One way to avoide caller id spoofing. It's a no brainer. If you don't 
recognize the number, don't answer. If no number is given, probably don't 
answer. Caller id has taken the fun out of answering the phone when it 
rings. Now, you pretty much know who's calling you. I gave a really high 
tech answer to caller id spoofing. Didn't I! I'm very low tech! hi hi! Doug, 
N6NFF

-----Original Message----- 
From: Steve
Sent: Sunday, April 26, 2015 8:54 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Before There Was Caller I D

Yeah, now there is caller ID spoofing so you can't ever be certain that =
a call is coming from where it is claimed.


----- Original Message -----=20
From: Martin G. McCormick=20
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Saturday, April 25, 2015 11:01 PM
Subject: Re: Before There Was Caller I D


I did exactly the same thing in the early nineties
shortly after I started working for OSU's IT center. I got
a spam message from something called "Fortune5000" with a
toll-free number which I called to complain about the spam.

When you called Fortune5000, you had to first listen to
a prerecorded bit of babble from some guy whose last name was
Michaels. You then got to talk to a live representative who
would reel you in. When I called to bellyache, Michaels, himself
answered. I told him in no uncertain terms that I did not
appreciate commercial advertising messages and that he shouldn't
be doing this at all. Bozo hung up on me which made me mad as a
hornet.

For the next 3 or 4 days, I called Fortune5000 on
several lines and conferenced them together so the
representatives ended up talking to each other and wondering why
this was happening.

They never heard my voice at all but one day, one of the
reps said, "We need to tell Mr. Michaels our phones are all
messed up again."

I felt happy hoping that he would maybe call his
telephone company and they would check everything out and decide
he was an idiot.

Should I have done this? Of course not. Was it childish?
You bet. Do I feel bad? Absolutely not. This was some kind of
multilevel marketing scam and I have no idea what eventually
happened to Bozo Michaels who didn't even show one bit of
remorse for spamming half the internet.

What he saw would have been several calls from Oklahoma
State University's outdial trunks which all had a single number
that could have been any one of ten-thousand possible telephones
on the campus. Unless one did something really stupid such as
threaten violence, the odds of anything happening were extremely
small.

Soon after, OSU upgraded it's outdials and Caller ID
began showing actual extension numbers. When spammers were
especially brazen, I would go to pay telephones on occasion and
jerk their chains a bit.

Ah, the good old days when you could actually tell where
the spam was coming from and really be as much of a pest as they
were.

Martin WB5AGZ

Dave Allen writes:
> Hi Phil!
>=20
> Ten years later, I took a leaf out of your book.
>=20
> Do you remember the World Tomorrow Program? They had a big call center =

> that
> took orders for all of Garner Ted's books and tapes, etc. They had a =
toll
> free number, and I had 3-way calling so I couldn't resist the =
possibility.
>=20
> I called once, then went to three way and quickly had the two calls
> conferenced at the right timing.