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The one ring telephone scam is similar in form to the venerable 809 area code scam in that both involve trying to dupe unwary phone customers into calling a foreign phone number in order to stick them with hefty charges. While the 809 scam involved sending pages, faxes, voicemails, or e-mail messages that supposedly relayed important information (e.g., news about a distressed family member or a notification of prize winnings) in order to lure the recipient into calling a provided phone number, the one ring scam employs a simpler technique -- the scammers place calls to blocks of phone numbers (sometimes with the use of robo-call devices), disconnect each call after a single ring, and hope that the owners of some of those numbers will be curious enough to call back: Once hooked, the victims of the one ring scam are supposedly separated from their money through a variety of means: keeping them on the line for as long as possible while they rack up international call tolls, duping them into unknowingly calling premium-rate phone numbers (akin to the 900 Pay-Per-Call services), or enticing them into signing up for pricey services, as described in a May 2019 alert issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC): As with the 809 scam, however, it appears that the prevalence of the one-ring scam and the potential damages its victims might suffer are considerably lower than exaggerated warnings about it often suggest: It's certainly not true, as stated in the example cited above, that the mere act of calling a particular number would allow a phone user's contacts and banking information to be stolen by someone else. That sort of information would be compromised only if another party somehow hacked into the user's phone (via a malicious app or other code) and/or the user actively did something to enable access to it. (In either case, there's no obvious reason why such a scheme would require the victim to place a call to the information-stealer rather than the other way around.) Some versions of this warning maintain that You may also be charged a monthly fee for joining some club you know nothing about. By calling the number, you 'authorize' them to place a fee on your cellphone bill. However, it seems to be more the case that victims aren't subscribed to services simply through the act of calling a phone number, but rather that the scammers use social engineering techniques (including harassment) to persuade them to subscribe to pay services or give out their credit card information: Other versions of the warning caution that cell phone owners who return one-ring calls are charged $19.95 for an international call fee and then a $9.00 per minute charge on top of that. But Verizon currently lists rates for placing calls to the 222 country code mentioned in the above FCC alert (Mauritania) at about $3.00 per minute, so a victim who returned such a call and stayed on the line for a couple of minutes before hanging up might realistically be out $6 or so in toll charges. Phone customers can generally get any premium service (i.e., international call fee) charges tacked on to such a call reversed by contacting their phone service providers and documenting the circumstances of the call. Many forms of this warning list specific country/area codes that phone users should never place calls to (because of their association with various phone scams), including 473 (Grenada), 268 (Antigua), 876 (Jamaica), 809 (the Dominican Republic), 375 (Belarus), 371 (Latvia), 222 (Mauritania), and 284 (the British Virgin Islands). There is, of course, nothing wrong with connecting to numbers with these country/area codes if you happen to know whom you're calling: all cautions regarding the one-ring scam (and similar schemes) apply only to solicitations to contact entities unknown to you. If you have to call a number associated with a dialing code that's unfamiliar to you, you can use a code lookup site to check it out first.
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