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When the phone rings, the screen can lie: the displayed number can be forged.
Phone scams ("vishing") rest on a little-known technical fact: making any name or number appear on your screen, including your bank's real number, is easy. The caller then poses as your bank advisor, tech support, a government office or a courier, and unrolls a polished script: create fear or urgency, isolate you ("tell no one", "don't hang up"), then land the fatal request, a code received by SMS, an approval in your app, a transfer to a "safe account".
The defence fits in one reflex: hang up and call the official number back yourself (on the back of your card, on the official site). No real bank, police force or government office asks for codes, money or approvals by phone. And if the caller "knows everything" about you (name, address, bank) that's no proof: that data comes from data leaks and data brokers reselling your number. This theme trains the reflexes AND shows where the calls come from.
Learn what the name or number displayed on your screen is really worth when the phone rings.
The displayed number proves nothing: only the call you make yourself is reliable.
10 exercises per level, mixing decision, spotting and quiz. The first 2 levels are free; the next ones open with any subscription.
Each level ends with a mission: what remains to be done once the lesson is understood. Some rely on your report, others on a setting we cannot see: it says so each time.
Copy the number on the back of your bank card into your contacts, then your mobile carrier's customer service number, taken from its official site. When a call worries you, hang up and dial one of them yourself.
Open your banking app and find where to block a card, without doing it. The day an "adviser" pushes you to secure your account, that's where you'll go yourself, after hanging up.
Log in once to your online tax account and your health insurance account, going through their official sites, and bookmark them. That's where a real refund or a real debt shows up, never in a phone call.
A scammer who knows your name and address sounds believable. Look at what your scan finds around your phone number: anything listed there, a stranger can quote on the phone, and it will never prove who they are.
Search for your number in quotes on a search engine. Pick one page that shows it, a directory or an old listing, and ask for it to be removed. If your country keeps an opt-out list for telemarketing calls, sign up.