Real Audio | How to Listen
If you have caller ID, you might want to think twice about trusting the information displayed on your telephone. As more people place phone calls over the Internet instead of the wired telephone network, identifying the person on the other end of the line is getting more difficult.
Starting late last summer, people all over the U.S. and Canada got phone calls from a Twin Cities phone number -- a recorded voice offering a deal on wireless phone services. When they called the number to complain, they were patched through to a small Minneapolis company that definitely was not selling Nokias or Blackberries. It was a company that provides janitorial services to area businesses.
Building Resources Corporation office manager Rhiannon Fisk fielded the complaints.
"Around Christmastime, the call volume started to pick up, and we got dozens and dozens every day," she said. " It got to the point where we just had to start ignoring them because it was affecting how we did business."
Understandably, the callers complained angrily about the unwanted telemarketing calls.
"I'll pick up the phone, they immediately say you called my house and I want you to stop calling, and take me off the list, and they usually just hang up," Fisk said.
Fisk sought answers from the company's telephone provider, Integra, but received none. She then complained to the Minnesota Attorney General. The AG's office told fisk that, while nothing could be done, it knew the likely source of the problem: caller ID spoofing. The shady telemarketers, wanting to avoid detection, made it look like it was someone else. It's a mystery why they chose the Minneapolis company.
Scammers have long known how to fake the source of e-mail. Since Voice over IP, or VOIP, sends voices as packets of data, it was perhaps predictable that telephone customers would start seeing a problem like e-mail spoofing.
"If you pick up you standard phone today, and you have caller ID, you can see which number is actually calling you, and you have a very high level of assurance that it really is that telephone number," said Stuart McIrvine, security researcher at IBM. Now, when you start to get into Voice over IP, it's very easy for someone to fake that number, so you think the call is coming from somewhere else."
Consumer advocacy groups are just beginning to field complaints about the problem. Jordana Beebe with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse says she's not sure how many people are being burned by caller ID spofing, but calls it a deceptive practice that should be stopped.
"Caller ID is there so that you know who is calling and you can make a determination about whether you want to take that call or not," she said. "And if for instance that technology is being abused so that you are duped into taking a call that otherwise you wouldn't take, we feel that consumers shouldn't be in that type of situation."
You don't have to be a skilled, devious hacker to trick called ID displays. In the past year, about a half dozen services have cropped up that use VoIP technology to sell caller ID spoofing, at five to ten cents a minute, to consumers. They go by names like "Telespoof," and "Camophone." They're marketed to people who want to hide their true identities, like bill collectors and private investigators. Only one caller ID spoofing service, responded to inquiries from MPR, but the owner wouldn't reveal his name, saying only that he believes his service is ethical and lawful.
Beebe of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse says new regulations and laws are needed to fight caller ID spoofing. But VoIP is largely unregulated. A spokeswoman at the agency that would most likely have jurisdiction, the Federal Communications Commission, did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
In the meantime, caller ID spoofing could get worse as more consumers and businesses switch to Internet telephone calls.
"What we're going to see is more people devote more time and energy into breaking it, because it's going to become more popular," said David Endler of the Voice Over IP Security Alliance.
Back at the janitorial services firm, office manager Rhiannon Fisk says that mercifully, her phone stopped ringing off the hook about a month ago. The calls ended as mysteriously as they appeared.
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