So today I get a collection call on my cell phone for my brother-in-law. It was very odd as my brother-in-law lives in a different city and he and I have never lived together or co-signed on a loan or anything like that. Well, anyway it turns out that the collection call was from his former internet provider. He had forgotten to pay a small fee when closing out his account. The collection agency claims that my number was on his account. My brother-in-law chewed them out for calling me, but their story didn’t change. The only thing I could think of was that I connected to his wi-fi via my Iphone when I visited him. He isn’t too techie so he never used the wifi for anything other than his laptop. Is it possible that the ISP saw my phone on his network and pulled my number in to his account? It didn’t seem the collection agency knew my name. They thought my number was his.
Short answer: no
Long answer: The only thing a wireless router sees is the MAC address of the NIC (network interface controller) of your iphone. It has no way to know whether this NIC is attached to a computer, a laptop or a smartphone, let alone somehow extract the telephone number.
The only logical explanation is that your BIL at some point gave them your number.
Well, technically, different NIC manufacturers have different identifiers as part of their MAC address, so it’s usually possible to tell (broadly) what category of device it is. Some iPhones, for example, might start with the same OUI.
However, unless you have a custom router from your ISP that’s snooping you, it shouldn’t be forwarding your MAC address to them to begin with, only its own.
And even if his ISP was monitoring your iPhone, it’s doubtful that anybody there would bother tracking down your number. I’m not even sure if that’d be legal. I’m also not sure if the iPhone would be broadcasting your number in any form, unencrypted, over WiFi, and I don’t see how you could go from MAC address to phone number short of hacking Apple’s systems or entering into a shady deal with them (or subpoenaing, but ISPs generally don’t have that power).
It’s also possible that you were somehow linked to him via public records – marriage certificates, real estate, government records, etc. and that you inadvertently left a phone number somewhere that they found. If they can find birth records of both married families, they can attempt to track down all the siblings one by one. Has anyone else in the family been contacted yet?
Heck, it’s easy enough for a private citizen to track down somebody’s contact info just by Googling for similar services and paying something like $10; collection agencies are probably even better at it.
Back in my days of heavy debt, some of the shadier collection agencies would call my family members asking for me. I think they just looked up my last name in the local white pages, as it’s an uncommon name.
ETA: Of course this only applies to you if you have the same last name as your BIL.
There’s an awful lot of not only convergence, but aggregation going on. Given enough data banks, each of which seems to identify you poorly, when combined, may result in some useful data. And there may have been some human guesswork as well that just happened to get lucky.
It’s hard to hide everything you do from everybody.
Collection agencies are sneaky, it’s possible he used you as a reference for another account at some point and they were able to access that information in their DB. It would be nearly impossible for them to get your number through your phone connecting to his WiFi, and it doesn’t make much sense to do that when they have 1,000 other ways of getting contact information for him/his family.
Social engineering is a more likely culprit. A mutual friend or family member of the both of you may have provided your phone number to an unscrupulous collection agent posing as a long-lost friend, for example.
There is lots of this kind of info through facebook, for example. Lots of possibilities.
I’d guess it was good old internet search engines.
I’ve looked up my name and my state before, nothing else, and found sites that had my last 5 addresses (going back 19 years, pre-internet for me), my age, my phone number, the street I live on, marital status, home ownership status, and under a list called “relatives” listed 5 people, my mother, my father, and aunt and 2 strangers with the same last name.
Check out spokeo.com some time. It’s a bit disturbing.
And wildly ridiculous. For me, it has: the wrong age, the wrong political affiliation, the wrong home value (off by a factor of 3), and the wrong astrological sign, so it probably has the wrong birthdate, too. It may be wrong about other stuff, like hobbies, but I’m not about to pay money to find out what my hobbies aren’t.
Haw haw haw. That spokeo.com thing is a riot - they’ve got my address from 4 moves ago (lived there early 2008), and states my income almost a full $100k higher than it is. Other than “male”, that’s all the info they have.