I despise telemarketers...

[sba55]

If they wouldn't hang up the moment you start asking for their company name and address, then I would. They know they're violating the law, so the moment you bring anything like that up, they release the call.

And the caller ID referenced a residential phone number in New Hampshire that's always busy.

Once you have the caller ID, it shouldn't be too hard to find out who that number belongs to. If the free reverse lookup services don't turn up anything, I'm sure you could find it with a company like Intelius in a few minutes.

After that, I would guess you're good to go. If they're faking their caller ID (which they probably aren't), then I'm sure there's a way to sue to number and get their name during discovery. I doubt you'd have to do that, though.....

-Felix

 

[jesse]

Once you have the caller ID, it shouldn't be too hard to find out who that number belongs to. If the free reverse lookup services don't turn up anything, I'm sure you could find it with a company like Intelius in a few minutes.

After that, I would guess you're good to go. If they're faking their caller ID (which they probably aren't), then I'm sure there's a way to sue to number and get their name during discovery. I doubt you'd have to do that, though.....

-Felix

It is extremely easy to fake your caller ID number with VOIP systems. Any provider that sells SIP trunks well let you forge the number to whatever the hell you want.

If I was going to get into spamming people over the phone you would have a hell of a time catching up with me. You could purchase SIP trunks on pre-paid credit cards and launch your SIP sessions from services such as Amazon ec2 also bought on pre-paid credit cards.

You could also launch SIP sessions from botnets and pay for all of it with stolen credit card numbers. If you have a hard time stealing credit card numbers on the internet you're an absolutely worthless player. Of course, operating like this, it'd be in your best interest not to be located in the United States.

You'd have to "sue" all the way up the chain from the POTN providers all the way up to the cheap SIP providers. In the end all they'd be able to give you would be the credit card number and an ip address--both of which are worthless trails.

VOIP is crazy easy to do really scary things with phones because it puts massive amount of telephone "power" in the hands of anyone. The good thing is that most folks don't understand any of this and it's not really that abused.

The law is too slow for the internet. The law eventually catches up with folks if they get complacent but many do never do.

 

[wsuffa]

I thought transportability was only taking a cell number to a different carrier. Is it actually possible to get a former land-line number assigned to a cell phone?

As Missa said, yes. You can transfer it to a cell, to an IP-based service (Vonage), or to another landline carrier.