Just as an example, I call John Smith regularly. He’s in my contacts.
I get a call and my phone displays John Smith is calling. It stops ringing before I can answer. I press redial or (call back or whatever that button is called) and realize it’s not calling John’s number.
My mom is getting the same problem. She’ll call and ask what I want. I hadn’t called! She had seen my name calling and dialed me back. She doesn’t know about the redial button.
How are the Spamners doing this? It’s very creepy that they somehow know a name I’m familiar with and impersonate it with their number.
This happened to me this morning. I saw my mom’s name. Hit redail and the number was phony. It wouldn’t go through.
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I guess it’s good that I rarely can dig my phone out of my pocket before it stops ringing. I miss a lot of spam calls. Android
Someone stole your contacts list somehow and is now spoofing specifically tailored to you. You may have inadvertently allowed an app access to your phones contact list. Or maybe they stole John Smiths contacts list and you and your mom were on it.
I think that the caller-id on cell phones only consist of the phone number. Any name that comes up is either in your contacts or comes from a lookup done by your phone itself. Landlines get both name/number from the data on phone line. But if a scammer has your list of phone numbers, then they can spoof that number when they call you and your phone will paste in the name from your contact list.
You might want to check the call logs on your cell provider just to make sure the calls are actually coming over the cell network. There’s a chance that a trojan app on your phone is spoofing calls directly on the phone itself rather than spammers calling your phone over the cell network.
I’ll call my provider and ask them to confirm the call log.
Thanks filmore
Junk Texts are getting bad too. I’ll sometimes get 3 or 4 within a minute. They’re easy to spot. They have random letters in the message. I see that in the preview and delete without opening it. I don’t open email or text unless I recognize the sender.
Thank goodness I only get bad texts a few times a month.
CNAM (caller name) is an extension to Caller ID, pretty much widespread.
If just the originating number is passed through the call, the terminating network provider (the call recipient’s phone company) has to do database lookups at the originating phone company, and has to pay a lookup fee to do so. But the CNAM can be provided by the originator, and the cost savings gives the terminating provider incentive to just pass it along to the call recipient.
To get you to answer the phone (thus confirming that it’s a working number, thus more saleable) and to get you to maybe listen to their message (generally, to sucker you into buying something or to scam you).
Just like SPAM emails that try to look like they come from somebody you know or some business/organization you use.
Or form letters in junk mail that sprinkle your first name and street and town through the letter, to try to make it more ‘personal’ to you, and thus maybe get you to respond.
Remember that the caller id/caller name on a phone call, the ‘from’ address on an email, and the return address on a postal letter can all be spoofed – a malicious sender can put whatever they want into that, whatever they think will get you to respond.
It’s such a violation of privacy.