Indian mobile users are being bombarded with massive numbers of spurious international missed calls originating from Pakistan, Czechoslovakia, Middle East and African countries and also from India routed through international numbers to defraud users who call back to these numbers.

Such short and missed calls - known as 'wangiri' calls - is a larger part of an international syndicate involved in lottery winnings programme scams through mobile and Internet email.

Wangiri is derived from the English word 'one' (or 'wan' as it is pronounced in Japanese phonetics) and 'kiru', which means 'to cut'. A 'wangiri' call is a call that is cut off or hung up after one ring, according to Wikipedia.

A curious call back to these international numbers is received by the representatives of global syndicate involved in lottery winnings programmers and other fraud through phone. The curious caller is told to have won a jackpot, lottery or is explained that the caller could be of some help to manage or dispose of a few million dollars of cash inherited. The caller is made to understand that he would be well rewarded and is asked to share his bank account, credit or debit card details and other personal information.

Much before the caller gets alerted he loses some few hundreds of rupees as call charges as calls to these numbers in the aforementioned countries costs between Rs. 10 to Rs. 45 per minute. Operators have been receiving complaints from their subscribers of such missed calls from international numbers and when the user calls back they are charged a huge amount. Vodafone had recently cautioned its customers not to respond to unsolicited international missed calls.

"We have been receiving such complaints for almost a year now. One should not call back to these numbers. Some have also reported that people are being charged Rs. 45 per minute if they call back to such numbers," said a senior Vodafone official.

Source: www.indiatoday.in