How to set up a fake phone number

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/23/how-to-set-up-a-fake-phone-num.html

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I used to use Grand Central before it got Google poisoning and died. Twilio sounds good. I would be tempted to have the voicebot say “You have reached Rachel from Cardholder Services…”

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But here’s the fun part.

Yeah, why do I need this? Asking for a friend.

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Mark, if you use an Android phone, watch for the introduction of call screening. As I understand it, it’s basically a bot that answers your phone and announces that you have call screening on and that the caller should state their name and reason for calling. It converts it to text then displays that on your phone and makes it ring.

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And, no texting allowed?

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867-5309
Only fake number I need

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Wait. Rachel has been calling you too? She and I had been progressing to a very warm and personal relationship for the last six or seven months. She calls me on a regular basis and always sees attuned to my moods. I certainly hope that yours is just a casual friendship as I have recently been pondering on whether I should try to advance our relationship and offer her a key to my apartment.

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Callfire has numbers for $3 / month and 5¢ per minute. I ported my home number to it and added a Turing Test (Press 1 for ____) to thwart robo dialers. Honest callers don’t mind and their calls transfer to my mobile number. I give out this “home” number to companies that might share it elsewhere.

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How is this different from voice.google.com? Take voicemail messages. Set it to forward (or not). Make or receive calls from the computer as if it were a telephone with a fixed number they assign that never changes.

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It’s easy to set up a fake phone number. I just scribble random and fake phone numbers in the public toilet.

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Because it may not be easy to sleep at night with the knowledge that your random made-up number might be someone else’s actual real-life number?

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There’s always 5353456:

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American tourists have no end of fun calling their favorite ‘fake’ 555 numbers in Scotland, where that is a valid exchange.

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Jenny, is that you?

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Growing up outside Chicago and watching a lot of TV, I always think of 588-2300.

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I’m still waiting for regex phone number blocking. 469 area code, I’m looking at you.

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Empire Strikes Back

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01632 960xxx numbers (the British equivalent of 555 numbers) work well if you live in the UK. The mobile phone equivalent is 07700 900xxx.

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