I had a pet name for my wife in my phone. Then I added another entry for “wife”. When she calls me it shows “<pet name>/wife”.
So yesterday we were sitting in the yard. She had her phone with her and I didn’t. Her phone rang and the display read “<pet name>/wife”, in addition it displayed the picture I have of her in MY phone. She looked confused (thinking my phone was calling her ?) so I answered. A recording said, “This is the power company, your service is scheduled to be terminated unless you speak with us now, press 1…blah blah blah”.
Other than the obvious bullshit, how did the scammer the get the two names I call my wife and her picture? And are they using that info to call other people?
Is it possible that your contact for your wife got shared to her phone somehow? Maybe you sent it to her as a linked contact and she added it. Or maybe it got shared somehow through iCloud/google.
My guess is that the spoofed number would display the phone’s own number, like it would look like you were calling yourself and then you’re motivated to answer out of curiosity.
Since your wife’s phone has her own number as the contact you shared with her, voila, that’s what pops up. Simple enough to confirm, check her contacts.
Did she maybe have your phone? In any event, with that phone showing the picture, one way or another it has that contact info. You can’t (yet) accompany your call with a contact picture, even if you’re not a scammer. That picture is already in the phone.
Alright–this is a little out there, but not impossible.
So spoof callers (scammers) spoof local numbers to trick you into answering, since it appears to be a local call. In my case, they call using the same first six numbers (area code and prefix).
So it could occur, however unlikely, that through random chance they happened to do that using something similar to your wife’s number, and somehow actually generated the last four numbers matching her?
It stands to reason people are getting spoof calls using my number just the same as I get spoofs using their numbers. If I happened to have one of those people as a contact in my phone, it’d show up as if they were calling me, right?
I don’t have a specific answer to OP’s specific case, but a more generic one: EVERYTHING you put on your smart phone, you might as well have published on the front page of The New York Times.
Jumpy’s answer in #7. Spammer finally generated my own number to call me on my flip phone. I don’t keep any of my pet names for myself on it, so that was all right.
How sure of this are you? It’s possible, if say, your wife doesn’t use Google to sync her contacts, but you do, and one day in the past you logged in to your gmail or something using her phone and you inadvertently synced your contacts to that phone.
It is not uncommon for spam callers to use tech that spoof’s the recipient’s own phone number. Had she regular caller ID on her phone, it would have just showed her own number. But, because we have smart phones now, instead of displaying the number, it shows picture and nickname.
At some point, you synced your contacts to her phone. You say that you checked her contacts but it wasn’t there. That is probably because she has it set up to only show contacts that she has stored on her phone, and not any of the contacts you inadvertently synced from the cloud.
I don’t know what kind of phones you have or what kind of apps you’re running. But you definitely synced your “in the cloud” contacts to her phone. That should be a given. The question should be, “How/when did you do that, and via which app?”
Yeah, the scammer doesn’t have her picture or pet names. They just faked the incoming number as her number, and some internet syncing service that your phones are doing (iCloud, Google, who the hell knows) has leaked the info that you put into your phone into hers, and her phone displayed them.
Definitely a spoofed number, your wife’s number, as others have noted.
There is a wealth of information on the internet about pretty much anyone who lives on the grid. It’s not even necessary that some internet service that you use has leaked your info. You, your spouse, her phone number … that info is available and quite easy to find, even if that person does not use any internet services or social media. Hell, with just a name and a city or state you can have a Google satellite / street view of a person’s current residence within minutes, and without spending a penny.
The internet changed the world in terms of communication, knowledge, entertainment, convenience, etc. Unfortunately there are some shitty aspects to it as well, particularly with regards to privacy.
Not connected to the same account, but if you both have Androids, for example, and shared contacts I’m not surprised that the information and picture would be transferred also. How the spammer generated your number is of course trivial, the interesting question is how the phonebook info got shared.
I once foolishly added contacts from email to my phone and was swamped with the address book until I got a new phone, and that was ages ago.