Mobile Phone Number Scams

uk-book.info - mobile phone number scam

Screenshot of a website page from uk-book.info

If you input almost any mobile number into a Google search it will appear in results for the websites www.uk-book.info, and/or ukphonebook.mobi, and/or uk-community.com, often under the guise of an address book belonging to someone you’ll never have heard of. Certainly, my mobile number appears on those websites, as does almost any other mobile number I search on. However, the name associated with that number is never mine.

This started when I first found uk-book.info when looking on the internet for the owners of mobile numbers that had been sending me spam texts.

On first glance, the numbers and names found on www.uk-book.info under an A-Z listing appear to be part of someone’s contact list that has been made public. However, the numbers shown don’t correspond to the owners of the mobile numbers –  my number apparently belong to a person I’ve never heard of, as do others I’ve checked out. Also the names of the ‘address book’ owner and many of the people in it look computer generated, as many names are odd. The names seem to change too, so what appears under the letter ‘A’ one day might be different on the next day.

I’m guessing these websites are there solely to gather data on the mobile number you search on. In other words via their website stats the site can see what number you searched on, whether you click through to their site to take a closer look or not.

Secondly, they hope people will alert them to live numbers by taking some kind of action on the site. On uk-book.info and ukphonebook.mobi it’s either by signing up via the green “Sign Up, it’s free !” button at the bottom of the site, or the orange “It’s your ? update it” button. On uk-community.com it’s by clicking on the edit or bin icon next to a number.

Either way, if you click to edit your mobile number the people behind the sites will know they have a live number to sell on.

The domain name uk-book.info purportedly belongs to someone from Delaware, in the US, but the web server that hosts it is actually in France. It’s about time this scam site (and its counterparts) was investigated and hopefully taken down.


For information on other mobile phone scams, please consider visiting the following website:

https://www.tigermobiles.com/common-mobile-phone-scams/

 

 

 
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