A technique regularly used by direct marketers makes it possible to imitate your telephone number to harass potential victims.
Cold calling is a real nuisance for many smartphone owners. If you use a phone, it is highly likely that you have already received a call from an unknown person trying to talk to you about insurance, a contract or a juicy sale. Obviously, these proposals often border on scams and will mainly drain your bank account for services that you will surely never need.
But did you know that some telephone canvassers can also pose as an individual, especially a loved one? This technique has a name: telephone spoofing. It allows a person, service or company to hide their own number to display that of another entity. This is particularly useful when the person needs to call another number and does not want to display their own number, so as not to be recognized or blocked. The worst is that sometimes it is your own number that is used by these unscrupulous interlocutors!
Spoofing is mainly used by two types of people: fraudsters and telephone canvassers. As a reminder, in France, telephone canvassing is regulated, in particular since a law launched on January 1, 2023 and which requires canvassing companies to use very specific numbers for their activities. Thus, users can identify these numbers and choose to ignore them when they receive their requests by call or message.
But the spoofing technique ignores this regulation by “borrowing” another person’s telephone number. This is why some people are sent messages on their answering machine ordering them to stop approaching them or even calls asking them not to call them anymore… As if these people had been at the origin of calls from canvassing!
Fortunately, spoofing may be living its last days. Since October 1, 2024, telephone operators have been ordered to block calls whose number displayed on a telephone cannot be authenticated. In other words, if the operator cannot correctly link the displayed number to the device making the call, they must block the call.
Unfortunately, this law currently only regulates calls made from or to landline telephones. The Banque de France defends itself by estimating that the vast majority of cases of spoofing recorded come from landline telephone numbers. For smartphone owners, there would therefore be little risk to fear.