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I received a phone call early yesterday morning from an unknown number. I answered it and someone asked "Is this bitmaker?" (they had my real first name). I said yes, and then they said they were from UPS, and that's all the information they needed and hung up. Googling the number says that other people have received the same thing, and it isn't a real UPS phone number. What was the angle of this scam?

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    It's possible they simply wanted a recording of your voice saying "yes".
    – chepner
    Sep 15, 2020 at 19:12
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    @chepner Could you elaborate on this in form of an actual answer? Without any context, your comment is really just causing panic without providing much useful information or actionable advise.
    – Philipp
    Sep 18, 2020 at 10:59
  • @chepner this reminds me of a very popular scam in Switzerland where they are a real company offering some useless product like spam protection or w/e. They start with some innocuous yes/no type of questions and slip a "...and you would like to order product X" where (often elderly) people just keep saying yes. A month later they get a bill and if they ask why the recording is played back. Saw dozens of those cases in consumer magazines :). Probably not the case here unless they are going to do some editing where they use your 'yes' with a fake question.
    – Yanick Salzmann
    Oct 6, 2020 at 15:22

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I suspect someone has a list of names and phone numbers and they are going through them to see which ones are still valid. Two possible reasons for this could be:

  1. If you recently applied for a job, or applied for an apartment, etc, online, it could simply be that this service is verifying the phone number you supplied is accurate. This could help weed out fake applications.
  2. A recently validated list of names and numbers is much more valuable to telemarketers. It could be that the telemarketers themselves are validating the numbers, or the validated list is going to be sold to telemarketers in the near future. The idea is that when you answer a call and someone asks for you, the call is likely to last longer than a cold call, and this increases the chances of a sale. I would not be surprised if in the near future you receive one or more calls from someone asking for you by name, followed by a sales pitch. When you get the call, be strong, my friend.

Disclaimer: this is conjecture only.

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