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Caller ID Spoofing Firm Gets Death Threats
Frankie70 writes "Three days after the startup company Star38 began offering a service that fools Caller ID systems, the founder, Jason Jepson, has decided to sell the business. Jepson said he had received harassing e-mail and phone messages and even a death threat taped to his front door -- all of which he said came from people opposed to his publicizing a commercial version of technology that until now has been mainly used by software programmers and the computer hackers' underground. Details in the Houston Chronicle. Earlier ZDnet article about the service."
Why the fuck isn't the parent marked flame bait?
The entire premise behind this "service" seems to be: fraud. I can think of no legitimate uses for it.
Ladies and gentlemen, a little background:
***All caller ID block does is add a 'do not show' flag to the ANI data****
It is up to the switch at the receiving end to strip that data when it sees said 'do not show' flag. THE DATA IS STILL THERE. How the hell else is the phone company going to bill for calls to 800 numbers? Collect the data from the dialing switch? HA! I'm not even sure that would be possible. Certainly not without a a hellofa lot of changes.
Spoofing is the only way to ensure you don't actually send your real call data (e.g. your phone number) down the line. I'm not positive, but I think you could seriously rape a company with an international 800 number too... just spoof your caller ID number to be some tiny ass third-world country and dial away.
For reference, I do software consulting for a phone company. Play with switch logs all to damned often.