on 25-07-2021 07:28
Had a call on our landline yesterday. When I answered a male voice asked if If I had just called as our number had shown on his phone.
I asked him the number showing and he gave our landline number.
Told him no call had been made from our number and that was the end of the call.
Should I be worried that somehow my landline number has been cloned?
Answered! Go to Answer
on 25-07-2021 07:48
No reason for immediate concern. When fraudsters want to make outbound scam calls, mostly they want a UK telephone number that isn't associated with fraudulent calls showing on the recipients phone. These scam calls are operated as a commercial business from third world locations with weak law and order but adequate telecoms (so India in particular), and they "forge" the calling number by nothing more sophisticated than simply typing into the CLID field on their telephony dialling system whatever they want as a "Caller Line ID". That's passed on by telephone systems worldwide without any checks. Possibly they picked a UK number (yours) at random, but in that case they'll soon change it - the whole point of a random number is to escape call blocking systems that stop known scam numbers, international calls and withheld numbers. If it is soon changed then you can probably forget about it. Often they pick a legit UK call centre response number - so yesterday I had a very Indian-accented "Keith" calling me from a distant location, claiming to be from Amazon, with the CLID showed a Glasgow number, sadly he rang off before I could do my Olivier award winning "hapless scam candidate" act to waste his time. Sometimes they use BT, VM or other known business numbers.
See if this recurs and becomes a problem. If it does, get VM to change your phone number.
on 25-07-2021 07:48
No reason for immediate concern. When fraudsters want to make outbound scam calls, mostly they want a UK telephone number that isn't associated with fraudulent calls showing on the recipients phone. These scam calls are operated as a commercial business from third world locations with weak law and order but adequate telecoms (so India in particular), and they "forge" the calling number by nothing more sophisticated than simply typing into the CLID field on their telephony dialling system whatever they want as a "Caller Line ID". That's passed on by telephone systems worldwide without any checks. Possibly they picked a UK number (yours) at random, but in that case they'll soon change it - the whole point of a random number is to escape call blocking systems that stop known scam numbers, international calls and withheld numbers. If it is soon changed then you can probably forget about it. Often they pick a legit UK call centre response number - so yesterday I had a very Indian-accented "Keith" calling me from a distant location, claiming to be from Amazon, with the CLID showed a Glasgow number, sadly he rang off before I could do my Olivier award winning "hapless scam candidate" act to waste his time. Sometimes they use BT, VM or other known business numbers.
See if this recurs and becomes a problem. If it does, get VM to change your phone number.
on 25-07-2021 08:06
Scammers seem to currently be picking an area code (one of the latest is Bournemouth), & faking random numbers, some genuine some unused for a week or two, then moving on to a different code. The funny thing is these guys have little geographic knowledge of the UK, hence you could get a call from the Amazon call centre in Shetland or the BT one on the Isle of Skye.🤣
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on 25-07-2021 12:05
Thanks for your helpful info. I hope nothing will transpire as I would not want to go through the
hassle of getting a new landline number after having present one for a very long time.
on 25-07-2021 12:13
@keithrob wrote:Thanks for your helpful info. I hope nothing will transpire as I would not want to go through the
hassle of getting a new landline number after having present one for a very long time.
More bother than it’s worth TBH.
All numbers are recycled, so you could end up with a number previously used by a business, or someone with a bad debt, or even one another customer has got rid of due to nuisance calls!
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