Caller ID Spoofing

It should not all be on the “customer” who has to deal with the amount of spam and scam on a daily basis. It would be no different if there is a mobile and one is driving. It just shows as an unknown missed call.

Would that not inform the hospitals to change their methods / phone systems to show their caller-ID, or even send SMS messages? Or don’t they like to leave messages? Those who do not enable a message system have made a concious decision they don’t want to be bothered - by anyone for any reason, seemingly including emergencies.

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Some hospital systems do show their caller ID, being the main switchboard number, but a typical base hospital can easily have 1,000 extensions. If a caller rings back to a hospital, saying that they received a call from the hospital, no-one is going to be able to help them with who rang.

The one reason I have been given for hospitals/doctors etc not leaving messages is ‘privacy’. They don’t wont to disclose anything about the patient because they don’t know who might hear.

Trouble is, they don’t tend to look at the notes that tell them who they can talk to as they are ‘too busy’.

“This is [name and role] at [phone number]. Please return my call.Again my number is [phone number]” ← Privacy?

I agree, but one staff person told me that it may be a transgression of privacy to even disclose that the person had been/was going to see that doctor. I can understand it in a shared accommodation situation, but for families?

I think that the privacy protection is being taken tooooooo far by some, and totally ignored by others. It’s a tricky thing, as not everyone is open with their families about their lives and medical things.

Perhaps just the return phone number? A patient should recognise it, and others might recognise it too so it is a house of cards, er I mean a game.

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I agree, but the funniest part of all is that all this talk of privacy and having privacy and protecting privacy is just nervous spasms of the privacy corpse - dead years ago. RIP. I called a government department to confirm an appointment for one my children, who lives with me/shares my address, phone number, same email domain and said appointment was paid for on my credit card, and they told me the date of the appointment (made months out) couldn’t be divulged without my childs consent due to privacy concerns. I told them my child was a minor and unable to give legal consent until he became an adult, and that as his parent and legal guardian and payer of his bills I had every right to the information. I have no idea if all of that is actually true in a legal sense - but she gave me the information so it must have sounded convincing - but what about privacy? did I just bully my way through a real policy (which in theory I shouldn’t be able to do) or is it all B/S anyway and these people just make it up on the fly to avoid having to actually to real work, like looking up an appointment? I’m glad I’m not a cynical person …

As for systems that don’t send their number, even a switch number - that is because someone in the organisation either didn’t know what they were doing or made that choice, not because it can’t be done.

And call blocking - if a number isn’t in my personal address book - it goes to messages. If someone doesn’t leave a message then it wasn’t important or they failed to try hard enough - and in that sense I’m the honey badger :slight_smile: As @PhilT said - a vague message is fine, even a “please call 555-xxxx and ask for extension 4269” is fine …

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A bit later, but this US case popped up and is instructive of the abuse that happens.

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Edit: the title has been corrected. (plse note extra “o” in title as bot would not except the string with double “o”.)

This is related to many threads here from scammers to nuisance callers where persons outside any Australian jurisdiction are purporting to be in Australia. The journalist in the linked article says it will most likely get worse and I agree.

Does anyone else here think we should be starting to ask the Minister/Shadow Minister for communications if they are going to do something? I would think there would only be positive support from the electorate in addressing this issue. A start would be penalties for telcos allowing unauthenticated traffic on their network.

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Our local Neighborhood Watch often has the local Police expert talk about cyber crime and also phone spoofing, I was concerned that if now even the Tax Office uses your voice to identify you " In Australia Your Voice Identifies You" then anyone taping your words on a phone could potentially create your Australian Government login. He was unaware of this but did mention lots of callers just want you to say the word “Yes” ( do you have solar panels?) because with US banks voice recognition of you saying “Yes” in now part of how to access your bank accounts by phone. He thought Australian banks may pick up this technology or people could unknowingly open USA bank accounts for money laundering. So just saying Yes to phone scammers is moving way beyond an annoyance. We should be raising this with the people who can do something about it - Federal politicians.

