I got the strangest call today. It was the robocall woman about my credit card that I get about once a week. (Yes we registered with the do not call list but can’t escape this one) But this time the caller ID showed my own name and home phone number! I did a double take, was confused, but let it go to voicemail. For a moment I thought, is it my hubby calling on his cell from work? Can’t be. Unless he changed his caller ID info. But why would it have our home number? It’s impossible to call your own number. It was disorienting until I heard the familiar woman about the credit card and recognized, aha! They’re really getting clever now!
Just now I did a Google and it turns out the BBB is getting lots of reports of this happening over the last month or so. Sneaky bastards!
This should really go in The Pit, where we can really let fly with our uncensored commentary!
Called ID can be spoofed, so they can make it show any bogus number they want. They might as well make it show the number they are calling. Interesting that they get it to show your name too. That means they aren’t just dialing number entirely blindly – they know who you are! That’s creepy.
The biggest Pit-worthy flame I would wish to write (and in fact have written on this board before) is for the esteemed gentlepersons who designed the Called ID protocol, for designing a protocol where the caller can inject whatever text he wants into the Caller ID data stream.
This is exactly the same major blunder as the early designers of e-mail committed when they made it possible for any e-mail originator to insert anything he wants into the “From:” field.
I got a call once that just showed up as “Neighbor” with an area code not typically found on our street. Cute, huh? As if I’d be friendly enough with the folks next door to put their number on our phone, but not close enough to know their names, so I’ll just label them as “Neighbor” - yeah, that makes sense…
Sometimes, I get spam e-mail from my own address. When I mark it to block, my e-mail server (NetZero) tells me I can’t block my own address. Has happened across multiple computers, and I am religious in my virus protection. I just chalk it up to yet one more intrusion of shady marketing tactics.
And who falls for these practices this day & age anyway? How can it possibly be cost effective or efficient. Do they think after the 80th call I’m going to suddenly decide to respond?