Fake Call

I’d a call from someone in Ireland who missed a call from me and had a very similar number.

I think they received a call from a faked caller ID that was using my number.

This stuff is getting very annoying.

Got a 1 second phone call from Azerbaijan this morning. Operator must have noticed they forgot to reroute through an 'Irish' number and hung up ASAP.
+994662183333

Super-Rush wrote: »

Somehow I've started to get these calls lately.

The numbers I've been getting calls from are trying to look like Bank Of Ireland.

When the phone rings my phone displays the number as 0353766801772.

I never answer and always decline and when i get e text to say I've missed a call, it displays the number as 076 680 1772. Very feckin crafty and would catch out an older person every time.

The missed call text is possibly generated by your voicemail service. It will display the text as if it's from the number you've missed the call from.

That call is full blown inbound fraud with a VoIP number that will accept calls.

It would be worth alerting the Bank of Ireland helpdesk about that 076 number.

ComReg should be going after providers hosting those kinds of numbers though. If there's a report of fraud, it's not that hard to just get someone at the VoIP provider to call the number and investigate and if it's fraudulent activity the service should be suspended.

If they don't do that, I think they should lose their licence to interconnect with the telephone network.

Flinty997 wrote: »

If there no way to track a large volume of calls all coming from the same location? Even internationally.

They buy VoIP services, likely using stolen credit and debit card details. They may have thousands of accounts in many locations, including here.

They then route calls in reasonable looking volumes through each, so they don’t necessarily get caught by any simple filters and the VoIP companies don’t know it’s not legitimate traffic.

What they could do though is block calls originating from outside Ireland displaying a +353 Caller ID or at least strip the caller ID off it. If the call came up as INVALID ID, you might not answer it.

They need to target them at EU or even ITU level.

The calls aren’t likely to be coming in through any of the traditional telcos. They’re likely coming in on small VoIP carriers.

You can buy numbers almost anywhere in the world on those services. It’ll have to be regulated a lot better at international level.

Only if you set your caller ID to fake an Irish landline or mobile number.

If you’re using an Irish or Irish licence holding VoIP service while abroad, it’s a completely legitimate user of Irish caller IDs & most likely has a soft switch & gateway into the public networks here. That’s not an issue.

They’re going to have to sort this out though, as it’s just not acceptable to have random people being able to pose as any phone number.

A VoIP service should be restricted to using caller ID in blocks of numbers that it owns, or numbers that have been ported to it. If they present any other number, the caller ID at the very least should be stripped out.

If some random international VoIP service decided to use your Caller ID, it shouldn’t be possible.

As it stands now, if someone had access to a VoIP service like that and knew your mobile number, they could make calls that for all intents and purposes appear to be from you.

Absolutely no overseas VoIP service should be presenting Irish mobile numbers for example.

No non Irish licensed VoIP service should be presenting Irish phone numbers either.

That’s a ridiculously insecure system

You should not be able to set your caller ID to a number you do not own (have rights to use).

VoIP companies rent blocs of numbers which are licensed though regulators like ComReg, or they lease number ranges from larger telcos who hold those licences.

If they are allowing users to just set their caller ID to anything at all, that should be a flat breech of terms of use and they should lose the ability to present any numbers at all. Just delete the caller ID field in the signalling.

A telco who has no Irish number ranges or licence here has no business presenting +353 numbers and nobody other than an Irish mobile operator should be presenting Irish mobile numbers. They cannot possibly own them or have rights to use them.

You do not own any of your numbers. They assigned by a regulator to a telco that has a licence to use them.

There’s no legitimate use case scenario where you should be able to display your outgoing caller ID as absolutely anything you like and inbound calls from telcos that have no licence here but are displaying +353 should not be allowed to send that caller ID.

As it stands you could display your phone number as absolutely anything from a random number, to a private landline or mobile belonging to someone else, to an emergency service or state service in a country you’ve nothing to do with.

I mean why do you think you should have the right to display my mobile number or the French Revenue Commissioners?

Presenting someone else’s phone number is identify theft. There’s no other way of explaining it.

It is a ludicrous mess that is facilitating widespread fraud and rendering caller ID totally untrustworthy.

I would also add that most VoIP services, at least responsibly operated ones, do not allow you to set your caller ID to numbers that you do not have rights to use. You typically can only pick from your list of numbers, not just enter any string of digits as your outbound ID.

There is massive fraud going on, worth millions of $/€ and it is being in large part facilitated by the ability to present entirely spoofed numbers. The system has to be made much more secure.

If the telcos and regulators don’t tackle it, more people will simply give up on PSTN and mobile services and migrate to “over the top” VoIP services linked to IM - WhatsApp, FaceTime, Telegram, Signal etc all already have a large % of the market. They offer far more security, verify that an inbound call is who it claims to brand can easily block spam.

Failure to tackle this will simply mean the voice telephone network will be as useless as spammy email services & that will just mean a whole load more abandoned services & lack of revenue for telcos.