Hi! I’m Bobby Cox and one of my roles at WhitePages is to make sure that we’re providing the best support and assistance to our many customers. On a daily basis, my Team is working hard to meet and exceed our customers expectations by answering questions, responding to emails and ensuring that all of our customers have an enjoyable experience. I volunteered to write this post based on a common customer inquiry that just won’t seem to go away. Rather than deal with this inquiry on an individual customer basis, I thought I’d share with a broader audience…hopefully it helps.
Every so often, we receive inquiries from customers about sales calls they received from “White Pages”. Importantly, these sales calls are NOT from our company, WhitePages, Inc. The people making these calls are scam artists engaging in what is called “phishing“. ‘Phishing’ is a credit card theft scam that uses the household brand names of WhitePages, and YellowPages, to establish trust, then try to get people to provide their credit card information over the phone. This is a scam. If you get a call like this, tell the caller that you will track down their location and report them to the FTC and FBI if they call back. Unfortunately, this is an empty threat as the numbers they use are most likely faked due to something called “CallerID spoofing” and it’s almost certain the callers are overseas…but it may keep these folks from pestering you again.
And on a side note, please be very careful when somebody that you don’t know asks you for your credit card information over the phone. While we’d all like to believe that all people are trustworthy and honest, unfortunately it’s simply not the case. Better to be safe than sorry.
We’ll continue to post service announcements such as this one, when appropriate. Just felt like this type of thing seems to be occuring more frequently and wanted to make sure all of you knew about it.
Questions, comments, concerns? Feel free to post a comment below.
Bobby
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
hi robert
i feel concern about this situation, last month i was looking for some information in whitepages.com and i received some msg about pc’s and video cameras , and i just click , thinking that this was some kind of sponsored publicity on this webpages, then i just was referred to another page about e/books and there they asked me about my credit card information,of course, i didn’t trust on this site , but i was wondering if u control this or is part of ur business(???)
Adri,
It sounds like you clicked on an advertisement. WhitePages.com is a free website where you can search for people and connect via email, text and other great features on our website.
I hope this is helpful!
Bobby:
I just had a call from someone who clamed to be with the white pages. I told him I wasn’t intrested. He called me back to inform me that it was “mandatory” that I be listed. After chewing me out for some time he said he was going to drop us off the list. If this guy is one of yours be ashamed.
Mike,
This scenario is exactly why we made this blog post. These calls are NOT from WhitePages. Please read my post to learn more about these calls and what you can do to prevent them in the future.
Hello BT,
WhitePages is still free and a vast majority of our information can be found without becoming a WhitePages member. However, we also have millions of listings that we believe cannot be found anywhere else for free on the internet. To view these exclusive listings, we ask that you become a WhitePages member (membership is free).
We have so much more to offer than a printed directory and we invite you keep using WhitePages, explore all that we have to offer and connect with confidence!
This is a very helpful heads up to all the users of Whitepages. That said phishing is very cruel. You have to be very careful in giving out your CC even if mentioned that they’re from established and known companies. This happens to the usual victims that are not updated with current events, barely watching news or not reading online blogs such this. You’ll never know how very helpful these things are. So thank you guys for this announcement! Cheerio