Unsolicited calls from people calling me using their redial?

[Frustratedfool]

We have had a few landline calls since the issues in the uk yesterday, from elderly people saying they redialled a missed call from my number. But I never called them.

Has anyone else had this issue and knows the correct course of action to fix this?

thanks.

[Client62]

Scam phone callers at random choose a number to use as their Caller Id, thus making it harder for their victim to trace the call.

The unlucky random person being you that gets all the returned calls from older people who persist in calling back to unknown numbers.

Have a look at your number in  https://who-called.co.uk/

There may be no entries at all or a clue as to what the calls were about.

If folks call all you can say is you have the wrong number, please do not call again,  goodbye.

[Beth_G]

Hi Frustratedfool,

Welcome to the Community Forums!

Sorry to hear you've been receiving some unsolicited calls to your landline.

Client62 has provided some great advice - if you're able to give that a go and come back to us with an update, that would be great.

Also, are you having any issues making out bound calls or anything like that? Your landline service is showing as 'uncontactable' on our end which would indicate an issue.

Let us know

[Frustratedfool]

Hi. I checked the ‘who called me’ list and we are thankfully not showing there.

Our landline is working, though, so I’m not sure why it is showing as uncontactable?

[Beth_G]

Hi Frustratedfool,

Thanks for getting back to us, I'm pleased to hear your number is not showing on that site. 

Oh I see, in that case it's likely to be an error as this usually means that there's something blocking the line.

I've checked however and this doesn't appear to be a routing issue. Can you please let us know if you do receive any more calls of a similar nature? If you're then able to get time stamps from the caller of when they say they've received a call from you, we can investigate further.

Thank you

[Frustratedfool]

We had a call today at approx 10:40 and another at 11:12 and 11:14 the last two called from 01902871xx. 

All calls are from elderly people who are very confused and are using their call back option saying they are returning our call.

This is becoming a nuisance as I am disabled  and getting to the phone before it stops is a huge effort, but I need to get to the line as we have very elderly family who may need to speak to us urgently. This rules out a desire to use an answering machine.

If there is anything you can to do help these people and prevent our number from being spoofed, I’d appreciate any options available. Thanks.

[MOD EDIT: number edited in case it's an innocent number being spoofed]

[Beth_G]

Hi Frustratedfool,

Thanks for coming back to us, I'm sorry to hear these issues are still ongoing.

I'll pop you over a private message now so I can take your details and look into this further for you. We will most likely need to book in an engineer visit for this.

You'll be able to find my message over at the purple envelope.

Thank you

[Finmack]

I too have been getting unsolicited calls from people who say I have called them. All say they are returning my call having seen my number for redial. I have not phoned them and I am getting fed up telling people this. Today I have had 12-15 calls from numbers I do not know. Last week being away for 2 days there were 18 numbers on my phone I did not recognise. I had a VM engineer out who witnessed a call and he could not provide a solution or give a satisfactory answer as to how my number appeared on someone's phone when it had not come from me. He said he would check with his manager and call back on my mobile - but never did. So how does it happen and what is the solution, as I see other people in the Community have had similar issues. Any advice would be appreciated.

[Joseph_B]

Hey @Finmack,

Welcome back to the Community Forums and thanks for the post.

Sorry to hear you have been having this issue, in order for me to look into this for you, I will need to take some information in a quick private message, If you have not used this feature before you can access it via the envelope at the top of your screen.

Speak to you soon. Joe

[goslow]

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@Finmack wrote:

<snip>  So how does it happen and what is the solution, as I see other people in the Community have had similar issues. Any advice would be appreciated.

---

Most likely, your number has been used by phone scammers as a fake caller ID for their scam calls.

In the past, scammers used random, non-existent numbers for their fake caller ID. Now, they have taken to using real numbers, belonging to innocent people, unconnected with the scammers. A real-looking caller ID number adds a degree of authenticity to the scam call. Often the scammers will match the 'stolen' caller ID area code to the area code of the victim being called so the incoming call appears to be a local number.

The scammers tend to swap their fake caller ID regularly so, with any luck, your number will drop out of use and the call-backs may well die out on their own.

In the meantime, you could leave your voicemail on with a suitable message in place explaining the issue.