Over the past few months, maybe even over a year, I’ve been getting what I assume are junk phone calls from various spoofed numbers. I’ve never answered them, but the numbers just pinged my BS meter and nobody has ever left a message from any of the numbers.
Anyhow, the curious bit is this: the number (that I assume is spoofed) is my area code, plus the first three digits of my phone number, plus a random set of four digits. So, if my number is 1-247-234-5678, I’ve been getting numbers from:
(The four digit endings are real endings for phone calls I received in the last month; the area code and first three digits are made up.)
What’s the deal here? Has anyone heard of this type of spoofing? Why are they doing it this way? Or is there a chance this is not spoofing, but something else (which I can’t possibly fathom what it could be.) The only one I see that is repeated in that time period is the -1285 number (appears 3 times in a row). Every other number is unique for the month of August.
It’s very common. They grab number a (or spoof) a number and then war dial that number rotating the last 4 digits to make it look like it someone (very) local to you. For a while some of even my tech savvy friends didn’t believe they were fake numbers. In addition to appearing to be a local number, if you look up the number it’s still attached to someone’s name or says “Cell Phone [your city]”, which makes it even more convincing it’s actually someone trying to get a hold of you.
That’s kind of what I figured, but cell phone numbers don’t work that way. Aren’t they pretty much arbitrarily assigned, as opposed to the land line days where you might have a number of prefix exchanges in a geographic area? I assume I’m overthinking it.
That is true. Sometimes they even do a database lookup on the generated number, and use the actual name attached to the account for the spoofed caller ID. This is even more likely to fool you, especially in a small town where you might know the party they are trying to impersonate.
Not as arbitrary as you might think. Unless the phone owner specifically requests a number (as I always do), the assigned digits are taken from a list just as in the old days, when the prefix was dedicated to one company. In fact, if you do request a specific number, you may have a hard time convincing the clerk that you should have it, as most are not familiar with the concept, and the companies see no value in promoting it.
That kind of depends on your exact situation- for example, the area code on my cell phone is one that was originally exclusively assigned to cell phones/beepers in NYC , so there was a time when I saw that area code and thought it was a cell phone that at least started out local to me. The cell phone numbers at my employer were assigned in large blocks, so that those in the same area code have the first six digits the same- and they are large blocks (like a few hundred) and I don’t have everyone who might call me saved as a contact.
I first became aware of this when I just missed a call and redialed it. The guy who answered had no idea what I was talking about and had not called me. Then days later the same thing happened in reverse–my number was spoofed and the victim called me, and I told him I hadn’t called and explained that my number must have been spoofed.
Well, this is what I mean: if the spoof number was just from my area code or any adjacent or overlapping area code, I would have accepted the call. I get calls all the time from 224, 847, 708, 312, 773, etc. The fact that the area code and the first three digits of the phone number were the same is what tweaked my BS meter. There’s like 10s of millions of phone numbers in my metropolitan area. What’s the chance that someone is calling from one of the 9999 other numbers that share both my area code and what used to be called an exchange prefix?
Sure, back in the day, with land lines, I could tell what numbers were supposedly coming from somewhere in the vicinity of my neighborhood by the exchange prefixes (the first three digits after the area code). But with cell phones, they’re not tied to geography or anything that would make me think, “oh, geez, I better answer this call, it looks like it could be from someone I know because the first six numbers match.” In fact, it tells me the exact opposite! Like I said, if all they spoofed was the area code and made up the number afterwards, I would have answered the call.
The good thing is these spoofers are idiots and save me the trouble by identifying themselves in this way, so I shouldn’t be complaining.
I live in the same area code (or one of the local area codes), so that’s not what’s raising my suspicions. It’s the fact that the three numbers after the area code are the same.
But, with that, perhaps the people the people they’re most likely to be able to separate from their money are the ones that see the prefix and assume it’s within a few miles…the people that grew up on and still use landlines. Think about who those people are.
On the other hand, what difference does it make to them. They get a number that appears local to me. They call me, and a thousand others like me, it probably doesn’t take much to break even with that number. Especially if all they’re doing is selling lists of live numbers.
In most area codes each cell company was issued however many 3-digit sections they needed.
So if you have an AT&T phone and your number is 247-234-XXXX then you know (barring spoofing) every other 247-234-YYYY is also an AT&T cellphone. Ditto Verizon, Sprint, etc. So in addition to the valid point made by Joey P, they’re also signaling to you that the caller is on a cellphone of your same brand.
Which means no per-minute charges to answer, the caller is probably from near you, and if you got your number through some corporate deal the caller may even work for your employer. Plus, if you’re naïve about caller ID spoofing, you’ll think “I know it’s a cellphone; it can’t be a robocall.” These are all things that will encourage you to answer it.
The good news, for the great many of us who’ve moved away and still use our now nonlocal phone numbers, is that these callers totally out themselves by trying to be sneaky. Anyone from my old hometown calling me now will already be in my contacts. Unknown numbers from there can be safely assumed to be the robocalls.
The fact we have threads and threads of people asking exactly this question says there are still lots of people who’re learning about this now 4-year old tactic.
One of the ‘tech savvy’ people I mentioned upthread would not believe me about this. For months he kept getting a ‘local’ call on his cell phone but when he picked it up it was dead air. I told him over and over what the deal was but each time he got the call, he’d do a reverse phone number search and it would come up as a ‘valid’ cell phone number from our area. And each time I’d explain to him what was going on. At the very least I did convince him not to call the person back, so that was good. After a while the he finally got to talk to the person (or that number got a hold of someone else in his family) and it turned out to be a skip tracer trying to track down his brother that defaulted on a store credit card. Between that and me showing him my phone with plenty of missed calls with similar prefixes (not related to his brother’s skip tracer), he finally got it.
This is someone who understands, for the most part, how this stuff works, but also tends to be overly optimistic. Don’t get me wrong, he’s not going to hand out his credit card number to any random person, but even after this I’m sure it took a lot more car warranty calls than most people before he stopped answering unknown numbers.
There are two different people involved: The phone dialing operation and the broiler room operators who are attempting to separate you from your money. The broiler room guys hire the dialer guys to dial phones, and when someone answers, to connect them to the next available agent. These dialers can dial hundreds of numbers simultaneously. Occasionally, someone answers, but the boiler room guys don’t have any available agents. In that case, you get nothing on the other end.
I’ve been using Nomorobo on my landline and Nomorobo and trying Robokiller on my cellphone. I’m now getting more spam calls that real calls on my cellphone. I’d say about 80% of the calls on my landline are spam calls of which Nomorobo seems to handle about 80% of them. On my cellphone, it’s closer to 50:50, but Nomorobo seems to miss most of them.
The phone dialing operations actually have an algorithm looking for the best number to display as the caller on your phone. The algorithm looks at the number dialed and the number displayed, and finds the numbers that work the best using A/B testing techniques. It might explain why all of the spam numbers begin to look alike. And, they’re getting trickier too. I got one on my Caller ID screen that just said “Mom”.
