Capturing a phone call's true origin

[John F. Eldredge]

Does anyone know of a way for an Android phone to capture an incoming call's true origin number, or is that information only available to the phone company? In the last year, I have received about 1,000 calls (several per day) where the caller hangs up as soon as I speak. At first, I assumed it was a bot building up a list of answered numbers, but I am now starting to suspect I am being deliberately harassed. I served for several years as the newsletter editor for the Nashville Peace and Justice Center, a local progressive organization, so any harassment could be politically motivated. 

[Kent Perrier]

If they are spoofing their origin number I don't know that even the telephone company has the source in their records. Realtime connection logging might have it.

I let the google assistant screen all unknown numbers so I never see numbers not associated with names not in my contacts.Not really an option if you don't have

a Pixel.

Kent

On Sat, Feb 10, 2024 at 8:56 PM John F. Eldredge <jo...@jfeldredge.com> wrote:

Does anyone know of a way for an Android phone to capture an incoming call's true origin number, or is that information only available to the phone company? In the last year, I have received about 1,000 calls (several per day) where the caller hangs up as soon as I speak. At first, I assumed it was a bot building up a list of answered numbers, but I am now starting to suspect I am being deliberately harassed. I served for several years as the newsletter editor for the Nashville Peace and Justice Center, a local progressive organization, so any harassment could be politically motivated. 

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[Mark J. Bailey]

Just catching this thread, but at least in the VoIP realm (where a lot of spoofed calls originate), there is some effort to combat this:

 

https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication

 

I only know enough about this to point to it, though my two primary VoIP providers claim to be working towards and/or are supporting it (as I haven’t checked in this regard lately).

 

How this translates to the cellphone enduser side is not at all clear to me. But kind of like SPF (and maybe DKIM too) for email authentication, I think this is what they’re trying to achieve.

 

FWIW

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[Vincent Brown]

While this doesn't answer the question regarding the call origin, I heartily endorse the Jolly Roger Telephone Company. This is a voicemail service that uses AI bots to humorously carry on conversations with scammers and telemarketers, making them think they are talking to real people.

Whitelisted users from your contacts just get standard voicemail.

Numbers that you blacklist go straight to the bots.

Numbers blacklisted by enough other community users automatically get sent straight to the bots.

Numbers calling from auto-dialers get prompted to press 1 to prove they are human to potentially avoid a bot.

I've also used a service from EveryCaller to similarly filter calls and texts. This works more like a firewall for your phone. You can automatically block toll-free numbers and community blacklisted numbers. You can also set custom rules using number patterns. 

These two services work great in combination as numbers that are known to be suspicious don't even ring your phone. They just go straight to jolly roger.

[Dagmar d'Surreal]

I'm getting a few of those kinds of calls per day, and it appears to be that the criminals are failing at handing off the successful connection to a person on their end, which I suspect is just a nasty way of wasting their resources since they won't stop making fraudulent calls.

I finally just set my phone to screen all calls not in my contact list this past week, since not even changing my OGM to start with the Bellcore tri-tones for "number is invalid" hasn't seemed to make a dent in the bullshit.  

Sometime next week I'm going to resume attempting to get those calls so I can punish the wicked myself until someone sets their office on fire.

On Sat, Feb 10, 2024 at 8:56 PM John F. Eldredge <jo...@jfeldredge.com> wrote:

Does anyone know of a way for an Android phone to capture an incoming call's true origin number, or is that information only available to the phone company? In the last year, I have received about 1,000 calls (several per day) where the caller hangs up as soon as I speak. At first, I assumed it was a bot building up a list of answered numbers, but I am now starting to suspect I am being deliberately harassed. I served for several years as the newsletter editor for the Nashville Peace and Justice Center, a local progressive organization, so any harassment could be politically motivated. 

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[Michael L]

(This also isn't an answer for the question, but,)  I've used the "Should I Answer" app for the last several years.  Its blocking feature has the option to block incoming calls that are not in my contacts so it doesn't ring unless it's in my contact list.  I haven't had anyone spoof my contacts .. yet.  Guessing that can happen.

Guess I couldn't do this if I used my phone for answering incoming business calls.

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