Today, I received a phone call from a stranger who demanded to know who I was. No greeting, just “who’s this?”

I declined to answer (because we don’t give out ANY personal information to people who call us, right, class?), instead telling them that it seemed they had the wrong number. This person then insisted that I had called them, and they wanted to know why.

“I didn’t call you. I haven’t called anyone today,” I replied. (I wasn’t even stretching the truth for emphasis—other than a couple text messages and posting something about Beethoven’s birthday [Happy 245th, Viggy!] on a social media account, I had not used my phone for communication purposes all day. I still haven’t, actually.)

“It says you called me,” they said.

“Maybe there’s a mistake,” I offered. I have an incredibly easy-to-mis-dial mobile number, and I figured someone had called them from one of the several same-digits-in-same-order-but-different-quantity-of-each phone numbers that exist.

They just hung up, because of course they did. Hopefully this person had simply mis-dialed and realized their mistake.

But there is a more sinister possibility, here: scam callers almost always use fake caller ID. There is a possibility that my number was the one they happened to use for a round of scam calls; this caller did share both the area code and interchange with my number.

Now, if that was what happened in this case, the damage is limited. They called the spoofed phone number back, which happened to be mine. I explained that I didn’t make any calls, they got angry and hung up, I blocked their number (just in case, and also because I was a little annoyed as well).

But what if a scam call had been placed using a number that was attached to a phone number owned by the perpetrators? This person might have, in going through their list of missed calls, run straight into a trap designed to steal money, personal information, or both.

I wasn’t aware of this until recently, but it appears that a lot of people look at their “missed calls” list every day, and call back every single number. Because of the very real possibility of running headlong into fraud, I cannot recommend against this activity strongly enough.

If someone is truly calling for a legitimate, important reason, they will leave a message or call back later. There is no good reason to try to find out what’s on the other end of every single random phone number that attempts to reach you every day. A lot of those calls are going to be from people you do not want in your life.

(Some of the numbers you do recognize may be, too, but that’s outside the scope of this article…)