Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/08/why-you-should-never-return-a.html
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Umm, hold on. It spoofs the caller id number that you see to be a harmless number, but when you return the call, it dials some high-charge number?
That’s completely broken.
eta: Reading the FCC letter, spoofing caller id is just an add-on warning, not that it’s done in this case.
19 Likes
I just let everything to to voice mail. If they don’t leave a message, I don’t return the call. I have special rings for my contacts, so if I don’t hear the “proper” ring, I just let it go.
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If it’s really important, they can send a letter.
https://www.google.com/search?q=phone+crying+stock+photo&tbm=isch
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Ya, that was my reaction. Trick me into calling an international number, shame on me; bill me for an international call when I dialled a local number, shame (and class action litigation) on one or more phone companies.
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You mean that Prince in Nigeria wasn’t my friend?
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Normally, I set the ringer to buzz at night. Guess I have to start turning on airplane mode or ‘do not disturb’. 
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Exactly. Is it customary now for people to call back numbers when the caller didn’t leave a message? Why would you ever do that?
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Got an incoming phone call yesterday that spoofed our own phone number.
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I have had numerous calls back from people I left messages for, only to discover after some confusion that they didn’t listen to the message. I can sort of understand this from friends, but I also get it from business people and people where I got the wrong number. Now I always ask “Did you hear my message?”
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until they spoof your contacts.
But yeah I let it go to google assistant and watch the transcript then block 99% of the time no one I want to talk to ever calls.
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I still have my phone number from Houston. Now living in California, everyone I know in Texas is in my contact list. So I never answer a caller from Texas. Get rid of your local number, get an out of state number. With a cell phone no one has to pay long distance anyway.
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I’m not sure how this would work except with landline phones, when the called party answers and the scammer sends a second “chirp” of Caller ID that changes the display on the phone to something that isn’t in Mauritania and then immediately hangs up. The mark then dials *69 to return the call and gets nailed.
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I got a spoofed call yesterday, when I looked it up it’s apparently Apple Care’s actual phone number but of course it’s not them. I don’t own any Apple devices so easy scam for me to avoid
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I don’t even check my voice mail.
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That sounds like a new wrinkle on the old, grim urban legend, “He’s in the house!”
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A few years ago I got a Windows support scam call when I was all apple.
They really need to do something to improve things. If all of us are ignoring the phone is it going to atrophy as a system?
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That happened to my parents three times the other day. Weird.
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Sometime in 1989, or perhaps 1990, I returned home from work to find nine messages on my answering machine.
This was unusual: I typically received zero or one or two messages in a day, or possibly three on a rare day — but never nine .
I replayed the messages. (This was back in the day when answering machines stored incoming messages on a cassette tape.)
The first eight calls were hang-ups.
The ninth call began with a woman’s voice saying “Will you accept a collect call from —”
— and then a brief pause —
Followed by a deep male voice booming: “— Turkey.”
No, I do not know anyone in Turkey.
http://gnomonchronicles.com/wiki/A_Foreign_Call_On_My_Answering_Machine_(nonfiction)
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If some jerk calls me at 2am you can bet I’m not calling him back.
Not that any of my stupid jerk-ass friends ever call me anyway. Lousy jerks.
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