strangers see my number on their Caller ID

Hi,

My wife and I are experiencing an unusual problem that Cingular has proved
unwilling/unable to rectify.

For the past 2 weeks we each have received calls (5-6 per day) from
strangers all over the country telling us that they received a call from our
cell numbers. We each have a Motorola V180, with AT&T WS SIM. We've not been
billed for any such calls, at least not yet.

After hours on the phone with polite and as far as I could tell competent
Cingular service reps, who in turn discussed our situation with the
escalation, engineering and fraud departments, we were told that Cingular
could not determine the cause of the problems and that we should switch our
phone numbers. When I politely insisted that we had done nothing wrong and
that putting us to the inconvenience of changing numbers was no solution, we
also were afforded the option of cancelling our contract without penalty.

Since we have a terrific (for us) AT&T plan, (signed up literally the night
before the merger) I would prefer not cancel the contract.

I know this is an unusual situation. Can anyone hazard a guess what's going
on? Perhaps armed with more information we can persuade Cingular to try
harder to get to the bottom of this without losing either our phone numbers
or our favorable contract.

Thank you,
Michael

---

› See More: strangers see my number on their Caller ID

[POSTED TO alt.cellular.cingular - REPLY ON USENET PLEASE]

In <IrONf.39875$pE4.27328@trnddc04> on Fri, 03 Mar 2006 03:09:28 GMT, "Michael
Jay Friedman" <[email protected]> wrote:

>My wife and I are experiencing an unusual problem that Cingular has proved
>unwilling/unable to rectify.
>
>For the past 2 weeks we each have received calls (5-6 per day) from
>strangers all over the country telling us that they received a call from our
>cell numbers. We each have a Motorola V180, with AT&T WS SIM. We've not been
>billed for any such calls, at least not yet.
>
>After hours on the phone with polite and as far as I could tell competent
>Cingular service reps, who in turn discussed our situation with the
>escalation, engineering and fraud departments, we were told that Cingular
>could not determine the cause of the problems and that we should switch our
>phone numbers. When I politely insisted that we had done nothing wrong and
>that putting us to the inconvenience of changing numbers was no solution, we
>also were afforded the option of cancelling our contract without penalty.
>
>Since we have a terrific (for us) AT&T plan, (signed up literally the night
>before the merger) I would prefer not cancel the contract.
>
>I know this is an unusual situation. Can anyone hazard a guess what's going
>on? Perhaps armed with more information we can persuade Cingular to try
>harder to get to the bottom of this without losing either our phone numbers
>or our favorable contract.

Your numbers are probably being spoofed on Caller ID (by sleazy/disreputable
telemarketers), which can be done from any digital PBX. If so, there's
nothing Cingular can do. Your best bet *is* to change your numbers.

--
Best regards, SEE THE FAQ FOR CINGULAR WIRELESS AT
John Navas <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cingular_Wireless_FAQ>

In <IrONf.39875$pE4.27328@trnddc04> "Michael Jay Friedman" <[email protected]> writes:

>Hi,

>My wife and I are experiencing an unusual problem that Cingular has proved
>unwilling/unable to rectify.

>For the past 2 weeks we each have received calls (5-6 per day) from
>strangers all over the country telling us that they received a call from our
>cell numbers. We each have a Motorola V180, with AT&T WS SIM. We've not been
>billed for any such calls, at least not yet.

[ snip ]

With lots of luck you can talk to these people and
ask them, the next time they get a similar call,
to aswer it and find out who it really is...

But barring that:

There are two possiblities. The first is that someone
cloned your phone (pretty hard to do these days) and
is making outgoing calls "looking" like you. But
since you haven't been billed and the cellcos agree
it's not you, then that's probably not the case.

the other is a bit trickier. Caller ID is all too
easily spoofed, both deliberately and accidentally.

I'll leave out the ugly technical stuff, but if you
have the right type of telco connection, you can
send out pretty much whatever caller ID string
you want.

This has legtimate purposes - for example, all the
lines from a hospital might claim to be from the
main number. But...

It can also be done by Bad Guys. For example, they
might send across teh CNID of a local bank and then
call people to "verify" their accounts and PINs...

Most likely, since you're using a regular personal
account, someone accidentally misporgrammed their
PBX or VOIP circuit and it's sending out your ID string.

