My family has been the target of a harassments campaign by a group of young teenage boys because my sibling has a small following on YouTube and for some reason these dweebs have decided to make it their life’s mission to bully my sib off the internet. Because Sib has fortified all means of communication online and is no longer reachable, the harassers have been contacting me and anyone associated with Sib by sending threatening texts and voice mails through spoofed numbers. The police are involved on Sib’s side of things, but I’m just curious how these idiots are managing to spoof their numbers to attack us daily. What’s the mechanism for this? How does it work?
In: Technology
Basically: there’s nothing in the phone system to make sure caller ID is not lying. It’s just data that gets sent with the call and nothing in the network validates that the reported number is correct. There’s not even *a way to validate*.
It’s like the return address on a mailed letter. You can put anyone’s address there. While the letter is in your personal mailbox is the only time someone might notice something’s wrong. Once the letter’s in a bin with 100 other letters there’s no longer a way to prove it came from your house.
So if criminals buy the kind of phone equipment offices use, it’s really easy to make it lie about caller ID. This is even easier with “voice over IP” because that lets anyone with a computer access hardware that lets them spoof a number. There are legitimate uses for this which is why it exists, but when the decisions were made the equipment was so expensive only businesses could buy it, so there wasn’t any concern about security. Now individuals can afford it, and VOIP companies make it accessible to anyone.
It’s pretty bad but the powers that be don’t see it as worth the money or trouble to update things. Cases like yours are rare to them, and the only time the public cares is 30 minutes of “someone should’ve done something” after a tragedy occurs. Your best option is to constantly report it to police and hope that you annoy them enough that they start constantly bothering the people who can investigate. The odds aren’t great. 🙁
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