Vietnam Mobile Telecom Services Corporation (MobiFone) recently received complaints from customers, who reported being spammed with missed calls from a foreign number and subsequently being charged high international call fees.

MobiFone has taken measures to eliminate these fraud calls. The company also advised users to use discretion before calling these numbers back.

MobiFone released an official press announcement on November 15 warning its clients on the issue. The company stated that users were being scammed by unusual numbers with international prefixes, such as +224, +252 or +232, which belong to Somalia.

The company affirmed that this was the exploitation of global telecommunication charges, whereby foreign numbers were used to give missed calls to numerous users in Viet Nam, following which the user would be charged a high call rate of at least VND13,800 per minute (US$0.61)

The company advised users to be careful with regard to numbers from abroad or not in their contact list, and to report such fraudulent calls to MobiFone’s customer care centre for immediate help. The company said it would also be working with authorities and international service providers to stop this fraud.

The occurrence of missed calls from these international numbers has been ongoing for the past few months at all hours. Upon picking up or calling back, phone users are automatically directed to an answering machine with the message “Scam Phone Number 25299251089, Somali Missed call scam numbers.”— VNS