What happens to phone numbers that were used for spam?
I live in the US and we've got elections coming up. Every day for the past several months, I get 3-8 text messages from political campaigns per day. I block them every time, yet they keep coming in.
My question is NOT how to stop them, but what happens to those numbers that I, and surely hundreds and maybe thousands of other people have blocked? What if an actual person gets that phone number and needs to call people? What happens then?
Because on a long enough time line, all numbers will have been used for spam.
22 replies
Like others, my phone number was targeted and spoofed. I got 7-10 callbacks that day. Hasn't happened since.
Hi! Spammers often dupe a real number for a bit, then change it up. My wife's office was the spammer's number for a day. They got a day of getting hundreds of "I'm reporting you to the police" and "go eff yourselves" calls, and then the spammer's moved on. The receptionist got a gift card from management for dealing with it.
I work in a 911 dispatch center. A lot of non-emergency lines for different police/fire/EMS departments in our county, as well as some lines for different county agencies like the department of children & youth, the coroner's office, etc. come into our dispatch center at least some of the time (after office hours, over the weekend, if their office is short staffed and no ones available to answer the phone, etc.)
One day, the scammers were using one of those 10-digit lines that came into us
And it was mind boggling how many people don't understand that they use spoofed numbers and tried to call them back
Got a whole lot of people wanting to report "me" to the police, which, i suppose, was actually kind of in my wheelhouse. Most of them were from way out of state though so not our jurisdiction.
Often those numbers are simply recycled. Telecom companies don't care if you blocked that number, they get paid the same for it.
Keep in mind that a lot of those numbers you see in spam calls are spoofed and not their real number either. Spammers often fake a number that's in your area code to look local, when in reality they could be on the other side of the world.
That's even more disturbing, because it means I don't have to wait for a new number to be living this nightmare; some spammer might be using my phone number right now.
I guess I'm just wondering if anyone's considered this might become a problem in the future and if they've done anything to address it proactively... but, right, when the fuck has anyone ever done that?
I once received a spam call from my own number. They spoofed my own phone number to call me.
Imagine if your email client let you just free-form type in the "From:" field. (off-topic knowledge: There used to be email clients that would do that)
That's sort of how caller ID works if you control the call.
In fact, just like an email is just a text file that you don't see (unless you view the source), caller ID is similar. It's all based on trust. There's no good current way to verify that stuff, so........ some spammers, instead of spoofing some random number for a while, will spoof each number they call as also the caller.
The most annoying version of this I've seen is calls coming in purporting to be from the number "1". Just one. lol.
Soon with AI it could be your voice on the other end of the line too. Or Grandma's. Or your Proctologist.
Or my grandma's proctologist!
It's happened. I've known a person who had gotten chewed out in some random phone call over a spam call they didn't even make. Some spammer was faking local numbers and one of them was his. One of the people who got spammed phoned the number assuming it was the spammer's and chewed him out for it.... took a few minutes of screaming at each other before they realized what was going on.
here in Canada there's been some legislative steps to combat spam calls, and they have been reduced but as long as there's money to be made spammers and scammers will keep trying.
Dang, that sounds like a fun conversation.
Reminds of a prank call connecting two Chinese restaurants to each other and them trying to figure out who is ordering what in their limited English before they switch to Chinese and start laughing.
Had that happen to me once in the 90s - worked at Domino's and someone called a Pizza Hut and added me to the call. Har har. I'm sure it was amusing to the person that did it, but it wasn't to me. Although I can appreciate the humour. Still wasn't funny to me. heh
You're correct but it's unlikely. Assuming there is no protection for this from the phone companies, there are 10 digits in a phone number which is 10 billion numbers. Making some assumptions, you have about 1 in 1.2 million chance to be struck by lightning each year. Round that down to 1 in 1 million, you're 10,000x more likely to be struck by lightning than have a spammer spoof your number. You don't worry THAT much about being hit by lightning. You'll be fine.
Caveats - lots of averaging going on.
Phone numbers aren't random, though. In the US there are fixed area codes and within that fixed exchanges, so the pool of available numbers i going to be short of 9999999999.
But, yes, those are some big numbers. But now with AI, who knows if spamming will increase to match.
What is this technique? I could perhaps send real looking messages from a bank and gets tons of money. Or somebody I'll intended could spoof my number to create issues between me and my family. How could telecom companies keep it happening?
Do bear in mind that a LOT of people think, "Oh, I know, I'll scam to make money." And a LOT of people put in a LOT of time and effort to do so. I'm not saying you won't outsmart them if you try, but consider that you're going up against a shitload of experience in scamming. If they're not doing something, it probably isn't workable. Probably. Not necessarily. People do come up with new stuff to try all the time.
It's possible, but not always that easy to do. Banks and Telecom companies do put some systems in place to try and prevent bad things from happening but it's a game of cat and mouse... Whatever you do, scammers will try and find tricks and other ways around it.
Exactly what you think, they are blocked if they call you. The block list is saved locally on your device, no matter who acquires the number.
Don't Android and iOS put blocked numbers into your account so those numbers are still blocked on a new phone when you log into it?
Na, iPhone stores them in Settings > Apps > Phone > Blocked contacts, android is similar. That information doesn't go to the carrier, though it will transfer if you put your new phone next to it and migrate all the data
(On android if you block someone, the texts still come to the phone, just in a folder that you have to go look for, like a filter basically)
Ah,, that's not so bad, then, especially thing I think phone-to-phone transfer is getting more rare as everything is being sent to the server.
Still considered locally, you just sync it over the cloud. It would be an issue if those blcok lists get shared by everyone. I guess some android version like mine has a report for spam feature, so that could be a shared list.