My wife got a new cell phone a few months ago and the caller ID for the phone still shows the previous owner’s name.
I asked our carrier - Virgin Mobile - to change it and they said something about the local providers have to update their cache mumble mumble or something.
How can one fix an incorrect caller id?
Dunno but I’ll be interested to hear responses. My phone just shows the number, and “Virginia” (our state) when I call someone with caller ID. Other people I know have their names appear.
I don’t mind having the state vs my real name, but I’d really dislike having someone else’s name show up!
Our land line phone just displays the home state of the caller (along with the phone number of the caller) whenever we’re called by someone with a cellphone. However, if we happen to have the caller’s number on our speed-dial list, then the name we’ve given the number on our speed-dial list shows up instead of their home state. Maybe that’s what’s happening to you.
(It’s not a speed-dial list, actually. It’s more a list of phone names and numbers we can scroll through to avoid dialing the actual number. Basically it’s a list of phone numbers that our land line phone knows about.)
That’s kind of weird that Verizon says they can’t change it.
We have Alltel (a group account with 5 lines), and for the longest time my brother’s phone would put out my mom’s name when he made a call. As you can imagine, we ribbed him a lot for that!
Eventually we went to the Alltel store and asked them to fix it, and they were able to fix it right away.
Nope, that’s not what’s happening with us. The “Virginia” thing shows up on our el-cheapo phone+callerID combo that has no programmable calling list. If I look at the caller ID on the cordless phone (which does have a calling list) it shows up there as “Mama’s Cell Phone”.
I had assumed that the carrier would be able to fix it too. Maybe I just got unlucky with the tech support guy who fielded my question. I should try again.
My wife googled her phone number today and found the dude who previous had her number - so it’s definitely in the caller id database somewhere.
The previous owner was a real estate dude and the number is listed on his website! She should just be glad that she is not getting real-estate related calls all day :eek:
Makes me wonder how that works. The Virgin Mobile dude told me the database is maintained by the local telco, not the cellphone carrier but that sounds fishy to me. (how would the local telco get the data?)
Virgin Mobile does not own any mobile infrastructure. They are simply a brand used to sell mobile service from actual providers. In the US, they are selling Sprint.
Regardless, it does seem pretty pathetic that they have no way to accomodate your request, even if it meant that some Sprint Reps had to answer calls as Virgin Mobile Reps. It’s quite possible to do instantly, but maybe not for Virgin Mobile to do so.