Vicki Nguyen

I know we want to be polite and answer calls when people call us.

Do not answer.

I thought I understood the case.

It was a decades-long story about the powerful and the privileged seemingly getting away with murder.

But I discovered a much darker, more shocking tale than I ever could have guessed.

Isn't it so obnoxious?

It's like the scammers have figured out another way to try to get you to respond with sort of a familiar tone.

They want you to say like, wait, who's this?

And then get you entrapped into a conversation.

So when you get a text like that, unless you recognize the number, do not respond.

Exactly.

And just here's a number that will blow your mind, Andrea.

According to YouMail's latest robocall index, they say that consumers here in the U.S.

receive 2.6 billion spam or telemarketing calls in just one month.

And

Where it gets really dangerous is scammers are pretending to be someone that you might know or trust, like a family member, but also someone maybe from your bank or even an IRS agent or someone from a government agency, a sheriff's department, for example.

And these messages come with a sense of urgency and they often come with sort of a threat of penalty if you don't respond properly.

But just a reminder, if the IRS needs to get a hold of you, you'll get a letter.

Oh my gosh, Andrea, this is, it's almost embarrassing, but at the same time, I'm actually really happy it happened to me because now I know from the inside how easily you can be fooled.

So I was, number one, distracted and in a hurry.