My naïveté has landed me in some strange situations before, but never anything quite like this. Imagine finding a message on your phone with a very reasonable request and what seems like a normal United States phone number. I would later find out that I had fallen prey to a pair of scams, but first, the story.

I called back the phone number and began inquiring about the message I had received. The responses were quite vague and seemed stretched out, as if they were trying to keep me on the line. After a few minutes of probing, I had gotten nowhere and gave up…it must have been some kind of joke or prank.

Later that day, I received an email telling me about an area code scam that could cost me up to $2400/min. The email, supposedly from an AT&T representative gave me information about phone messages and calls remarkably similar to the one I had recently received.

Be wary of e-mail, or calls, asking you to call an 809 area code number. It’s important to prevent becoming a victim of this scam, since trying to fight the charges afterwards can become a real nightmare. That’s because you did actually make the call. If you complain, both your local phone company and your long distance carrier will not want to get involved and will most likely tell you that they are simply providing the billing for the foreign company. You’ll end up dealing with a foreign company that argues they have done nothing wrong.
Please forward this entire message to your friends, family and colleagues to help them become aware of this scam
AT&T Field Service Manager

The email seemed a tad unprofessional so I decided to do my own research and I found a page on AT&T describing this area code fraud. The article described that the 809 area code (among others such as 284 and 876) was actually an international code for areas in the Caribbean. The article also warned about emails describing ridiculous charges for the area code. These emails were simply scams.

In the end, I paid only a few dollars per minute for a useless call to the Dominican Republic. Who would have thought I would be happy with that?

Resources:

• The Wikipedia Article – further confirming my belief that there is a Wikipedia article for everything
• Scambusters
• Trendmicro – includes a copy of the original email