LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – Only on FOX5 tonight, Friday marks one year since a Las Vegas retiree decided to start logging every spam call to her phone. FOX5 first told about her and her unusual hobby back in January. We sat down with her again now that she’s logged for one full year to find out exactly how many calls she’s gotten. FOX5 also spoke with a security expert about why she may be getting more calls than most people and why to never answer unknown numbers.
“The phone calls were coming in and coming in…until finally, one day I said, ‘How many calls am I getting?,’ and just out of my own curiosity, I started this notebook,” Gayle Jean Patrick shared with FOX5. Patrick says as a retiree, she does have some free time but not at five in the morning especially for spam callers.
“I used to ask them, ‘Please take me off your list. Let me speak to your supervisor,‘… it would probably take good couple hours out of the day just to try to deal with them,” Patrick recounted. Since Patrick started her spam call log book on April 4, 2024, she has not answered any calls since unless she knows for certain who is on the other end of the line. Instead, she writes down what is on her caller ID. In a year, she has gotten nearly 1,000 calls.
“I had two calls come in today, so I’m at 948,” Patrick revealed. Less than a third of those, 311, were legitimate calls from friends, family, or doctors. While she is not answering any spam calls, they still interrupt her day.
“I still have to stop and look at it to see is this for me or is this crap?,” Patrick explained.
“Even saying ‘Hello, who is this?‘, can be very dangerous,” asserted Ian Bednowitz, General Manager at LifeLock an identity theft protection service. Bednowitz says never answer calls from numbers you don’t recognize.
“You verify that your number is legitimate,” Bednowitz stated. Bednowitz says even having a conversation one time with a spam caller like Patrick did in the past will mean even more calls and anything you say can be recorded and manipulated.
“AI is becoming so much more sophisticated that even with a small snippet of your voice, just a few seconds, they can now create deep fakes of your voice, which they can use together with any personal information they can find to try and hack into your accounts, steal your identity, or trick your friends and family into sending them money,” Bednowitz revealed.
Since meeting with FOX5 back in January, Patrick put her number on the do not call list. Patrick believes that cut the number of calls per day in half. Patrick now plans to send her log to local leaders in hopes it can be used in some way to stop robo calls.
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