As a journalist, you expect to get a lot of calls.

As a political journalist, you expect to be on your phonea lot throughout any given day - as people contact you with information, tip offs, gossip and the odd bit of constructive criticism. Sometimes these calls are from numbers you don't recognise as ordinary members of the public want to get in touch to tell their own stories or pass on information.

So with all this in mind, I wasn't at all surprised when I came out of a meeting this week and saw a missed call on my mobile phone from a number I did not recognise. I did what I would always do and called the number back.

A man's voice answered. I said I had received a missed call from this number and was calling back. The man responded: "No, you called me."

I said I was pretty certain he had called me first, to which he again claimed I had called him first. I asked if he was trying to reach me, a journalist at the Liverpool Echo and he said no. I ended the call and put this down to a mix-up. But then it happened again.

I had a missed call from a different number this time. My hunger for stories and tip-offs meant that I called back again, wondering if this could be someone delivering my next big scoop - but a similar call played out. Another male voice again suggested I had called him first, as soon as he said this - and knowing that I hadn't - I realised something strange was going on. I quickly put the phone down and blocked both numbers that had called me.

Suspecting I may have become the target of a scam, I did some research and found a number of people who had experienced similarly strange activities on their phones. I don't know this for sure, but I believe I was the victim - or at least the target of - something that is known as a Wangiri Scam.

This is a type of telephone scam where fraudsters profit from the fees they earn from tricking people into calling premium rate phone numbers. Wangiri is a Japanese word that means 'one ring and drop' and the scam is sometimes known as the 'missed call scam'.

It involves scammers calling victims from a premium rate number but hanging up after just one ring. In turn, victims - like myself - often phone the number back to see what the call was regarding. As soon as they’re connected, they begin to pay for a premium rate call, with the criminals pocketing the subsequent fees.

The scam relies on natural human behaviour. When you get a missed call from a number you don't recognise, you are perhaps a little anxious - or in my case as a journalist, intrigued - to know who it was and what they want. Many of us will automatically call back to find this information out.

At this stage I still don't know what damage I have incurred because of this attempted scam. I wasn't on the calls for very long so I'm hopeful my monthly bill won't be too painful, but I will find out soon. In terms of protecting yourself from the Wangiri scam, there are a couple of tips I have read online which are worth noting.

The first is that if you receive a missed call from a number you don't recognise, google it. The internet is a good source of information when it comes to scams and there is a chance someone will have flagged up a dodgy number somewhere.

If you find that a number you’re receiving missed calls from is linked to a potential scam, you can block that number. This will prevent you accidentally calling it back in the future. This is what I have now done.

The world is a scary place these days and scammers are constantly trying to target us in a growing number of ways. Hopefully by sharing my story it may help just one person to avoid becoming the victim of this particular type of scam.