That’s a fancy way of saying your phone number is showing as someone else’s caller ID when they make phone calls or send text messages.
Causes of Phone Spoofing
Phone spoofing actually can be used legally by businesses and individuals. For example, a lawyer might want to spoof their own office phone number when making a business call to a client from a personal smartphone after hours. Unfortunately, this feature is frequently abused by phone scammers who use it to hide their real phone number and replace it with one that’s geographically closer to the people they’re targeting. By displaying your number as the caller ID, scam calls look less suspicious so their targets are more likely to pick up or respond. This can be incredibly frustrating for the victims and yourself. It can even make your phone unusable if your number is heavily spoofed and you begin to receive a high volume of calls back from the phone scam victims.
How to Stop Someone from Spoofing Your Phone
There are some things that you can try that are recommended by most phone carriers.
How to Stop Receiving Spoofing Calls
If you’ve been a victim of a spoofed call, there are several ways to protect yourself from scammers like this in the future. You can also block numbers from your old-school landline, by the way. If you haven’t already, create a password or security PIN for your messaging service or change the one you currently have just in case the spoofer has gained access to that information. This could very well happen if they’re doing neighbor spoofing. This is when scammers use numbers to target those in an area close to you; they’ll move to a new neighborhood fairly quickly and that could end your troubles.
