Spoofed caller id scam

[kevin1988]

I got a call today someone pretending to be from Virgin Media.  they spoofed someone's actual phone number can Virgin Media do anything to stop this happening. I actually called the number to see who it actually was an it was an elderly gentleman who said he keeps getting people calling back.     the scam call was originating from overseas. 

[Vinegar]

Short answer, no VM can’t do anything about this, and neither can any other telephony provider. When the system was designed and setup, decades ago, nobody gave any consideration to how it might be misused in the future, not dissimilar to the way that email is ‘misused’ to send spam and malicious messages claiming to be from someone else.

[goslow]

Not too much VM can do about this, unfortunately.

There are legitimate reasons that genuine companies might want to present a certain caller ID when making outbound calls (such as showing a general switchboard number for the business). The scammers have simply abused this feature to screen their identity when making scam calls.

Scammers used to use random or non-existent numbers as their caller ID but the telecoms companies have been more successful at screening these out. The scammers have since taken to using real phone numbers, from businesses and residential customers, as their fake caller ID. Quite often they try to match the area code of the fake caller ID to the area code of the people being called. This adds an appearance of authenticity to the call when it appears to come from a local number.

Mostly, for the unlucky people who have had their numbers 'stolen' by the scammers, the fake caller IDs are usually swapped fairly regularly so the unwelcome call-backs should not last too long.

The best defence individual VM landline customers have against receiving scam call is to install some kind of call screening device such as

https://www.truecall.co.uk/category-s/116.htm