Just a sampling from last week. Every single one of these is the same scam. I had another seven yesterday.
I never answer and they always leave the same prerecorded voicemail message (although that message seems to change every few days) about me owing taxes, which I absolutely don’t.
I also get most of them within an hour, which makes it even more annoying.
And yes, I’m on the do not call list.
Someone please make it stop!
These scammers generally call from spoofed numbers. If you call them back, some very confused person is doing to answer and have no idea what you’re talking about.
I’ve never personally used it, but https://www.trapcall.com is a service that can reportedly unmask spoofed/blocked numbers and provide you with the actual number a person is calling from.
I did computer telephony work many years ago and have a general understanding of how this works. Caller ID is trivial to spoof, but there’s an underlying protocol called Automatic Number Identification (ANI) that was historically used for long distance billing when those calls were billed by the minute. Since it involves billing it can’t be spoofed by the caller, and the telephone companies are careful to ensure it’s accurate. What Trapcall apparently does is replace the spoofed Caller ID with the ANI.
This looks like a cool service, but I can’t find their subscription plans/cost anywhere on the website. It looks like I have to sign up for the free trial without knowing how much I’m on the hook for if I forget to cancel in time, and that seems sus.
Ugh. I didn’t realize that & haven’t checked out their site in ages…
I just searched for their app in the Apple App Store and it looks like there are at least a few competitors out there now, so if you’re interested in something like this then I’d suggest shopping around to see what alternatives are available.
That’s cool I didn’t know about that. But what prevents the telcos from always using the ANI to identify every call?
ANI and CallerID serve two very different purposes. Suppose you managed the telephones for something like an insurance company, where you have lots of customers calling in, but also have lots of employees calling out. You want the Caller ID on your customers phones to show the main # for your company whenever you call them, so it would show something like 1-212-555-1000.
Because the company has a lot of employees, it has 100 individual phone lines, so 100 agents can be on calls at the same time. The phone company actually allocates 100 numbers in that case, and those numbers could be very different than the above -1000 number. So the numbers 1-212-555-7000 through 1-212-555-7099 all belong to the company. Each time an employee makes a call their telephone system finds any one of those numbers between -7000 and -7099 that isnt in use and uses it. The call is billed to that specific number, and the bills for all 100 lines are combined & billed to the company at the end of the month.
If the company couldn’t configure its phones to display 1-212-555-1000 as the Caller ID then customers would see random numbers in the range of -7000 to -7099 any time the company called them.
Good old caller id spoofing.