Robotcalls

Recently, I’ve been getting calls that appear to present themselves as local cellphones.

I kept wondering how they did that: had they hacked into mobiles in Midland, or what?

Then a couple of calls came through from Japan. Japan? Are you kidding me?

As always I noted the numbers down and blocked them on my cellphone. As I was typing the numbers in, I notice that the pattern was similar to the Midland mobile numbers. The only difference was the leading digit “8”. A-ha!

They’ve been spoofing local mobile numbers to match my area code and first three digits, in order to fool me into thinking it was a friend, or local businesses. By using a Japanese switchboard, they could just leave the “8” off and they would seem ‘real’.

Well, I’ve got their number now…