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Comment by james-skemp | Hacker News Reader

In case you're curious, the calls in a foreign language are, I understand, generally immigration scare attempts.

They were a big thing a few years back when Trump was talking about walls and kicking people out of the US; I thought they had died off, but I've also stopped answering my phone.

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I got my first call in Chinese a couple of days after I applied for for my visa to China so I assumed it was legit and related initially (e.g. they want more documents or something). Fortunately I don't speak Mandarin so once I tracked down my coworker and asked him to translate he told me it was a known scam.

My Chinese wife receives phone calls like this all the time. Either it's DHL telling her she has a package to pick up (in a completely different state) or it's the consulate asking for some information. I guess my phone number got in with hers somewhere along the line as I've also received a call or two like this.

I also get the DHL scam calls. Once I tried telling them that I was American and didn't speak Chinese (which is about the extent of my very rusty Mandarin knowledge) and it stopped the calls for a couple of months. That tactic did not work the second time around, though. :(

My wife and I have cell phones in the 650 prefix that are less than 1000 apart and my number is less than hers; the Mandarin scam calls come to my number a couple minutes before hers... I'm pretty sure they're just war dialing the whole area code. You can usually guess it's them because they spoof 415 numbers or 213 numbers.

If I can figure out the right button to press to get a human, I explain to the Chinese scammers that my Mandarin is really poor, but that I would love to hear what they think about the 6/4 Incident.

I don't think it necessarily has to do with visa to China. I started receiving a ton of spam calls in mandarin despite never applying for a visa to China or having a partner from China or ordering anything from Chinese services like Alibaba.

However, I find it interesting that those calls started shortly after I graduated college and started my first big tech job.

> In case you're curious, the calls in a foreign language are, I understand, generally immigration scare attempts.

I've been receiving Chinese language spam on both my Canadian and U.S. numbers for about five years now, and all of them have been DHL impersonators, PRC consulate impersonators, and people impersonating my mobile phone provider "您好，這是Freedom Mobile中文支持blah blah blah"; I've never heard an immigration-related one claiming to be a U.S. or Canadian immigration or customs body.

I get them from time to time. I ran one voicemail past a Chinese-speaking co-worker who said that it was about a package delivery.

They're all the same format...

[DHL/FedEx/the Chinese consulate] has an urgent package for you to pick up.

[Failure to pick up the package will result in the package being returned to the original sender./The package has been confiscated in customs due to irregularities. Failure to contact us will result in a formal investigation.]

Please call us... etc.

Today I learned they've morphed.

I assumed they want money in order to complete the delivery, but searching online it appears they want to verify someone will be home and nothing comes of it.

Seem to be some thought they're verifying names and addresses. Weird.

There are other formats. Here's one that my wife (who is originally from China) got:

This guy calls claiming to be from the Beijing police. They claim that after she left China, someone stole her identity and tried to make some transactions in her name. They managed to stop him, but now they're investigating and they need to gather evidence. And so they need to get her id and bank account details, etc.

For a while they completely had both of us, and we believed everything they said up until they were asking for her details. She asked for a name and id number, and said she'd call them back. When she looked up the real Beijing police phone number and called them, they said they had no idea what she was talking about.

Ah right; I can't believe I forgot about that! I was just talking with someone who got strung along like that as well. Luckily she bailed out as well.

One day almost all the phones started ringing in the office one by one. Turns out someone/some automated system started dialing our phone numbers one by one with the above Chinese message scam. At that time I realized I never needed my office phone before and unplugged it. Problem solved.

I got a couple calls a while back where the person on the other end was just unresponsively crying and then hung up, sounded like it could be a recording, not sure what that was about.

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