As I continue my vigilante journey, I am coming to the realization that my army is fighting with muskets.
What I need, what we need, is to upgrade to the Sherman Tank of weapons - a call system with spoofed caller ID. From what I hear, there's an open source phone system called Asterisk which runs on Linux. I don't know much about Asterisk or Linux, but I do know you can set your caller ID to whatever you want, so that has certainly piqued my interest.
This will get past one of the countermeasures I've outlined below - blocking me based on my area code. Not all the pharmacies are doing it, and the ones that are seem to be turning it on and off, but changing my caller ID on the fly would seem to solve this problem.
Imagine if I could devise my script to show random numbers on their end. Now that is the kind of tool we want in our arsenal.
I will keep you updated on my progress.
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Asterisk includes functionality to set your outgoing phone #. This does assume that the phone # you select is valid for you to use, e.g. if you had a block of 100 phone #'s assigned to you, you could select between them at-will. However, you can only use a phone # that your VOIP provider lets you use.
Just to be clear, it's not Asterisk that gives you this ability, it's the VOIP provider not restricting what you claim as the outgoing phone #. Also, this may only apply to the Caller ID data that's sent; ANI (used on toll-free numbers) may still correctly identify your number.
Lastly, keep in mind that intentionally misrepresnting your phone number could lead to negative situations, e.g. accusations of fraud. If you are able to do this, keep in mind what phone #'s you're using, and that they may correlate to real people/entities, some of which may be displeased to have been drawn into this, and will be looking first to the person who first used their number in this manner.
Thank you for these comments. Certainly something to think about - the last thing I would want to do is unintentionally victimize someone else.
If I did somehow have the ability to do it, though, I would use the TV phone numbers (xxx-555-xxxx).
But it sounds like my understanding of Asterisk is off.
Asterisk would be overkill I think; there are websites that spoof your CID though. They came under some heat a while back, likely as a consequence of that jerk who piped up about writing another utterly useless law to ban CID spoofing. Our laws don't affect our indian friends, but they could interfere with our own efforts.
Again, I like your creative wardialing and conferencing techniques against the bastards. I wouldn't assume that you're costing them money in phone time though; I suspect they have sweet deals whereby they pay next to nothing for calls in or out. They're on VOIP of some sort, which is cheap enough to cause this problem in the first place; their cost per call is so low that they can afford to be stupid and call multiple times per day even when we hang up on them every time.
It's clear that they just improvise their CIDs mostly: I have a long list of 'em and they're often random or sequential digits, area codes which, if they exist in US at all, are all over the map. They're in India (do ya love the wild guesses over at the whocalled site about where they are--I can't believe anyone could mistake those thick, distinctively Indian accents for anything else!), and just making up CID numbers when they bother to use any at all.
Are you CHARGED for those incoming calls to your cellphone?? I should think that your carrier would bear some responsibility to protect you against these calls, on the basis of cost if not annoyance. Sniff around and maybe check with FCC and/or local regulators. It's like the carrier is forcing you to put money in a safe every month, then refusing to lock it, leaving the door wide open. That's the sort of thing that cries out for a class action suit, I should think.
Y'know, I wouldn't be surprised if these turds were responsible for most of our email spam too; if they sold our phone numbers, they'd sell our email addresses. BTW E. Europe IS the center for spam, with China second I think. For an entertaining tale of a guerilla action against email spam, google "blue security." I was there. Exciting stuff.
check out caller id spoofing from the zero group. Blog owner, I'll give you a free card!
http://thezerogroup.com/
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