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Spurious call-backs after scam call

PeterMartinez — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 10:28:46 GMT

Just reporting a strange episode to see if anyone else has experienced it.

I received a call from "unavailable". I picked it up and it was the well-known educated English voice from "BT" telling me there was a problem with my internet connection. I put the phone down. But the strange thing was that over the following hour or so I received four calls from real people in other parts of the country, ordinary landline subscribers who had evidently received a silent call from MY number and were phoning me back. I had certainly not phoned complete strangers so I speculate that somehow the scammer had made these two calls and "impersonated" my number. I understand this can be done if the call originates from a Voice Over Internet Protocol connection. This sounds like a fault in the scammer's system to me!

Peter M

Re: Spurious call-backs after scam call

Gary_C — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 10:33:42 GMT

I suppose the spoofing system uses the last successful number to spoof the next call maybe.
What a pain.

Re: Spurious call-backs after scam call

PeterMartinez — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 15:19:05 GMT

I received several more calls from puzzled strangers over the following hours. The first two were within a few seconds of the initial scam call, from people who said they had received silent calls. I understand this can result from a call centre with not enough operators to pick up automated outgoing calls as they are answered. The later call-backs were from people who had dialled 1471 to see who had tried to call them earlier.

It would seem to be too easy to "fake" the caller's number and this makes the display of the caller's number ineffective for the purpose of verifying the authenticity of incoming calls, and as this story shows, is resulting in a new kind of nuisance call.

Peter M