<p>People here are so creative in coming up with ways to catch phone scammers. I’ve got a new challenge that I haven’t seen mentioned before.</p>
<p>We have Comcast land line. Got a call this morning, that shows up on the TV screen and phone caller ID as coming from our own phone! It had our last name, and our land line number. I had no idea this could be done. Anyway, I decided to answer and it ended up being a robot call, telling us that we still had time to amend our credit score. So I hung up. But what I want to know is, how are these companies making these calls so that it’s showing up as our own number? That’s going to put a serious damper on my ability to screen calls and not answer ones coming from numbers I don’t recognize. </p>
<p>I registered with nomorobo. It works very well but one thing I’ve noticed is when I have a voicemail on the landline and call my own number to get it I am given instructions to go through an extra step. I have wondered about it and I think this thread just explained why. </p>
<p>I also got that call. What is interesting is that our Quest phone account and Comcast cable/internet are in my name and the caller ID showed my husband’s name. I have heard that it is a violation for a solicitor to not show a caller ID and IMO this is really stretching it.</p>
<p>I’ve been getting calls from a “local” phone number. According to caller ID it would appear the calls come from somewhere within my small town, but if I call the number back it’s for a number not in service. By mistake I answered one of these the other day and was informed that the caller’s company had detected dangerous information on my computer-information they could help me remove. All I had to do was get on their website…</p>
<p>I was taking a break from work so I had a little fun with the caller. I pretended to be an earnest and concerned, but slightly dotty potential customer and made him walk me through the process of getting onto the site, (which I didn’t actually access.) “<a href=“http://www.?”>www.?</a>” “Okay wwwdot…” “Oh that’s wrong? Let me try it again. What was that website again?” In the meantime I kept asking questions about how they were able to identify me as needing help (“Through the wonders of the internet”!) and told longwinded stories while we waited for things to load. After about 20 minutes of this he was getting a bit frustrated so I finally “got on the website.” Unfortunately, I told him, I was getting an error message, which I read out to him slowly. "Error…message…You…are…full…of…[you can guess the last word]. At first he seemed confused, then caught on. I was surprised at how long he let me berated him for scamming people and that he bothered to get a supervisor on the line, who I also proceeded to try to shame. All in all it was probably a waste of a a half hour of my life but I have to admit that I enjoyed it and I hope it will result in my number being pulled from this particular calling list.</p>
<p>Lol, Sue. Good one. Mr B has been getting these “local calls” on his work mobile phone, but when he called back, a real person answered and was confused. They were probably spoofing some random local numbers. </p>
<p>We have a AT&T land line. Yesterday I was out shopping my 13 year old saw a call come in with the caller id as my name and our phone number so he answered it because he thought it might somehow be me. As soon as they started in on our credit score he hung up. I would hope most other people would to.</p>
<p>Thank you, Thank you zoeydoggie for the nomorobo tip! I had to jump through some hoops to get it but it is now on my line and working perfectly. I had to upgrade to FIOS Digital Voice at no additional cost from FIOS Voice, download some files etc. which took me a while but it was well worth it. I hear the phone stop after one ring now and I smile :)</p>
Mr B has been getting these “local calls” on his work mobile phone, but when he called back, a real person answered and was confused. They were probably spoofing some random local numbers. </p>
I would hope most other people would to.</p>