I’m no telecommunications expert but have learned just enough by supporting our ancient 10+ year old PBX at work just to be dangerous. All outbound calls show our main phone number, not the individual DID. This was done by design years ago by whoever set it up at the time so our individual DIDs aren’t out there for all to know. I wrongly assumed this was a function from the service provider, not a function of the PBX. A few years ago when we were in the process of switching from Windstream’s PRI over copper, to PRI over fiber from Time Warner, now Spectrum Enterprise, I asked our account manager about the outbound caller ID. And that’s when I found out it’s tied to the PBX. He did make mention that there may be legalities because of how one can interpret the definition of caller ID spoofing, but said a lot of companies do what we do and not to worry about it.
Our DIDs have been spoofed before by scammers, and people have called up screaming and yelling that we’re trying to scam them, and our receptionists usually transfer the calls to me. It’s usually old people who have no idea what caller ID spoofing is, but the name of the company I work for shows up along with the DID. Every time this has happened that I am aware of, the spoofed IDs weren’t even active at the time, so when if you dial the DID back it’ just ring and rings. So I’m guessing these people looked up our company name in the phone book (Do those existing anymore?) and called our main number back and through the auto attendant pressed 0 to get to a receptionist and the receptionist transferred the call to me.
I explain to all of these people that we are a real company, and if anyone from our office were to legitimately call you the number that would show up would be the main number, not the one they saw and it will never under any circumstance show any of our direct dial numbers.
On my home number, I have received multiple spoofed calls with the CID information being from the Tim Horton’s two towns over. That one was added to my blacklist pretty quickly.
Our DIDs have been spoofed before by scammers, and people have called up screaming and yelling that we’re trying to scam them, and our receptionists usually transfer the calls to me. It’s usually old people who have no idea what caller ID spoofing is, but the name of the company I work for shows up along with the DID. Every time this has happened that I am aware of, the spoofed IDs weren’t even active at the time, so when if you dial the DID back it’ just ring and rings. So I’m guessing these people looked up our company name in the phone book (Do those existing anymore?) and called our main number back and through the auto attendant pressed 0 to get to a receptionist and the receptionist transferred the call to me.
I explain to all of these people that we are a real company, and if anyone from our office were to legitimately call you the number that would show up would be the main number, not the one they saw and it will never under any circumstance show any of our direct dial numbers.
On my home number, I have received multiple spoofed calls with the CID information being from the Tim Horton’s two towns over. That one was added to my blacklist pretty quickly.