Spoof Phonecall Rearranges Recipients Phone Number
“…his phone rang, he answered – no one was there. He said he heard someone
hang up, now the phone number was on the caller id so I called it back
from my cell to see who was hanging up on my friend, but when I
dialed the number I received a message saying this number has been
disconnected.. we tried several times.
How can someone call from a disconnected line?
We also noticed that the number that made the call was my friends number just mixed up, that gave me the creeps him too. So the next day we both went to the Phone company.. this happened on a land-line…
We
told our story and the woman went back to her station and talked to
someone, came back and said it was a scam…and it had happened
before. One detail that the phone company thought was interesting…they said
the number that came up has never been used before as a persons number.”
The above was sent to me by a friend asking for advice, and they kindly agreed to let me republish the above as a helpful warning not to get too worried by spoof calls. In all likelihood, the above was just a prank based around Caller ID spoofing. From the Wikipedia page:
Caller ID spoofing is the practice of causing the telephone network to display a number on the recipient’s caller ID
display which is not that of the actual originating station; the term
is commonly used to describe situations in which the motivation is
considered nefarious by the speaker. Just as e-mail spoofing
can make it appear that a message came from any e-mail address the
sender chooses, caller ID spoofing can make a call appear to have come
from any phone number the caller wishes. Because of the high trust
people have tended to have in the caller id system, spoofing can call
the system’s value into question.
There are numerous websites and gadgets out there that can make the caller ID look like the recipient – however, I must admit taking the recipients numbers and jumbling them up is a new one on me. Anybody out there know if there’s a program that can do this, or is it a case of someone having to know the targets full number in advance so they can rearrange it at leisure?
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