Back tracking this is almost impossible, since there's
no connection to you nor to your telco account, and the
call could have originated "anywhere".

(A fullscale law enforcement search could do this, but
good luck getting anyone to do the work).

One realistic possibility: have there been any are
code splits recently in your area? It's plausable that
the person programming the PBX/VOIp/whatever punched
in your area code instead of the right one. So... you
could try calling the likely numbers with the wrong
area code and see what you get.

(they could also have mangled some digits elsewhere in
the ten digit string, in qhich case you're out of luck...)


--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
[email protected]
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]

John Navas wrote:
> Your numbers are probably being spoofed on Caller ID (by sleazy/disreputable
> telemarketers), which can be done from any digital PBX. If so, there's
> nothing Cingular can do. Your best bet *is* to change your numbers.

As usual when John goes to areas beyond his expertise, he provides
answers that are less than correct.

Only a telephone system (PBX or Key System) that has DID outbound
capability can to this. Most systems can handle inbound DID, but
outbound DID is entirely different - very, very few systems support it.

You *can* spoof caller ID from a regular phone line IF the called party
has a particular Caller ID chip (like the early Motorola chips) that
allows a second 300 baud ASCII string to reset the initial string. Of
course this is not possible to do with a cellular phone.

Caller ID can be spoofed very easily over VoIP.

And then there's SS7 level exchanges, but...never mind, its late.

"John Navas" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> [POSTED TO alt.cellular.cingular - REPLY ON USENET PLEASE]
>
> In <IrONf.39875$pE4.27328@trnddc04> on Fri, 03 Mar 2006 03:09:28 GMT,
> "Michael
> Jay Friedman" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>My wife and I are experiencing an unusual problem that Cingular has proved
>>unwilling/unable to rectify.
>>
>>For the past 2 weeks we each have received calls (5-6 per day) from
>>strangers all over the country telling us that they received a call from
>>our
>>cell numbers. We each have a Motorola V180, with AT&T WS SIM. We've not
>>been
>>billed for any such calls, at least not yet.
>
> Your numbers are probably being spoofed on Caller ID (by
> sleazy/disreputable
> telemarketers), which can be done from any digital PBX. If so, there's
> nothing Cingular can do. Your best bet *is* to change your numbers.

Tech article this week also reports it's fairly easy to spoof numbers on
Vonage, Skype, etc while making calls via the Internet.

[QUOTE=DecaturTxCowboy]DecaturTxCowboy wrote:[color=blue]
color]

As usual when John goes to areas beyond his expertise, he provides
answers that are less than correct.

[QUOTE]

Was that really neccessary?
Note to self... if the Flaming Cowboy is posting, skip the thread.

Somewhere around Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:14:08 GMT, while reading
alt.cellular.cingular, I think I thought I saw this post from
DecaturTxCowboy <[email protected]>:

>John Navas wrote:
>> Your numbers are probably being spoofed on Caller ID (by sleazy/disreputable
>> telemarketers), which can be done from any digital PBX. If so, there's
>> nothing Cingular can do. Your best bet *is* to change your numbers.
>
>As usual when John goes to areas beyond his expertise, he provides
>answers that are less than correct.
>
But his answer *was* helpful, and mostly correct. Bottom line is that caller
IDs can be spoofed by some phones, and there's nothing that can be done
about it. That's all the original poster wanted to know, and the answer was
"good enough". If everyone who doesn't give a 100% correct answer to all
the questions, then people like you who do know everything will have to post
full time to answer everyone's questions.

You wouldn't want that, would you? :-)

--
Marty - public.forums (at) gmail (dot) com
"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...
well, I have others." - Groucho Marx

As the original poster, I want to thank everyone for their repsonses. We'll
likely port over to Cingular Orange and get new numbers. Thank you again.

Michael


"Marty" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Somewhere around Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:14:08 GMT, while reading
> alt.cellular.cingular, I think I thought I saw this post from
> DecaturTxCowboy <[email protected]>:
>
>>John Navas wrote:
>>> Your numbers are probably being spoofed on Caller ID (by
>>> sleazy/disreputable
>>> telemarketers), which can be done from any digital PBX. If so, there's
>>> nothing Cingular can do. Your best bet *is* to change your numbers.
>>
>>As usual when John goes to areas beyond his expertise, he provides
>>answers that are less than correct.
>>
> But his answer *was* helpful, and mostly correct. Bottom line is that
> caller
> IDs can be spoofed by some phones, and there's nothing that can be done
> about it. That's all the original poster wanted to know, and the answer
> was
> "good enough". If everyone who doesn't give a 100% correct answer to all
> the questions, then people like you who do know everything will have to
> post
> full time to answer everyone's questions.
>
> You wouldn't want that, would you? :-)
>
> --
> Marty - public.forums (at) gmail (dot) com
> "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...
> well, I have others." - Groucho Marx

Lord Vader wrote:
> Many of his other posts are like this too.

