I use Google Voice as my voicemail due to the built in transcription which lets me tell at a glance whether a call is spam or in the rare case, worth returning. This past Friday I had my phone on silent for most of the day and was pleasantly surprised with the following transcription greeting me after I checked in:

Scam voicemail message

I immediately thought of scam and went through the process of calling the SSA and the fraud hotline but given the hour-long wait-time and the maze of “press X to do Y” I gave up. Doing a quick Google search confirmed that it, in fact, was a scam and I had nothing to worry about.

What’s shocking is how easy it is to spoof a phone number. Especially that of a government agency. It’s extremely illegal and one would think that whatever service was used to do the spoofing would prohibit this from being possible. I consider myself digitally savvy and yet I had to double check. Others may not be so lucky.