I've received a couple of voicemails from nurses at distant hospitals, calling me as a wrong number and addressing me by the name of a doctor, asking what to do about a certain patient. That really worried me, for the poor patient, so I phoned back and left a voicemail message that hopefully let the nurses know that they reached a wrong number.
Could be one of our pre employment drug screening failures who’s given us a fake Dr number thinking it’ll save them longer from us reporting a positive.
Doesn’t work that way but they do try to delay getting fired.
One guy said recently (the agents keep a scoreboard of the best excuses) that he tried to not take amphetamines but he really had to mow the lawn before his drug test. LOL.
I could kinda feel his pain there. Hahaha.
I had also gone quite a while, but yesterday I received a call from a spoofed number (my local exchange) saying they were from Apple and that my account had been compromised. In this case caller ID wasn't helpful because it showed someone's name. Even though I didn't know the person, I answered. If I had just seen the number I would have known it was spoofed.
Maybe caller ID is not such a good idea. Just now a received a call that showed up as 'Agilent Tech', a real company. It was a SS scam. Again, I probably wouldn't have answered if I had only seen a number I didn't recognize.
The bad guys spoof any number they want. Your carrier looks up the real owner of the number and displays it to you. It’s truly utterly a worthless feature. Most of the real name/number databases are also three months behind on any changes.
There is no money in voice. It’s just a commodity data stream riding along with the data money maker. There’s zero investment or real standards work being done in it. It’s literally network garbage traffic. Kinda like USPS and junk mail. Except it doesn’t pay any bills. Just overhead.
Given the choice, carriers would just shut down voice PSTN interconnect to cell phones and tell ya to go use Zoom or something else. They’d just leave the price the same and charge you for delivering data.
Of course if they did that, spammers would suddenly decide if figuring out how to get into things like FaceTime would still turn a profit. LOL.
“I’d like to buy a thousand iPads please...”
Or whatever the next version of spam calls turns out to be.
But the PSTN has NO ability to control it. No matter what their marketing says about blocking features and such that they sometimes even get people to pay extra for.
