (between 2012-2016). It got to the point that I just bought a new phone number and the calls went away.
They might target, but sometimes they buy information too.
For example, my wife and I use Visible. It's Verizon but cheaper (and it's owned by Verizon). They also sell your number to scammers. So we get a lot of scam calls and voicemails. We just ignore them. Reporting them does nothing because the carrier is who you report them to (on an iPhone) and the carrier is the one that sends them. But I do it anyway. Most of them come in when I'm at work (and without my phone) anyway. So yeah, so they know who we are (name, town we live in). We just don't engage with them.
Look up Kitbogas channel on youtube. He does scam baiting, if you watch a couple of his videos, you'll see some of their approaches
They most likely have automated systems to call ranges of phone numbers. Or the random person call them believing that the scammer is actually a legitimate service. If you Google “my computer has virus”, you will find plenty of fake “Microsoft support “ numbers to call.
They only get all the info when they “verify” the info and the victim willingly provides the info. They create a convincing story whether a risk that they claim to be able to mitigate if the victim cooperates, or they fake a prize that requires a certain action to obtain.
Very automated. I've been having regular calls for a while now from all sorts of different state area codes, same exact script about a loan offer almost complete and just lacking some income info. I let any unknown number go to voice mail, and find it entertaining to see which AI voice I get this time. For a while there it was a friendly woman that had a convincing tone, but the one guy's voice they tried sounded like he needed a vacation and was over his job.
Can't you get a lot of people's names by looking up their number on WhatsApp?
I kinda don't understand the question.
There's a lot of different phone scams.
Some of them just try to get you to pay them with itunes gift cards and what not. They don't need any information.
They don't pick a single random person. They call 1,000s of people to find one who's susceptible to their grift.
OP is trying to do a side hustle and would like lemmy to come up with the details about how to do it (j/k) 😅
It’s really depends on the scam, but some of them really do pick a random person. Or, rather the autodialer/autotexter that they are using does. I’ve gotten several scam texts in the last week fishing for info.
Further, there is a lot of into out on the web. Some is just an easy look up for name and adddres from a phone number, other data is pulled from breaches that ends up public or for sale.