Happy Monday - someone is using my main business number in a robocall scheme

HCHTech

HCHTech

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Pittsburgh, PA - USA
Well, this is new. We're getting bombed with calls from folks in random area codes (not near to us) that said they were called and this number was left. No message, apparently. If I search my number, after my normal listing gets a hit for "Nomorobo" a robocall blocking service. Their site says my number is a robocall, and the last activity was detected 24 seconds ago. Recommendation: "Be Cautious". Awesome.
 
Yep - I think we'll have to just ride it out and hope they move on to using another number soon. You can report to the FCC - probably a waste of everyone's time, you can change your number (wow, we really don't want to do that, we've had the same number for 24 years), or you can grit your teeth and put up with it, just like if your email address gets spoofed.
 
Well, the phone is still ringing with out-of-town numbers, but the angry voicemails are dying down a bit. I know scammers have been spoofing local numbers in the caller ID for a while now, but this is the first time I've heard of targeted spoofing - using a number from a real tech support company as the caller ID for a fake tech support company. Spear-Phishing for robocalls? Spear-Spoofing?

Anyway, I'm optimistic they will move on to the next victim soon and I can start assessing the damage. I'll bet they got the number with a bot-web scraper. I'll have to check with my web guy to see if the number is directly in the HTML anywhere instead of displayed as an image - although that is just a thought. Verizon tells me my number has been reported a "few dozen times" by callers as junk, so that may be the lasting damage.
 
Curious what carrier/service you use for your primary number?

FCC recently started encouraging "STIR/SHAKEN" only since 2020/2021
www.fcc.gov

Combating Spoofed Robocalls with Caller ID Authentication

Caller ID authorization is a new system aimed at combating illegal caller ID spoofing. Such a system is critical to protecting Americans from scam spoofed robocalls and would erode the ability of callers to illegally spoof a caller ID, which scam artists use to trick Americans into answering...
www.fcc.gov www.fcc.gov

Sorta like...SPF...for phones.
 
In the end, other than the major PITA it will be dealing with this so long as your number is being used for this, I doubt there will be any long term damage.

I can't imagine most of us have not experienced seeing our own phone numbers showing up on our caller ID for an incoming call, which is an impossibility.

None of this is new, or unusual, sadly. While some people have Etch-A-Sketch memory, a very great many more do not.
 
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I see this morning on the "Nomorobo" (so clever....get it? :rolleyes:} site that I'm still on the list, but the last activity was 18 hours ago, so I'm hopeful the bad actors have moved on to the next number. It looks like the only lasting damage is reputational, but that listing only shows up if you directly google the number, so hopefully it won't affect us much. I checked a few sites where you can lookup phone numbers, and see us listed as a robocall (6 reports, no comments) on findwhocallsyou.com. None of the other places I checked have us listed, so yea for that, I guess.

Edit: And just like that, the nomorobo site has our number as "xxx-xxx-xxxx is an Unknown Caller - We have no other information about this number". That was unexpected, but perhaps gives a glimpse into how those sites work!
 
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