The number of spamming, phishing have taken a new Horizon. Leaving the web aside, apart from spamming, Phishing is common on phones too. Consider this, you get a call from a correspondent who pretends to be from your bank and with little “intelligently faked” information about you, (say some kind of your recent activity), would be enough for you to trust the other party. In fact, in 95% of the cases, users would fall for it without bearing a doubt in mind.
Honestly telling, its really hard to tell when you are wrong. Its hard to figure out who is calling you and your family. The right thing to do is Reverse Number Lookup. To start with you can look for any of the free Phone Lookup which would provide you a report includes information, when available, associated with residential, business, cell, unlisted, non-published, Internet, pager or pay phone numbers, plus name, address, carrier, connection status and more. Sometimes it could be just your curiosity to findout the actuals of a call, or even the identity of a missed call., these kinds of services always are helpful.
Tracking the Cell Phone Location
In case you a successful lookup results out to be a cellphone with outdated, or in some cases totally false information, Mobile tracking is your next step. The mobile tracking (you’ve probably hard about it) is now being offered to the general public at least in some countries like US, UK. For most other countries, its still availble to government agencies, and to police authorities only.
Apart from dealing with pranksters, tracking companies are even targeting employers, who are able to track their staff members and receive detailed reports on their daily movements.
How does it work: Mobile phone tracking is set up using the SIM card, with an ID number that trackers can then enter online to view a real-time location. Although this can be legitimately initiated by asking permission from the phone user, the system is open to misuse. Although the tracking company is legally required to send occasional warning messages to the trackee’s mobile, but a recent analysis reported that none of the phones in that experiment received any such warnings. Other researchers have found that it is perfectly possible to track someone for two or more days before they receive a warning. The methodology is as simple as sending a text message to the victim’s cellphone, before he’s pinpointed.
So what this means is that before even you get into a legal action with a prankster, you can track him without his knowledge, which is helpful in most of the cases. Of course, this technology has the side hurting the privacy of the masses.
How do you avoid it?
The Data Protection Act saves the day. Tracking companies are legally obliged to ask permission from the tracked person, and then to offer options for dropping out or registering preferences. For instance, a tracked employee can contact the tracking company to stop them carrying out traces on weekends.
And of course there exists the last resort: If you suspect you’re being tracked, look out for suspicious text messages, and keep your mobile switched off when you don’t need to receive any calls.
To summarize, here’s what you can do to get rid of potential implications of this tracking ability:
- Switch your mobile phone off when not in use, or when you see suspicious messages.
- Don’t give out your mobile phone number on forms/forums/internet – use your landline or perhaps email.
- Don’t transmit your credit card details via your mobile, its easy to tap the calls.
- Never trust strangers on phone unless they prove themselves.
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