Caller ID Spoofing

Friday I got the day off and I was home in the morning when we began to receive a barrage of calls on our home phone. It was people calling from all over the New York City area to ask me why I keep calling them? Only we hadn't called them, in fact we hadn't called anyone. This was my introduction to caller ID spoofing.

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Caller ID is a boon to anyone who wants to avoid telemarketers, hostile ex-es, or other examples of what the group No Doubt called "telephonic invasion." ("It's all your fault/I screen my phone calls," they sang in the 1995 hit Spiderwebs.) It's also a helpful tool for busy people who simply want to know if a call is urgent or can be returned later. But scammers have discovered that this useful feature can be used deceptively, in ways that can cost you if you're not careful. FTC link

Apparently robo callers can buy software that allows them to use random phone numbers that will be displayed on the caller ID function of the people they call. I discovered it's surprisingly easy. This is from Business Insider:

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Anyone can use simple solutions like Spoofcard, which allows users to purchase credits towards call time used in a simple smartphone app. With Spoofcard, users input the number they want to call, and what number they want displayed on the other end — initiating an untraceable call that leaves the other person only seeing the spoofed caller ID. News link

Ironically, most of the people who called me were actually pretty cool. They believed me when I told them I didn't know anything about it. I actually spent a few minutes chatting with several of them. Apparently the caller using our phone as his caller ID was offering deals on real estate. We were getting frequent 'callbacks' for about an hour Friday morning and again in the afternoon. Saturday we got a couple of calls and none since then. Apparently the robo callers or telemarketers who use false caller IDs rotate them. I guess if they go too far with it they actually can be traced. This is also from the same Business Insider article I linked to above:

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“There are an awful lot of people who believe that if they use Caller ID spoofing, somehow there is no call record, and it can’t be traced," Attorney Mark Del Bianco, who has represented Spoofcard, told the Journal. "That’s not the case.”

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2l036Y3