The other day I was contacted by someone claiming to be from Google Business. 

He told me they were offering a free trial on a free upgraded website listing which could potentially boost the visitors to my website

There was no attempt to gather bank details or any other obvious stuff so I agreed to the 30 day trial at the end of which they would get back in touch, go over the results and ask if I wanted to go ahead with the monthly paid listing. 

I didn’t see any harm in it until the same guy phoned yesterday, interrupting a video shoot I was in the middle of

I told him I was busy but he said he only wanted to text me a verification code and asked me to read it back to him.

Being busy and therefore not giving it much attention I did that and got on with my work.

A little later I thought about it and a little alarm went off in my head….

I ran a Google search for scams of this kind and found that there are a lot of these doing the rounds 

On the plus side it could just be an attempt to get you to pay for a service which Google offers for free (and usually sends verification codes by post) in which case I’ll tell them to get lost of they contact me again. 

On the much more scary side it could be the start of an attempt to hack into your phone 

With many of us now using our phones for banking and to access our credit cards etc, identity theft is a real worry 

So far nothing has happened but I took a few precautions anyway:

I abbreviated the passwords and login details I keep in a notebook on my devices and changed the email addresses associated with any of my financial info 

It seems obvious to most of us that we shouldn’t provide any sensitive info to random callers or text messages 

But sometimes - and scammers rely on this - we are just busy and not concentrating and can be caught unawares

Especially when the contact seems to come from a trusted source 

Just be on your guard people - bad guys are out there.  

Cheers : )