[janus]

It depends on where you live. In my country I would never take a call from a bank at face value and would always expect they give me a phone number to call back, and that better be an institutional number. Phone fraud is rampant.

[bluGill]

Which in turn depends on where you live: some places a call is not ended until both sides hang up. Fraudsters use that to call you, give you a number and then when you call back pretend to be answering the phone (complete with ring noises).

If someone like a banks calls you, you need to call back from a different phone line, using a number that you look up before giving private information.

Note that most of the time the above doesn't matter, as banks rarely need to call you to get private information. "did you buy X" isn't private - whoever is asking already knows you did: even if they are a scammer you have already lost - if you didn't you need to hang up and call the bank to arrange getting a new account now that your old one is compromised. The only other time that matters is why you know who will call and why (if you just applied for a mortgage you expect the loan officer to call but you also know exactly who that is)

[someplaceguy]

> some places a call is not ended until both sides hang up. Fraudsters use that to call you, give you a number and then when you call back pretend to be answering the phone (complete with ring noises).

WTF? That's completely insane! Where is that?

And please tell me that you can hang up the call if you reboot your phone, at the very least!

[desas]

It's a landline thing. It used to be the case on analogue lines in the UK that the caller controlled the connection (probably because they were the ones being billed for it and the recipients phone couldn't communicate it's time to stop the bill).

That "feature" was copied into the digital world. Except now there's a very short timeout where after the recipient hangs up, the connection is terminated.

[bluGill]

It isn't completely insane. in the days of landlines it makes sense because you can hang up the phone and go to a different - more comfortable - room when you realize the conversation will take longer. I don't think cell phones have ever had this anywhere.

[JohnFen]

I'm old enough to remember when the phone system in the US behaved this way.