As well as other posters that respond to Navas' comments.

New to the newsgroup, huh?

"Michael Jay Friedman" <[email protected]> wrote in
message news:IrONf.39875$pE4.27328@trnddc04...
> Hi,
>
> My wife and I are experiencing an unusual problem that Cingular has proved
> unwilling/unable to rectify.
>
> For the past 2 weeks we each have received calls (5-6 per day) from
> strangers all over the country telling us that they received a call from
> our cell numbers. We each have a Motorola V180, with AT&T WS SIM. We've
> not been billed for any such calls, at least not yet.
>
> After hours on the phone with polite and as far as I could tell competent
> Cingular service reps, who in turn discussed our situation with the
> escalation, engineering and fraud departments, we were told that Cingular
> could not determine the cause of the problems and that we should switch
> our phone numbers. When I politely insisted that we had done nothing wrong
> and that putting us to the inconvenience of changing numbers was no
> solution, we also were afforded the option of cancelling our contract
> without penalty.
>
> Since we have a terrific (for us) AT&T plan, (signed up literally the
> night before the merger) I would prefer not cancel the contract.
>
> I know this is an unusual situation. Can anyone hazard a guess what's
> going on? Perhaps armed with more information we can persuade Cingular to
> try harder to get to the bottom of this without losing either our phone
> numbers or our favorable contract.
>
> Thank you,
> Michael
>
I am with sprint but I had the opposite problem I would call sbc in
California and get sbc in Nevada.....
and it turned out that sprint was having a problem with their equipment in
Nevada and giving me a Nevada phone number not a California by the way this
was the system that handled outgoing 1-800 calls..

Originally Posted by DecaturTxCowboy

Lord Vader wrote:
> Many of his other posts are like this too.

As well as other posters that respond to Navas' comments.

New to the newsgroup, huh?

Maybe so, but it's what seems to be your personal hard-on for navas that draws the most attention.

Nope, not new to the newsgroup at all.

Lord Vader wrote:
> Maybe so, but it's what seems to be your personal hard-on for navas
> that draws the most attention.

I could copy and paste so many vitriolic post from others it would make
General Sherman's march into Atlanta look like a family Sunday afternoon BBQ

Somewhere around Sun, 05 Mar 2006 14:32:06 GMT, while reading
alt.cellular.cingular, I think I thought I saw this post from
DecaturTxCowboy <[email protected]>:

>Lord Vader wrote:
>> Maybe so, but it's what seems to be your personal hard-on for navas
>> that draws the most attention.
>
>I could copy and paste so many vitriolic post from others it would make
>General Sherman's march into Atlanta look like a family Sunday afternoon BBQ

I can find all types of ill-mannered or stupid posts on usenet, too (as well
as the world in general), but I don't feel any urge to copy them. Why not
copy the good instead of the bad?

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument.
-William G. McAdoo

Originally Posted by Marty

Somewhere around Sun, 05 Mar 2006 14:32:06 GMT, while reading
alt.cellular.cingular, I think I thought I saw this post from
DecaturTxCowboy <[email protected]>:

>Lord Vader wrote:
>> Maybe so, but it's what seems to be your personal hard-on for navas
>> that draws the most attention.
>
>I could copy and paste so many vitriolic post from others it would make
>General Sherman's march into Atlanta look like a family Sunday afternoon BBQ

I can find all types of ill-mannered or stupid posts on usenet, too (as well
as the world in general), but I don't feel any urge to copy them. Why not
copy the good instead of the bad?

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument.
-William G. McAdoo

My sentiments exactly

Marty wrote:
> I can find all types of ill-mannered or stupid posts on usenet, too (as well
> as the world in general), but I don't feel any urge to copy them.

I would only feel the urge if someone really believes I am unique in
making disparaging replies to Navas.