Security News > 2021 > November > US government securities watchdog spoofed by investment scammers – don’t fall for it!
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has issued numerous warnings over the years about fraudsters attempting to adopt the identity of SEC officials, including by phone call spoofing.
Call spoofing is where a scammer calls you up on your landline or mobile phone, claims to be from organisation X, and then reassures you by saying, "If you don't believe me, check the number I'm calling from."
Identifying the actual caller is as good as impossible in the case of a regular landline or mobile call, because the phone has no reliable way of identifying the person who dialled the call in the first place, or who is speaking into the microphone.
Even identifying the phone number of the calling line is troublesome, because the Caller ID data that's decoded and displayed on your device is unauthenticated, and therefore unauthenticatable.
You might want to call someone from a call centre, but to show up on their phone with a toll-free number or a central switchboard number for any return calls.
We've also had Naked Security readers report to us that they've had similar scam calls in the UK, where the calls came up with their own bank's real number, and the crooks opened the call by "Identifying" themselves as working for the bank.