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Cellular Phone Forum / Providers / Cingular / March 2006strangers see my number on their Caller ID
Hi, My wife and I are experiencing an unusual problem that Cingular has proved unwilling/unable to rectify. For the past 2 weeks we each have received calls (5-6 per day) from strangers all over the country telling us that they received a call from our cell numbers. We each have a Motorola V180, with AT&T WS SIM. We've not been billed for any such calls, at least not yet. After hours on the phone with polite and as far as I could tell competent Cingular service reps, who in turn discussed our situation with the escalation, engineering and fraud departments, we were told that Cingular could not determine the cause of the problems and that we should switch our phone numbers. When I politely insisted that we had done nothing wrong and that putting us to the inconvenience of changing numbers was no solution, we also were afforded the option of cancelling our contract without penalty. Since we have a terrific (for us) AT&T plan, (signed up literally the night before the merger) I would prefer not cancel the contract. I know this is an unusual situation. Can anyone hazard a guess what's going on? Perhaps armed with more information we can persuade Cingular to try harder to get to the bottom of this without losing either our phone numbers or our favorable contract. Thank you, Michael >My wife and I are experiencing an unusual problem that Cingular has proved >unwilling/unable to rectify. [quoted text clipped - 19 lines] >harder to get to the bottom of this without losing either our phone numbers >or our favorable contract. Your numbers are probably being spoofed on Caller ID (by sleazy/disreputable telemarketers), which can be done from any digital PBX. If so, there's nothing Cingular can do. Your best bet *is* to change your numbers.  SignatureBest regards, SEE THE FAQ FOR CINGULAR WIRELESS AT John Navas <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cingular_Wireless_FAQ> > Your numbers are probably being spoofed on Caller ID (by sleazy/disreputable > telemarketers), which can be done from any digital PBX. If so, there's > nothing Cingular can do. Your best bet *is* to change your numbers. As usual when John goes to areas beyond his expertise, he provides answers that are less than correct. Only a telephone system (PBX or Key System) that has DID outbound capability can to this. Most systems can handle inbound DID, but outbound DID is entirely different - very, very few systems support it. You *can* spoof caller ID from a regular phone line IF the called party has a particular Caller ID chip (like the early Motorola chips) that allows a second 300 baud ASCII string to reset the initial string. Of course this is not possible to do with a cellular phone. Caller ID can be spoofed very easily over VoIP. And then there's SS7 level exchanges, but...never mind, its late. DecaturTxCowboy Wrote: > DecaturTxCowboy wrote:[color=blue] > color] [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > > Was that really neccessary? > > Note to self... if the Flaming Cowboy is posting, skip the thread. SignatureLord Vader Somewhere around Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:14:08 GMT, while reading alt.cellular.cingular, I think I thought I saw this post from DecaturTxCowboy <forgetit@bummer.com>: >> Your numbers are probably being spoofed on Caller ID (by sleazy/disreputable >> telemarketers), which can be done from any digital PBX. If so, there's >> nothing Cingular can do. Your best bet *is* to change your numbers. > >As usual when John goes to areas beyond his expertise, he provides >answers that are less than correct. But his answer *was* helpful, and mostly correct. Bottom line is that caller IDs can be spoofed by some phones, and there's nothing that can be done about it. That's all the original poster wanted to know, and the answer was "good enough". If everyone who doesn't give a 100% correct answer to all the questions, then people like you who do know everything will have to post full time to answer everyone's questions. You wouldn't want that, would you? :-) SignatureMarty - public.forums (at) gmail (dot) com "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others." - Groucho Marx Marty Wrote: > Somewhere around Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:14:08 GMT, while reading > alt.cellular.cingular, I think I thought I saw this post from [quoted text clipped - 28 lines] > "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... > well, I have others." - Groucho Marx I fully understand what you are saying. My point is simply this. Why did the Flaming Cowboy find it neccessary to bash J Navas? Many of his other posts are like this too. I found what he had to say to be a great addition to what j navas was already posting. I would have been fine with the post, if only he didnt feel the need to bash :-( SignatureLord Vader > Many of his other posts are like this too. As well as other posters that respond to Navas' comments. New to the newsgroup, huh? DecaturTxCowboy Wrote: > > Many of his other posts are like this too. > > As well as other posters that respond to Navas' comments. > > New to the newsgroup, huh? Maybe so, but it's what seems to be your personal hard-on for nava that draws the most attention. Nope, not new to the newsgroup at all > Maybe so, but it's what seems to be your personal hard-on for navas > that draws the most attention. I could copy and paste so many vitriolic post from others it would make General