How long does it take to trace a phone call in real life? I know that in the crappy movies, nobody ever talks long enough to get a trace, but how long does it really take?
The phone would have to be masked. Look at your phone the next time you get a call. The caller’s number is normally showed.
So it would take an electronic wizard to mask the phone/
These days every phone call is traceable even when caller ID is blocked or spoofed.
Verizon customers merely have to dial *57 immediately after the call ends. The customer doesn’t get to see the caller’s number, but the police do.
I thought that was the way it is.
I just saw a movie where the police went through that “keep them on the phone so we can get a trace”. I was pretty sure that this was hollywood crap and that in this day and age tracing a call would be a lot easier.
Back before computer controlled switching, the only way to trace the call was to go out into the switch room and look at which connections were active. Tracing a call in the old days really did take a lot of time. It was kinda like ok, the destination call is coming in on this line, which is connected to wire number such and such in this trunk, which goes to that other phone station across town, so now we call up the technician in that station who walks out and sees that such and such wire is presently connected to line number such and such, so now they look that up in a book and the source is Mr. So-and-so on Mayberry Ave or whatever. If the caller hangs up before the technician gets to see the state of the switches and relays, then the switches and relays go back to their idle state and there’s no way to trace it.
Early computer systems controlled the switching, but didn’t necessarily log it due to lack of storage space for the logs. You could often ask for a particular line to be logged, but that would require the logging to be set up in advance. Computers weren’t installed everywhere at once either, so it was possible that part of the call would end up routed through some old switchgear that wasn’t so easily traced.
So, the older the movie, the more realistic it is that it takes time to trace the call.
In a modern movie (anything since the 2000’s), taking any time at all to trace the call is just silly, as long as the source and destination are both in the U.S. If you have to trace it though old equipment in the outskirts of West Krapistan, well, that’s a different matter.
Nope. It’d take anybody who bought an app for their smartphone or a box for their landline.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=caller+id+spoof
You’re thinking of SOUTH Krapistan.
With Voice over IP the best you can do is trace a call back to the company doing the Internet to POTS connection. You’d need a court order to find out where the Internet connection came from. Assuming they didn’t disguise that using Tor, an infected middle computer, etc.
Since a lot of mass callers use VoIP today, tracing a call is becoming pointless.