Another certainty. The Mexican “customer” will be back in business soon, too. They lost nothing but their supplier. I suggest they look for a new one in India or thereabouts, and the US Govt won’t bother them any more.
Somebody’s getting clever. We got a call yesterday offering to reduce my debt; the caller ID displayed my employer but with our local exchange rather than my employer’s exchange.
Why are American telcos allowed to transmit spoof calls?
Because there may be times when that is desirable, not intended to be fraud.
Imagine you have a large company with many phone lines. Each executive has his own phone number, but you want the customers to call only one main switchboard. So you replace the outgoing CID with the company’s main number, and call recipients are less confused.
Or you may hire outside services to call on behalf of the company, for legitimate business. You don’t want the outside service’s name to show on the CID, you want the primary company’s name/number to show.
If your employer’s prefix is local to the area, they may have done it on purpose and it would be a coincidence that it happened to be your employer’s. I’ve always been surprised they don’t do that. It’s been years since I’ve answered the phone when the caller ID has the same first six digits as me, but if using the same first six digits as someone else in my city, I’d probably hesitate for a ring or two before I declined it. That was, in fact, the whole basis for what they’re doing now. Of course, if they happened to pick the same first six digits as my employer, I’d have to think about for even longer while I mentally run through all of our phone numbers to figure out if thats’s one of them. We only have 4 lines and I know them all, but if you knew your work could call with any of 30 or 40 numbers that all look the same, you might pick it up.
They could have also figured out your work phone number and done it that way as well. Either purposely (automated) look up your name on a database that shows where you work, get your work phone number and go from there.
Those are not what I would call spoofed calls. The companies concerned pay the telcos for that facility; in these cases the telcos are not paid. Especially with calls labelling themselves as local it should be possible to check the authenticities of the calls and block them if appropriate.
My patented solution: the robo-secretary. Fight fire with fire!