Security News > 2023 > May > Phone scamming kingpin gets 13 years for running “iSpoof” service
Get the ability to change what someone sees on their caller ID display when they receive a phone call from you.
In the 12 months until August 2022 around 10 million fraudulent calls were made globally via iSpoof, with around 3.5 million of those made in the UK. Interestingly, the NCA says that about 10% of those UK calls, made to 200,000 different potential victims, lasted more than a minute, suggesting a surprisingly high success rate amonst scammers who used the iSpoof service to give their bogus calls a fraudulent air of legitimacy.
It's not any sort of ID. Those magic words "ID" and "Identification" shouldn't really be there, because a technically savvy caller could insert any number they liked when initiating the call.
In other words, Caller ID not only tells you nothing about the person using the phone that's calling you, but also tells you nothing that you can rely upon about the number of the phone that's calling you.
Caller ID "Identifies" the caller and the calling number no more reliably that the return address that's printed on the back of a snail-mail envelope, or the Reply-To address that's in the headers of any emails you receive.
The most important thing to remember is this: THE CALLER'S NUMBER THAT SHOWS UP ON YOUR PHONE BEFORE YOU ANSWER PROVES NOTHING. If you genuinely need to contact an organisation such as your bank by phone, make sure that you initiate the call, and use a number than you worked out for yourself.