Do you constantly received angry phone calls and text messages from total strangers accusing you of spamming them or trying to trick them into falling victim to a phone scam? If so, you might be a victim of someone using your phone number without your knowledge via a technique called phone spoofing.
Before delving deeper into phone number spoofing prevention hacks, it pays off to understand how it comes to be in the first place. You’d be surprised to learn that phone spoofing can actually be used legally by businesses and individuals.
For instance, some lawyers might want to spoof their own office phone number when making a business call to a client from a personal smartphone after hours. But this feature is frequently abused by phone scammers who use it to hide their real phone number before replacing it with one that’s geographically closer to those they are targeting.
By displaying your phone number as the caller ID, scam calls tend to look less suspicious so their targets are more likely to pick up or respond. This can be incredibly frustrating for the victims and yourself.
Now let’s take a closer look at phone number spoofing prevention hacks. As a good starting point, it is important to let your carrier know of any suspicious activity pertaining to your phone number. Most service providers boast support pages for dealing with identity theft and phone spoofing.
There is also the option of setting or changing your voicemail password. After all, most voicemail or message bank services can be accessed simply by calling them from your phone. In the event that someone is spoofing your phone number, they will likely also have access to all of your messages.
For those who are yet to do it, you can create a password of security PIN for their messaging service or change the one they currently have just in case the spoofer has gained access to that information. Of course, it is also advisable that you create a new voice message as aphone number spoofing prevention hack.