So you’ve seen a local number pop up on your phone and figure it’s safe to answer. Then it turns out to be a telemarketer… that’s Caller ID Spoofing. And fraudulent Caller ID Spoofing is on the rise.
Caller ID Spoofing is a practice used by some telemarketers and fraudsters to disguise calls so that they appear to be coming from a different phone number.
My husband returned a call to a local number and the poor guy on the other end had no idea what he was talking about. He informed him that his cell phone number had been hijacked by a telemarketer.
Jim Gibbs, owner of Windsor Starters Powerhouse, recently had his number highjacked and recieved numerous calls complaining about his rude salesman.
I personally get them on my cell phone. The first six digits are usually the same as my phone. I figure it must be someone local, but I don’t recognize the number. I’ve fallen for it a few times. Now I just let it go to voicemail. And if they don’t leave a voicemail, it was probably a telemarketer.
“… in 2013 we had 134 calls for the whole year and in 2015, as of June, we had over 472,” RCMP Cpl. Josée Rousseau with the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre tells Yahoo Canada News.
A lot of these calls are about being a good customer to WestJet, Air Canada, or a large hotel chain. Other scams involve calls appearing to come from the Canada Revenue Agency or a utility company, demanding payment for an overdue account, asking for a credit card number. Be sure to contact these companies directly and complain about nasty telemarketing being used for their companies. And report the number used when calling you.
“We recommend that Canadians never give out their personal information over the phone to an untrusted source,” says Telus spokeswoman Jill Yetman. You can simply ask for the caller’s name and phone number and call them back. If they’re a scam, they’ll probably hang up.
More info here – Yahoo Caller ID Spoofing article