You receive a call from your child’s cell phone. When you answer, someone identifying themselves as a doctor asks you to come to the hospital right away. You rush to the emergency room in a panic, only to be burglarized while you’re away from the house.
This scenario is all too possible because of the increasingly intrusive world of spoofing, a form of robocalling using a voice-over-IP service such as Skype. How does it work? When someone uses a voice-over-IP service, they can self-designate a host number by simply entering it into the service. They can put it any number they want: your number, a friend or relative’s number, you name it. This is illegal, but that doesn’t stop would-be thieves.
Most of us have become hesitant to answer calls from unrecognized numbers, so this is a way for scammers to get around that. Once we answer the phone, we are at risk of falling for a scam that can cost us money and steal our personal data.
Spoofers generated 26.3 billion robocalls last year, which was a 46% increase from 2017. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says unwanted calls are the biggest consumer complaint made to the agency each year, to the tune of about 7.1 million complaints in 2017.
Unfortunately, it seems the situation will get worse. Although robocallers can currently mimic numbers, you are still often aware as soon as you pick up the phone that you’re listening to a scammer. Soon, you may receive calls from numbers you recognize, and when you answer, you’ll hear the voice of the owner of the number. This is becoming increasingly possible through the use of voice manipulation technology.
What can we do to protect ourselves from this invasion of spoofers without throwing out our phones? There’s the Do Not Call Registry, but that only deals with legal telemarketing calls. Spoofers, much like criminals who obtain illegal weapons, live outside the reach of laws intended to rein them in. 65% of unwanted calls fall into the category of spoof calls, not telemarketing calls. The Registry has its purpose, and we should take advantage of it, but we can’t rely on it to stop criminal calls.
Smartphones have a function for default call blocking. Unfortunately, spam callers rarely use the same number twice. Spammers can also add *67 before dialing your phone again, and just like that, they have bypassed that system. Plus, spoofers know upfront to call you from a fake number because those calls are nearly untraceable. Your default call blocking function on your phone can’t unmask a blocked call in order to stop it in the future.
That being said, you are not powerless to stop spam calls. First, you can send all unknown callers to voicemail, returning the call if it turns out to be legitimate. You can do this manually or use your phone’s call blocking settings to automatically send unknown callers to voicemail. For those who use their phones almost exclusively to communicate with those already in their contacts, this may be a viable option, although it may result in missing important calls.
You can also choose to use a call blocker app. Call blocking apps do a lot more than just sending calls to voicemail. Some of these apps (including a few offered by wireless carriers) flag and block unwanted calls, often taking it one step further by holding the offender accountable. This is done by providing blocked call unmasking, reverse phone call lookups, and phone call recording. Ultimately, these recordings can be used in case you need to take legal action against the spoofer.
We pay a price for the technology that makes our lives better, and one of those prices is robocalls which are becoming frighteningly sophisticated. Choosing a good call blocker app or opting to prevent unknown calls entirely can help you keep your data and resources safe.
Sources:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/06/tech/robocalls-scam-voice/index.html
https://www.trapcall.com/blog/caller-id-spoofing/
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/neighbor-spoofing-robocalls,news-27523.html