Sherman's march into Atlanta look like a family Sunday afternoon BBQ Somewhere around Sun, 05 Mar 2006 14:32:06 GMT, while reading alt.cellular.cingular, I think I thought I saw this post from DecaturTxCowboy <forgetit@bummer.com>: >> Maybe so, but it's what seems to be your personal hard-on for navas >> that draws the most attention. > >I could copy and paste so many vitriolic post from others it would make >General Sherman's march into Atlanta look like a family Sunday afternoon BBQ I can find all types of ill-mannered or stupid posts on usenet, too (as well as the world in general), but I don't feel any urge to copy them. Why not copy the good instead of the bad? It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument. -William G. McAdoo Marty Wrote: > Somewhere around Sun, 05 Mar 2006 14:32:06 GMT, while reading > alt.cellular.cingular, I think I thought I saw this post from [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument. > -William G. McAdoo My sentiments exactly ;) SignatureLord Vader > I can find all types of ill-mannered or stupid posts on usenet, too (as well > as the world in general), but I don't feel any urge to copy them. I would only feel the urge if someone really believes I am unique in making disparaging replies to Navas. As the original poster, I want to thank everyone for their repsonses. We'll likely port over to Cingular Orange and get new numbers. Thank you again. Michael > Somewhere around Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:14:08 GMT, while reading > alt.cellular.cingular, I think I thought I saw this post from [quoted text clipped - 19 lines] > > You wouldn't want that, would you? :-) >As the original poster, I want to thank everyone for their repsonses. We'll >likely port over to Cingular Orange and get new numbers. Thank you again. > >Michael > If you like the plan you are on, consider just persuading Cingular to change your number and keeping your current plan. Unless of course a Cingular orange plan would suit you better. In the end, that is what we decided to do. Rather a pain to change numbers, but our current plan is excellent for us. Michael >>As the original poster, I want to thank everyone for their repsonses. >>We'll likely port over to Cingular Orange and get new numbers. Thank you [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > change your number and keeping your current plan. Unless of course a > Cingular orange plan would suit you better. > [POSTED TO alt.cellular.cingular - REPLY ON USENET PLEASE] > [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > telemarketers), which can be done from any digital PBX. If so, there's > nothing Cingular can do. Your best bet *is* to change your numbers. Tech article this week also reports it's fairly easy to spoof numbers on Vonage, Skype, etc while making calls via the Internet. >Hi, >My wife and I are experiencing an unusual problem that Cingular has proved >unwilling/unable to rectify. >For the past 2 weeks we each have received calls (5-6 per day) from >strangers all over the country telling us that they received a call from our >cell numbers. We each have a Motorola V180, with AT&T WS SIM. We've not been >billed for any such calls, at least not yet. [ snip ] With lots of luck you can talk to these people and ask them, the next time they get a similar call, to aswer it and find out who it really is... But barring that: There are two possiblities. The first is that someone cloned your phone (pretty hard to do these days) and is making outgoing calls "looking" like you. But since you haven't been billed and the cellcos agree it's not you, then that's probably not the case. the other is a bit trickier. Caller ID is all too easily spoofed, both deliberately and accidentally. I'll leave out the ugly technical stuff, but if you have the right type of telco connection, you can send out pretty much whatever caller ID string you want. This has legtimate purposes - for example, all the lines from a hospital might claim to be from the main number. But... It can also be done by Bad Guys. For example, they might send across teh CNID of a local bank and then call people to "verify" their accounts and PINs... Most likely, since you're using a regular personal account, someone accidentally misporgrammed their PBX or VOIP circuit and it's sending out your ID string. Back tracking this is almost impossible, since there's no connection to you nor to your telco account, and the call could have originated "anywhere". (A fullscale law enforcement search could do this, but good luck getting anyone to do the work). One realistic possibility: have there been any are code splits recently in your area? It's plausable that the person programming the PBX/VOIp/whatever punched in your area code instead of the right one. So... you could try calling the likely numbers with the wrong area code and see what you get. (they could also have mangled some digits elsewhere in the ten digit string, in qhich case you're out of luck...) Signature_____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] > Hi, > [quoted text clipped - 25 lines] > Thank you, > Michael I am with sprint but I had the opposite problem I would call sbc in California and get sbc in Nevada..... and it turned out that sprint was having a problem with their equipment in Nevada and giving me a Nevada phone number not a California by the way this was the system that handled outgoing 1-800 calls.. I was courious? Would you have happen to have your home phone set to foward
calls to your cell phone?
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