from Hacker News

The Secret Sims Used by Criminals to Spoof Any Number

by sjreese on 8/22/20, 3:39 PM with 2 comments

• by ksaj on 8/23/20, 12:04 AM

  I remember years ago there were a lot of news articles about people spoofing numbers by using VoIP. Basically if you ran Asterisk or any other VoIP server, you could basically display whatever name and number you wanted.

  Then some good techies pointed out that business phones have been doing this forever, which is why you can have multiple direct lines, but the person called only sees the switchboard number. That's the proper intention of the feature.

  There are a lot of other ways to spoof numbers, too. If you're not technical, there are websites that give you a proxy number to call which does the spoofing for you.

• by Dahoon on 8/22/20, 4:06 PM

  Here we again see a clear example of the "Red scare V2". Is it bad or illegal? Call it Russian, even if sold in the US, by Americans and using American telcos. There's no link to Russia in all of this. The biggest market is the US.