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I am not sure if this is possible, as long as we have caller ids attached to a phone. The only way may be to have some sort of authentication software which verifies the caller id matches the unique id of the user. This might be more possible when moving to VOIP technologies as IP addresses could be potentially used for such verification…however, this may only work for static IPs and not dynamic ones.

Maybe others may know if spoofing could be prevented without a major disruption to the existing network.

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I’m not a full bottle on phone network protocols but I expect because telcos use id’s to manage billing there are ways to manage the integrity. If the onus was put on telcos to ensure the caller id was authentic then a means would be developed.

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We’ve been free from Spam calls for months, if not years, but I inadvertently answered a call that hung up with the recorded “Good Bye”. Since then we have been getting spoofed number calls. Very crafty, using a number we would regard as “local”. Since then I have been letting calls go through to the answering machine while I do an on-line search. Most come up as legit with no complaints of spam. Eg. Blue Care, private residences in Tasmania, Melbourne etc. But none leave a message, and we have no relationship with them. Also got a couple of 11 digit numbers. Fortunately we have Caller ID.
My husband has been banned from answering the phone as he is not savvy to scams as I am.
We are lucky to get and make 2 calls a week. So ringing many times a day is quite annoying.

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Yes, this is a serious issue and needs a solution!

Add our frustration with one or more calls every day that do not respond when answered or leave no message. And if you call back the number often does not

And NO IT’s NOT Acceptable that as consumers we should have to change our behaviours to circumvent these calls. It’s possible to suggest numerous reasons why you can’t just let it all go through to the message bank!

For older Australians who deal with government departments, many of these are difficult to return calls to! Miss a call and you may soon be back in the endless queue of prompts. For private business eg ‘health fund, super, banks’ it’s back to the long phone in trap system that tries to do anything but connect you to some one to talk to.

For smart mobile phone users you can add filtering based on your contacts list. For the cordless wall phone not so.

Technically there may not be a simple solution without an international agreement on how calls our routed.

Per Geoff2 it would be great to have some expert feedback on what is and is not possible.

It may also be that VOIP is even more difficult to manage given it is a universal technology that can function independent of telcos and access anywhere globally thru VPNs?

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Yes you can create a whitelist on most mobile phones, I don’t think it is plausible though to capture all numbers, for example will you risk the ED number being blocked when a family member is rushed there?

While trying to track back a nuisance number calling my phone recently a came across the so called owner of the number, an IT business that offers Australian numbers to anyone worldwide. Could not work out physically where the people behind it were but I guess it is one of many that open the doors for residents of Australia to be harassed and scammed.

A question for any Choice staff, is this organisation on ACA’s radar?
http://www.commsalliance.com.au/

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An interesting one … I was outside and heard our cordless phone ring, but not the Telstra wall phone. The caller hung up before reaching the answering machine. Caller ID was 05551. Googled ‘Australian phone 05551’ and got nothing.

We kept the Telstra wall phone because it has a loud ring, the cordless is hard to hear outside even at the top of its volume, but I can put the scam numbers on a different ring-tone. We are on Satellite NBN, so we have to keep our copper land-line as the internet is not reliable (so the NBN tells us).

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Sitting down having dinner the other night and the landline started ringing, the handset was on the table so I looked at the display and it appeared to be a mobile. So I answered it and they got me, “Hello this is Pauline Hanson” grr.
I shot off the following email.

"Hello Senator Hansen,
If you send your home telephone number to myself I will call you at home during your dinner time and play a recorded message to you.

Sound fair?

If not then don’t do it to me!

People and organises that treat me like that go down in my opinions of them.

Regards"

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Thanks for the heads up @Geoff2. We are aware of the Comms Alliance and have referenced them in some our submissions on the issue.

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https://www.acma.gov.au/articles/2019-11/acma-recommends-immediate-action-combat-scams

Hopefully they can get telcos to have some sort of authenticity for CIDs.

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It would be interesting to see how it is done.

There has been some media about creating a known phone list which could be used to filter unknown numhers…but I expect that this will push the scammers into finding a way to spoof real numbers to bypass this potential block.

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