Vishing (Voice Phishing)

Phone fraud is as old as the telephone, but 'vishing' was named around 2006 as VoIP and caller-ID spoofing spread; the first notorious industrial case was the Ahmedabad, India call-centre network impersonating the IRS from 2013, which led to a 61-defendant US indictment in 2016.

Telephone confidence tricks are as old as the telephone, and high-pressure 'boiler room' telemarketing fraud flourished in the US from the 1980s. The term 'vishing' emerged in the mid-2000s as cheap internet (VoIP) calling and caller-ID spoofing let criminals impersonate banks at scale. From around 2013 to 2016, call centres in Ahmedabad, India impersonated the IRS and US immigration officials, leading to a 2016 US indictment of 61 people and entities. Fake 'tech support' calls and pop-ups (often claiming to be Microsoft or Apple) grew in parallel. Since 2022 the method has shifted to fake crypto-exchange and wallet support calls and to calls impersonating IT help desks to break into companies, as in the Scattered Spider intrusions.

The caller pretends to be a trusted organisation such as a bank, tax agency, police, tech company, crypto exchange or your employer's IT help desk, often with a spoofed caller ID. They create urgency: an account 'hack', a warrant, a refund or a security alert. The victim is then pushed to read out one-time codes or passwords, install remote-access software, move money or crypto to a 'safe' account, or buy gift cards. With help-desk calls, attackers use personal details found online to get passwords or multi-factor authentication reset for an employee's account.

Cheap VoIP lines, spoofed caller ID and scripts let a call centre reach thousands of people a day, and a live voice is more persuasive than an email, especially with older victims. It is one of the most profitable scam types: the FBI logged $2.13 billion in tech-support scam losses and $798 million in government-impersonation losses in 2025, and AI voice cloning is making impersonation easier. Prosecution depends on cooperation with India and other host countries; joint FBI-CBI operations produced 215+ arrests in 2024, but new call centres open quickly.

Call-centre fraud (tech support plus government impersonation) cost US-reported victims about $2.9 billion across more than 80,000 complaints in 2025 (FBI IC3). The largest single cases are crypto-support impersonations such as the $263 million taken from one victim by Jeandiel Serrano and Malone Lam's crew in 2024 (US DOJ). Victims are disproportionately over 60 and often lose their retirement savings; older Americans reported $584 million in romance and confidence losses alone in 2025.