Dish Network Scam

Dish should already have all of that information. I have been a Dish customer for over 25 years and I have never been asked that question in all of the times that I have contacted them. They already know what equipment you have when they pull up your account. Your account is also protected with a PIN number that you have to provide when calling them about your account so that no one but you can make changes to the account. I wonder what the scammer was trying to accomplish!

Seriously! Now these scammers have your number and know someone is there who will talk to strangers. Next time, it will be some different kind of scam.

I don't answer calls from numbers I don't recogize anymore - they can leave a message if it's important. But they never do.

A quick Google search found a lot about this. One story said that once they get your info, they can pause your service (just like you could do yourself from your account). Then they claim that Dish has suspended your account until you pay for a supposed "upgrade".

I wonder how the scammers knew you had Dish Network in the first place?

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it's the dog's fault

Could just be coincidence. I don't answer unknown calls either, but I get regular email and text scams from various banks and financial institutions. Maybe one out of ten of those comes from a business I've actually done business with. They count on those occasional coincidental matches to snag victims.

Just like how door-to-door internet salesmen (at least here in Canada) know which houses to hit and which ones to not, there might have been customer info released by one of those lists. I wouldn't be surprised if it's some basic excel sheet lol.

I think they harvest telephone numbers from real listings and fake them into the caller ID on a routine basis.

…spam calls. You do have to do a little bit of work to set it up, but once that’s done, no more spam calls. The phone will ring once and it goes straight to VM. Once in a great while a call may get through but it’s like 1 out of 100. I have had this thing for probably 3 years now and the number of spam calls has dropped drastically. You have an Allow list and those calls make it through, the others are blocked. The phone does have (what they call) a Star list, that allows companies that have multiple phone lines to contact you once they are put into the Star category. Things like doctors offices, hospitals, etc.

I don't pick up calls from unkown numbers anymore - let them go to voicemail

Spoofing allows these scammers or telemarketers to enter any name or number they choose to show up on your caller ID. I don't know how they get the information, but I frequently get calls that show up as people I know. This makes devices that screen calls only marginally useful.

On some days I get a dozen or more annoyance calls. I usually just take the phone off the hook and check for messages at night. I have answer call from my local telco, so messages are recorded and stored off site.

Unfortunately, this is sometimes registered as an "answered call" by some of these annoyance callers and they keep trying.

I may try turning off the bells on the phones instead so these calls go unanswered. Hopefully, this will cause my number to be taken off the "list".

I saw a device a while ago that automatically answers the call and plays the series of tones you get when you call a disconnected number. This could also cause a number to be "delisted". I might go that route if I can find it.

Do a search on Google for bell tones and there is one you can download and put in front of your Voice mail message which lets Robo calls know it is a delisted number.

It may take a bit of dedicated looking though.

In my experience, that is very unusual. I have *never* seen a spoofed number of a person that I know. Usually they are nunbers for my own geographic area, which is a giveaway because I know almost nobody that lives near me. The ones that always get a laugh are similar to my own phone number. It's a cell phone and I have never seen a similar number. Maybe they assume that my whole family has similar numbers? LOL

I don't know about you, but I don't need any special software, voicemail or devices. The spam calls are totally obvious and I just don't answer them. Has never been an incident where I missed a real call yet.

If I was actually seeing numbers of people that I know, that's something I'd want to get to the bottom of as it suggests a pretty serious hack of some sort to me...

Thinking about this some more, the big AT&T hack could explain why you're seeing spoofed numbers of your friends. The hackers were not able to actually listen to anyone's calls or read their texts but they got the metadata - the numbers that the victim sent or received messages from. So, even if you don't have AT&T, a friend might have it and they may have metadata from a time when he called you.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...