It's great to have you here on the Clark Howard Show where our mission is to serve you with knowledge that empowers you to make better financial decisions in your life.

Speaking at great decisions, have you made one of the best you could make?

Subscribing to our free newsletters at Clark.com slash newsletters.

By the way if you find that I'm really not telling you the truth you don't like our

newsletters you don't enjoy them we make it as easy to unsubscribe as it was to

subscribe.

Don't you hate that when you subscribe to something and you can't figure out how to stop it?

We don't play that game.

In today's episode, speaking of games,

we're gonna talk about ones that aren't funny at all.

Phone scams that are absolutely proliferating even now using AI to trick you.

Also, the big pharmacy chains that I pick on all the time are closing locations all over the place. And this is being talked

about is if it's a bad thing. I'm going to give you my perspective because if it gets you to change your habits, it could be a really good thing.

So there's a big big rise in con artists using your phone as a way to reach you. The number of

spam calls people were getting had actually gone down a lot because of things called stir and shaking or shaken and stir whatever a

joint initiative of the feds and the major phone companies to require validation of the number you were getting a

call from. Well now criminals are figuring out how to get around that and the

number of spam calls going up. Now the average person

apparently gets about three to four spam calls a week. So you're thinking

that's not horrible but I want to tell you some of the patterns.

Very common is you'll get a call from your own area code or an area code in area.

The spammers, the scammers, are calling you when you ignore that call

...