You can’t, but you like Chronos said in the OP, it’s irrelevant because if someone is mooching off your wifi you can’t even get “their” IP, just that one that you gave them. Wifi guy is terribly confused.
The guy who called me sounded sincere, and also sounded too old to be one of my students. But yes, it’s possible that one of my students was doing… something… nefarious, and included something in their activity that linked to me, possibly with the specific intent of getting random third parties upset with me.
My guess:
The guy who called you is either hopelessly confused or lying through his teeth. He got your number … somehow … and called you. But as previously mentioned, you can’t get a phone number by looking up an IP.
He’s likely not even savvy enough to know how to check logs. Even if you did connect through his wifi your external IP would be the same as his and the private IP would be assigned by his router, probably just a digit or two different from his private IP. If he was that savvy he’d know that, in which case he’d be making the whole thing up and hoping you aren’t savvy enough to see through his BS.
That’s what confused me, it’s simply not how ip address work.
However, I do see random “intruder” connections on my network, that have their own (not your typical 192.168.1.xxx type address, usually xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) and they usually seem to track back to a cell phone. I don’t know, but I always assume it’s just someone driving close enough to my house that their phone (or car) attempts to connect. Of course, it’s secured AND I’ve set it up so new devices can’t connect without my approval.
I almost wonder if the caller divined a phone number out of either the MAC id or, to make more sense, the IP address. Look at 192.168.100. Someone could assume that’s 1-921-681-00? (maybe?). If your phone number starts with a common intranet prefix, that could almost make sense.
Anyways, like you/we said, if someone connected to his router, it would be given a local IP address, very similar to the one’s he’s already using. It could be that you just drove near his house, he caught your MAC address and had the right connections or know how to find your actual phone number or, more likely, he’s full of shit (on purpose or otherwise).
In any case, if it were me, I’d block his number and move on.
Can I do a brief hijack to ask what WiFi app you use that only connects automatically to networks that you’ve manually connected to in the past? I use something called WiFi Matic and at first it seemed to do what you described but later it started connecting to any public network I was in range of which I don’t want.
It’s the default on my iPhone. It asks whether to connect, but doesn’t actually do it without my approval.
I see. I have an Android. I guess with these you need an app to do this. I wonder if Chronos has iPhone or Android?
What’s the physical distance between you and the accuser? (Montana to Ohio?) Unless he’s within a few miles, tell him that WiFi doesn’t carry that far and his claim is impossible. I think he got your phone number somewhat at random and is really confused about a whole bunch of stuff.
When a connection is made to a network, the device has a “name” listed. Often this is just “android-xxxxxxxxx” or model e.g. “Galaxy -A5” etc, but sometimes devices have more meaningful names ( I set mine to something I can identify easily). Is it possible that your phone has your number in its network name?
if yes, then could be that he saw it if your phone made a request or connection at some point, even if you are not actually completing the connection process.
My phone is an Android (specifically, a Moto G4), and I’ve never installed any WiFi apps. Connecting only to networks I’ve already manually connected to is the default behavior (though it does sometimes helpfully point out that open networks are available, and asks if I want to connect).
I suppose that there must be some level of communication between a device and a router even before an actual connection is made, and that that might show up in the logs. And it sounds like a bad idea for a phone to use its phone number as the identifier for such communication, but possible.
Montana is where I lived in 2005, but I’m in the Cleveland area right now. I don’t know where the other guy is, but his phone number was one of the two Cleveland-area area codes, so I presume he’s around here, too. Montana is only relevant because nobody would naively expect a Montana phone number to be for someone around here.
Are you sure that’s the default? I thought the default was auto-connect. At least I don’t remember changing the settings, my iPhone and iPads all connect automatically to networks they know and public networks. At any rate, regardless of default behavior, the setting is under Settings > Wi-Fi > Auto Join
Don’t Android phones have a similar option buried somewhere in the menus? But to be clear this is for all networks; I don’t think there’s an option to not autoconnect to open public networks. Either it prompts you for all of them, or auto-joins any of them (though there is a hierarchy for which ones it’ll join first.)
I don’t see that option (on Android) . The default behavior is to display a notification when a public network is available, but it does not auto join, and there doesn’t appear to be an option to do so.
Perhaps you turned on auto join at some point in the past and it’s propagated to all your devices via iTunes or something.
But again, this is somewhat irrelevant, as simply joining someone’s network will not give them your phone number.
I don’t think the prank or malicious targeting stuff makes much sense. It’s just such a weird way to go about something like that. You could call the device “Chronos - 123.867.5309” so that shows up in the DHCP table to connect the IP to a person, I guess. But you’d expect the person to just change their password and blacklist the MAC rather than cause a confrontation. If you’re targeting Chronos, why would you do something so unlikely to get a reaction? A normal prank is like a fake Facebook account or entering the phone number into one of those “Microsoft Support” ads so buddy is spammed all day long.
None of this makes any sense as presented. You should call buddy back to get more information.
My WAG (and this is pretty weak) is that buddy saw your name on his Facebook recommended friends list for some reason. Didn’t understand why and asked someone equally clueless. That person suggested you’re stealing his wifi which caused Facebook to suggest you and then buddy googled your phone number. The IP address in the logs was a lie to show how you’re caught.
Yes, auto-connect is the default on ‘known’ wifi networks. I believe you can on check ‘auto connect’ for a given network, but every device I have will always try it’s hardest to stay online.
For example, if I’m at home, I’m on my network. As soon as I get to work, my phone will automatically join that network, without any input from me.
Actually, now that you mention it, that’s right. It is for known networks. I only just realized it, as my phone is constantly trying to connect to free networks around town, but they all have the same name: xfinity wifi. So even though there’s myriad of those networks throughout town, it’s still a known network even if the individual hotspots aren’t known. Ah, that makes sense. It annoys me because sometimes I’ll be walking around using my phone’s LTE connection and it’ll automatically lock into a weak xfinity signal from somebody’s house and will be slow as hell until I figure out what’s going on and disable wifi. I could just have the phone forget the network and I should be good to go.
Sorry for the aside–just had an “aha!” moment that should solve one of life’s minor annoyances.
Calling the guy back would make sense, in a logical world… but he was irate enough when he called that I think that the course of prudence is to have as little contact with him as possible.
There’s a common scam where someone calls you and tells you there’s a security problem with your computer, and (if you let them) they go on to assert that your IP address has been stolen - I’ve seen some examples where scambaiters let these scammers remote into a sandboxed computer and they just bring up various system utilities and baffle the mark with things that are perfectly normal.
It sounds like the guy might have listened to one of these scammers a little bit, then set off on his own course of misguided research. I guess it could even be possible that he just dialled the IP address itself and it happened that the numbers of the Ip address were the same as the digits of your phone number
I hate to ask the hateful tech support question, but have you actively checked this setting since Wifi guy contacted you? Android may have pushed out updates which changed some settings, so as to “improve” performance.
Surely a cell phone is no different than any other WiFi-capable device, and will use IPv4 or IPv6 according to what the network supports. I think you are assuming facts not in evidence.