I think that individuals and businesses do not have the ability to trace a phone call; it has to be done by law enforcement and/or under a court order. Have I been wrong? I’ve just read this in an article about a pizza place that was pranked:
PizzAroma reportedly traced the woman’s phone number back to an app that allows people to make prank calls using a fake number.
(No need to click the link. Long story short: A woman ordered ten pizzas for the following day and never picked them up. Pizzas got old and had to be thrown away. Pizza parlour discovers they were pranked. The owner of another business made up their loss, and bought pizzas for his own employees. PizzAroma now requires prepayment for order of ten pizzas or more.)
The article doesn’t say how PizzAroma ‘traced’ the call. I doubt that the Police Department is going to get involved over a $112 crime. I’m guessing it’s just a poorly-written article, but PizzAroma did, apparently, have a way of discovering the fraud. Did they simply google the number, and the returns said it’s associated with fraudulent calls? Or is there a way for a non-governmental person to trace a call?
My assumption at this point is that the prank call app is associated with only a few phone numbers, regardless of whether they’re real numbers or just spoofed caller id. I thing the tracing consisted of googling the number and finding other people complaining about similar activity.
I thought the entire story was a hoax, starting with the pizza shop name, which looks like it would be called Piss Aroma. However, the shop exists.
They didn’t “trace the call” as you are thinking as in getting the location of where the call was made from. They just looked up the number and saw it was associated with a pranking app.
That’s what I thought, but I wanted to make sure.
Thanks.
Most of hte “Likely Spam” and “Likely Fraud” calls I get seem to have either totally random numbers (one this morning from (561) 617-6431 which is somewhere in Florida) seem to be made up numbers in localities I have no business with, and they do not have a name associated in the caller-id. Hence the phone company filling in with the call coming from the town of Likely.
More insidious were spam calls using local cell numbers. I got my phone when numbers were being allocated from fresh exchange blocks for cellphones; I get a lot more spam calls (and texts). My wife, who got her number in the era of brick phones, so is mixed in with mostly land line numbers, gets virtually none. Although I did get a call on my land line from an 888 number telling me there was a problem with my Visa. (“Press 1 for more information”).
Funny thing, while I was typing this I got a call from “Visa” on my cellphone, originating from another local cellular number and no name associated - although it was a robocall. Visa doesn’t have a robocall system built into a local cellphone number. That’s another spam trick, ure real numbers. Back in the early days of spam calls, I got a call from someone asking why I had called them. I hadn’t.
So the short answer for the OP is there’s no easy way. You can look up the number. there are a few websites that allow people to input details about spam calls by (fake) phone number, as well as real advertising related robocalls. If there’s no name, that’s a giveaway. Even more so if number but no name. My unlisted landline number explicitly says “Unknown Caller” with no number.
Yeah, as mentioned above, I read it simply as “trace” = “track down,” not some more technical law enforcement type of process.