867-5309

Caller ID Spoofing

A clever, albeit annoying, example of caller ID spoofing recently hit Delaware’s largest city, Wilmington. Caller ID spoofing can range from pesky marketing calls to far more serious confidentiality breaches that could result in identity theft and the associated financial pain — not to mention the laborious chore of clearing your name. Spoofing can even lead to serious bodily harm and death. Let’s start with the pesky phone calls.

For those of you who are too young or not up on all the one-hit wonders of the 80s, there was a little song by Tommy Tutone called Jenny, perhaps more commonly known as 867-5309.  More than 20 years later, Jenny started placing some calls of her own in the wee hours of the morning in Wilmington. Those who answered Jenny’s call were met with a recorded message from a mortgage refinancing company.