Fraud Prevention Scam Targeting Americans
Received a phone call recently claiming to be from The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) ‘Fraud Prevention Team’? While the call might seem legitimate on the surface, it is unfortunately bad actors using FCC impersonations as part of a fraud prevention scam.
What is the Fraud Prevention Scam?
The FCC has a team of staff who work tirelessly to combat spam robocalls, phishing scams, and other communications-based scams, however, a group of scammers ran a scheme recently that hit close to home.
The scam callers claimed to be from the FCC’s “Fraud Prevention Team” and demanded payments via gift cards to prevent jail time.
The FCC has no such team, and the government cannot legally ask for gift cards to avoid jail time.
With only 1,800 calls made, the scam was thankfully short-lived. However, this doesn’t mean that scammers won’t try to run fraud prevention scams or use FCC impersonations again, so it’s important that you know about it.
How to Spot a Fraud Prevention Scam?
The fraud prevention phone scam started with calls being made using pre-recorded messages to convince their targets that the FCC impersonations were legitimate. Below is a transcript of a call that TNS picked up.
“Hello, this is an automated call from the Affirmed Fraud Prevention Department regarding to a recent transaction from the store Peloton of $1360.90. If this transaction was not authorized by you, please press 1.”
Impersonation scams unfortunately are all too frequent and a report from the Federal Trade Commission states that $3 billion was lost to these scams in 2024 alone.
Signs to look out for fraud prevention scams include:
- Demanding payment immediately via gift cards or other alternative payment methods
- Threats of jail time
- No prior warning of any debt owed
- Asking for personal information such as account passwords or verification codes
How Do I Protect Myself from Fraud Prevention Scams?
While organizations like the FCC and TNS are actively working to prevent scammers from contacting individuals, scammers are persistent and will keep trying to find new ways to use their tactics again.
Thankfully, the bad actors behind this fraud prevention scam called FCC employees themselves, who knew that no such team existed, and the scam was shut down quickly. The company who let the scam calls through was heavily fined for violating the Know Your Customer (KYC) ruling and letting through the traffic without verifying the caller.
The fraud prevention scam is common and can be used by scammers for all kinds of businesses. Often, we see them impersonating banks or online payment services, but they can use all kinds of organizations like we saw with the FCC impersonations.
If you do get a fraud prevention call like this and are unsure if it is a scam, it is best practice to hang up and contact that organization directly. You can also report it to the FTC and the FCC. By submitting a report, you can help these organizations to track down the scams, prevent bad actors from targeting others and help raise awareness of fraud prevention scams.
It is always best practice to never engage with unknown numbers and report phone numbers being used by scammers to your carrier. If you believe you are the victim of a scam, you can report it to your local police, state Attorney General’s office and the FTC.
Call-blocking apps, including those powered by TNS Call Guardian®, are also a great resource for reporting and blocking unwanted robocalls. Stay vigilant, share information about scams with others and be sure to check out our monthly Scam of the Month page updates.
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TNS Calling Trust Index is a measure of the crowd-source feedback for the unwanted calls that TNS receives in relation to the total number of calls to a subscriber. The index gives an indication of the consumer trust in voice calling and pulls data from our robocall protection platform TNS Call Guardian®. |
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