Publishers clearing house scam?

[Paul Haus]

Personally, years back I had the most fun with solicitation calls by giving the phone to the granddaughter and letting her have a chance to talk to them. She was something like 2 years old and loved to talk on the phone. Being able to hear her side of the conversation, I would have loved to know what they thought and said to her. When she said "They gone" I knew the caller had hung up. I admit it was fun and for a while my spam calls went down.

[Brian Elfert]

The phone companies are to to blame for developing technology years ago that could be spoofed. Users of digital phone lines can use ANI (Automatic Number Identification) to basically show any phone number they want when making outbound calls from a digital phone line. My employer has used such digital phone lines in one form or another since at least 1990. We used to show everyone's phone number as the company main line even though everyone had their own direct phone number. My employer eventually changed things to show the employee's direct phone number on outgoing calls. I could essentially set up my employer's phone system to show just about any caller ID for outbound calls that I wanted to.

When ANI was developed nobody at the various phone companies thought about how the ability to specify any phone number for outgoing calls would be abused many years later. It is sort of like email. Nobody realized that email should have been more secure to make spamming and phishing harder.

[Rollie Meyers]

I suspect it cost a whole lot more then 10¢ to write the check.