Looking through my missed calls, I see I’ve gotten 18 spam calls in the last week. At this point I’m quite disappointed with both Verizon and the FCC.
What’s particularly concerning is that it seems spam callers are somehow aware of my location. Last month I traveled out of state to Texas. Since then about half of the calls are from TX area codes.
Has anyone else noticed a similar phenomenon? I know there’s nothing I can do at this point but silence unknown numbers and change my voicemail to the tone for a disconnected line.
It’s quite absurd how the telecom industry has let things progress to this point. I don’t see how it could lead to anything but a negative impact on their business from such a terrible customer experience.
What you are seeing is a common tactic, these spammers know you are more likely to pick up a number that is most similar to yours and they buy the data of recently connected phones from cell towers through aggregators.
You might find this podcast on the whole thing interesting:
The aggregate data is sold far and wide, and not difficult to obtain. Scammers and others buy these profiles in bulk, and then mine them for potential customers to call in the same way that "legit" advertisers use your profile to decide which ads to insert in your Hulu stream or on top of your smart TV program.
Wild guess, geolocation data collected from a phone, either from an app or even from normal website visits where the visitor can be identified and their ip address geolocated. Cross referenced with the phone number when queueing numbers into the auto-dialer, to choose an appropriate fake callerid. I wouldn't rule out the cellular carriers providing such a service themselves, but seems trivial to do with or without a carrier's assistance for data brokers. They could even make their usual bogus claims of anonymization, if an api accepted only a phone number, and only returned general loosely recent location information like city/state/county.