Neighbor spoofing occurs when a scammer makes a fake number similar to the recipient’s number show up as a call’s origin, which increases the odds the recipient will pick up because the call appears to be from someone nearby. The word spoof itself was popularized by 19th-century British comedian Arthur Roberts. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Neighbor Spoofing”
In the late 19th century, there was a popular British comedian named Arthur Roberts who did sort of burlesque and silly songs, and one of his big hits was Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow Wow.
I’m bringing Arthur Roberts up because he is the guy credited with, if not coining, popularizing the word spoof.
Oh, spoof as a gag making fun of someone else?
Well, or a trick or a hoax.
Okay.
Nobody knows exactly the game that he popularized or invented. It’s not a card game, but some kind of game that involved a lot of nonsense and trickery.
That’s where we get the word spoof.
And the reason I’m thinking about the word spoof is because I got neighbor spoofed.
Spammers will take your phone number and they can program their caller ID to make it look like. They spoof it.
They fake it.
Yeah, they fake it.
And so I got a call from a very nice man who said, did you call me? And I said, no. And he said, well, you got neighbor spoofed because your caller ID is showing up on my phone.
Right.
Yeah.
And apparently it doesn’t last very long because they just move on to somebody else.
But this is a thing. Neighbor spoofing.
Well, I’ve got Apple spoofed. For a while there, the spam calls were just ridiculous. Were all phone numbers belonging to Apple stores around the country.
Really?
Which you might actually want to answer because you might be thinking, like, oh, that’s weird. An Apple store would be calling me. I’m an Apple user. Maybe there’s some reason that they would be calling me.
But, yeah, they went kind of around the map. And I just got them boom, boom, boom, one after the other.
Oh, gosh.
But, yeah, that’s the story with neighbor spoofing, too. If they’re calling you, they’re calling with a number that looks like it could be your neighbor, somebody in the same area.
Yeah, same area code.
Area code and all that.
Technology gives us the good words and the bad.
