I have been talking to several Subaru dealers recently. I just got a call from someone from the Subaru of America concierge service, and asked if I had any questions about the car. The caller ID on my cell phone showed it as “Sel De La Terre, Boston, MA” Sel De La Terre is a real restaurant, but I see no reason why they would have my phone number. What was that about? I doubt that a legitimate company like Subaru would be spoofing their number. Was he some kind of scammer pretending to be from Subaru? Do restaurants let people make sales calls from their phones now?
My SWAG is that the caller ID database had a glitch/error which caused an unintentional spoof.
Technically unlikely. My WAG is that the customer’s phone number was shopped to the highest bidder without much concern about ethics.
How could selling the phone number cause this? If there was no error in the system and no number spoofing, then the call must have come from the restaurant’s phone but the person making the call said it was Subaru. Why would you purchase a number then go use their phone to make a call?
If there was spoofing or an error in the system, then there’s no reason the restaurant was involved at all – either their phone or a sale of a number.
Just possibly, a database leftover from reassigned numbers/Centrex/block number assignment. You might find that the restaurant recently changed (some of) their numbers, and they went back in the pool without being cleared from the CID/ANI database.
This kind of glitch is a lot more common in this era of multiple carriers of varying technical quality levels. You, or they, or Subaru may be using a low-service bulk rate carrier that’s not too fastidious about the shared database info.
Doesn’t seem that strange. That number used to belong to Sel De La Terre, but now it does not. It’s Subaru’s number now*, but the caller ID listing hasn’t been updated yet.
Sel De La Terre’s been closed for a while now.
*Or more likely a service that provides local numbers to be used by national calling centers for their outbound calling campaigns. Or a scammer pretending to be Subaru, I suppose, but if you were shopping for Subarus and gave them your number, this certainly would seem likely to be part of a regular sales process.
Is it possible that the actual number that Subaru called from was similar to the restaurant’s number? Transposed digits or similar?
It is a bit of an oversimplification, but the number that the call is allegedly from gets passed along the chain of various telcos from the caller to you, but the name lookup is done by the telco that delivers the call to your telephone, and is done to an external database (and your telco pays for that lookup). If the number was mis-entered at the origin or got corrupted somewhere along the line, the displayed name will be incorrect.
With modern digital switches and soft switches, a caller with digital service (ISDN, PRI, VoIP, etc.) can set both the number and (often, but not always) the name to anything they desire (assuming their telco doesn’t restrict it - and most don’t). So if whoever configured the originating device (regardless of whether it is a full-blown digital PBX or a simple analog telephone adapter) mis-entered the number by accident, that wrong number will be transmitted to you. When your telco goes to look up the name, they look it up using the number they see and come back with the incorrect name.
Somewhat long discussion of history follows - skip if not interested.
As far as setting the number goes, in the beginning it was provided by the originating switch and defaulted to the WTN (the actual phone number making the call), though there was an option to set it to the BTN (the billing number), so that if a company had a bunch of phone numbers, all calls could appear to come from the main number. There was some fiddling around with sending the LEN (an internal circuit position designation) when the originating exchange didn’t provide the actual number. This is why the prototype Caller ID boxes (the wood-grain and olive gray WECo ones) and production ones based on that design could report “again” for a subsequent call from the same unknown number.
The first full-switch rollout of Caller ID was on the 201-332 switch, which at one time was one of the largest 1A ESS switches. It was configured with a huge number of Caller ID modems, since it initially provided Caller ID to all of the 192,000-odd phone lines it served. Once Caller ID became an orderable service feature, it was disabled on every line except the ones that had the feature. That’s also the reason for some of the original oddities in Caller ID - the 1A was a computer-controlled analog switch, not a full digital switch, and Caller ID was a very late add-on to a mature switch product, so the integration on the analog side was a bit of a hack.
As to why the telcos don’t enforce any restrictions on the number / name, it is because there is no money in it for them.
Are you sure about that?
I recall setting the names internally on a few VoIP roll-outs I was involved in, and I thought the Telco people said the name was sent along with the calling number. I recall reading of a once-upon-a-time service (probably now illegal) where you could make a VoIP call and enter the name you wanted to pop up on the call display.
Yes, for the US.
If your provider lets you set the name, it goes into both the provider’s database (for intra-provider calls) and the query-able database (for inter-provider calls).
One problem with those “any name you want” services is that sometimes the name is cached, and will show up as whatever it was set to previously (since the terminating carrier doesn’t want to pay to look up something they think they already know, since they don’t expect it to be changing frequently).
Here are some providers who sell query access:
http://www.cidname.com - “99.7% accuracy, data is never cached”
http://www.calleridservice.com
http://www.multitel.net - “Try our CNAM service” - lets you do free sample lookups
it used to be simpler. Now with dozens of providers (just the major ones) on a variety of platforms and networks, not to mention wireless carriers, coordinating and updating CID/ANI is much more complicated. And there’s lots more room for sloppiness, delays and outright manipulation.
I just got a call from good old “Rachel” using my own name and number as CID. Had to waste a good ten minutes looking up exactly which circle and bolgia of Hell that bitch belongs in…
I’m not suggesting that the restaurant is involved in any way except innocently.
I receive calls sometimes from scammers who (1) fake the number they are calling from, and (2) use or enable some kind of lookup for that fake number to provide the text name that shows in my CID box.
The number matches the name, but the number is fake to begin with (not the real number of the caller, who is often in India).
So I think the OP’s data was sold to someone who used it, along with these fake impersonations, to call him. Car dealers are not known for ethics or honesty, in my book, so that’s not surprising.
This is another example of what I am describing. And “Rachel” is now “Carmen.” Even the bitches morph.
And there we have an explanation that doesn’t require the caller to be a scammer:
He’s calling from a call center that also does some calling for that restaurant. They had their caller ID to come up “Sel De La Terre, Boston, MA” while they were calling for that, then changed to “Suburu of America” when calling for them, but the telco didn’t notice the change.
Or it was a scam.