Spoofing Caller ID & Unscrupulous Campaigns

Yesterday’s Birmingham News gives us a Chicago Tribune story on ’spoofing’ caller id.

Caller ID isn’t the trusty old crystal ball that it used to be.

Revered for years by persnickety consumers who like to screen their telephone calls, the premium service is now being appropriated by identity thieves.

Such scams are made possible by technology that enables con artists to manipulate the phone number and even the name that shows up on the unsuspecting recipient’s caller ID, allowing them to masquerade as officials of churches, banks and courthouses.

Known as “spoofing,” the endgame is to persuade consumers to reveal their Social Security numbers or other sensitive information.

Unscrupulous campaigns will use this, as happened in last year’s Birmingham City Council race. Last fall, pre-recorded phone calls from political millstone Bert Miller went out urging voters to support an incumbent city councilor – without that city councilor’s knowledge or approval. Caller ID falsely showed that the phone calls came from that incumbent city councilor’s home phone. The incumbent city councilor even received a call at home that caller ID showed to be impossibly from the incumbent’s own home phone.

While the calls purportedly supported the incumbent candidate, the idea apparently was that voters would be turned off by the association and vote against the incumbent. The whole effort was a bit clumsy and ham-handed (the incumbent won handily), but we can be confident that unscrupulous people will find more effective and sophisticated ways to use this.