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Serious problem with call protection


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I requested a call from Apple Support via the Dedicated App.

I received the call from an Irish number as usual.

Looking now in the call history, it is reported, is indicated in place of the name under the number, (the number is obviously not in the address book) as Malwarebytes Known Scammers.

No warning reported when the phone rang

Call Protection is set to warn.

Being an Apple number I can't understand how can be called Known Scammers.

The Apple support number used is: +353 (21) 4259200.

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I can fully understand why the number would be listed as a known scammer because actual Apple Support and Apple Store numbers are frequently being faked by scammers, but your experience does point out that they obviously are also used for actual support calls. Until the technology eventually catches up to block callers from faking caller numbers and CallerIDs, it's impossible to know whether the call is legitimate or not. 

So I don't really know what can currently be done about it. Do you want to be warned that this might be a scam and to treat accordingly or have all legitimate numbers put through without labeling as possible scams? I suspect Malwarebytes added it after several users reported it to the as a known scam.

I would be interested in why you weren't warned about it. Perhaps there's a category of calls that are known to be both legitimate and scams which get labeled as scam without warnings?

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I looked now on the dedicated website and noticed how the notification was made and at this point I cannot rule out that it was there.

Unfortunately, I had never studied the matter further and I was not aware of how the warning occurred.

Unfortunately it is not an easily identifiable warning especially when waiting for the call and therefore it is assumed that it is authentic and therefore less attention is paid.

Therefore FEEDBACK: if possible, make a more identifiable notification perhaps with visual signals / audible alarms

The risk as the app is set up is that if I had configured not as WARN but as BLOCK I would not have received the APPLE support call that I had requested.

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  • Staff

That number has been reported for whitelisting.

The problem is that scammers frequently spoof the caller ID info, so legit numbers can end up on the block list.

Also, be aware that Apple does not provide us with any other way to signal that a number is a problem. A blocked call is simply blocked, invisibly, and a "warned" call only has the caller ID info replaced with either "Malwarebytes Known Scammer" or "Malwarebytes Suspected Scammer" but otherwise rings normally. There's no way to customize this behavior further, as it's controlled entirely by Apple. We can't even see that we blocked something.

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