The call on March 28 started out normal enough.

A woman with a Caribbean accent told freshman Amanda Hardy she was from an international student organization. She asked Hardy to confirm her home and school addresses and telephone numbers.

“She claimed to be from a school-kind-of-office and already knew my status as a student and that I went to school here,” she said. “Then the questions got more and more personal.”

Hardy began to sense she was being lured into a dangerous situation when the woman on the other end of the phone began asking for personal information.

Hardy said she believes she was the target of a phone scam.

She is not alone.

Interim Director of University Police David Sprick said calls similar to the one Hardy received and other scams have been seen more frequently on campus and in the Eau Claire community in the past month.

Consumers frequently lose money to phone scams. According to the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, American consumers lose more than $40 billion each year to telemarketing fraud.

According to a University Police report, the woman who said she was with an international student organization asked Hardy for her credit card number and then for her Social Security number three times. The woman told the freshman she needed the information to process an application. Hardy hung up and reported the call to the police.

“I felt really stupid, because the second she started asking questions I should have asked who she was and hung up,” Hardy said.

While the Eau Claire area has had more scam activity reported, Sprick said the area is far from being targeted.

“It’s a national problem,” he said. “Anywhere and everywhere is a target.”

Asking questions to find out if the call is legitimate can be a first step, Sprick said.

“If you suspect their sales pitches, cut right to the chase,” he said. “If they don’t give you straight answers right away, hang up.”

While phone scams are on the rise, so too are scams that come in the form of written correspondence, Sprick said.

The more letters are filled with grammatical and spelling mistakes, the higher the likelihood of the correspondence being a scam, he said.

According to the DATCP, falling prey to a telemarketing scam may even set you up to receive calls from other potential scammers.

Fraudulent telemarketers frequently share consumer information on “sucker lists,” according to the department. These lists include personal information such as your name, phone number, address, and in some cases, even how much you may have spent on scams in the past.

If you suspect that you may have given private information out to someone conducting a telemarketing scam, Sprick said the best thing is to report it.

Hardy said her mother was the one who urged her to go to the police.

“She made me (report it),” she said. “She said the only way they could do anything was to go in and tell (the police).”

Hardy’s run-in with a scam prepared her for future calls. About a week after she received the call from the international student telemarketer, she called Hardy’s dorm again, looking for her roommate.

“It was the same type of call and the same line of questioning all over again,” she said. “I had her hang up right away.”