Caller ID spoofing can often be a very misunderstood venture. Caller ID and faking has been in the news lately and a major provider of calling cards for spoofing Caller ID systems, SpoofCard, was mentioned in a recent major motion picture, Untraceable. We have all heard about throw away cell phones and blocking our own Caller ID information for our outbound calls, but using a spurious phone number for our regular phones is a rather recent innovation made possible by technology. Caller ID is known as Caller Identification or CID, but should be known more properly as Calling Number Identification or CNID. It is a service offered by telephone companies that uses the information logged into your account and tied to your phone number (land line, VoIP, or cell phone). The caller’s phone number is forwarded to the recipient’s phone while ringing and if the name that matches the phone number is available and the recipient’s phone has the Caller ID service available the name will show up on the display as well. Spoofing Caller ID has long been used by private detectives and law enforcement in tracking down fugitives and to make sure that their sting operations are not exposed. Police will call a list of people that are wanted on warrants and told that they have won a prize and need to come to a particular location to pick it up. If the phone number on the caller ID read New York Police Department they would not get very many people caught up in their sting. You can choose to block your number on a per call or long term basis with some simple steps. Entering *67 before making a call will block the Caller ID form transmitting your information for that call only. If you want to block your ID for additional calls you will need to enter *67 for each call you make. If that becomes too difficult and you want to block the Caller ID information on all outbound calls you make you will have to make the choice with your phone service carrier. To unblock your Caller ID information for a particular call you will need to type *82 prior to dialing the desired number. With an all call Caller ID block in place you will need to type the *82 prior to each number called that you want to see your Caller ID information. If you have more than one phone line in your house you will need to use pre line blocking on every line or use one of the many services like SpoofCard to spoof your Caller ID when you make outbound calls. If you are wondering who is calling when their Caller ID is blocked or listed as a private number, instead of calling the number back and running the risk of giving out your Caller ID information unless you use a Caller ID spoofing service or per line call blocking you can also use a service called TrapCall. TrapCall has new users route their missed, rejected or unanswered calls to TrapCall’s 800 number. When you see an incoming call that you can not identify for whatever reason, press the voicemail button on your phone and the call is routed quickly through the TrapCall system, which sends it back to your phone with the Caller ID info intact. Primary Rate Interface (PRI) lines are the lines that telephone companies provide to businesses that give a business or individual the capability of up to twenty three phone numbers per single PRI line. Enterprising individuals would buy some of these PRI lines and lease out some of the twenty three phone numbers to other private investigators for a charge. These professionals knew that Caller ID is not totally blockable and that calling 800 numbers would allow their information to be viewed so that using these so called “blind” numbers would assure their identity would remain hidden. There were several services that offered these blind numbers discreetly within the security and investigation industries. These phone hackers continued to refine their techniques and as computer language became more complex and integrated in the use of phone systems, when VoiceXML became popular in phone systems that are not hard wired and run through servers, they found that the VXML could be made to imitate the PBX functions of hard wired systems and set your Caller ID to whatever you wanted it to read. Then when VoIP became a popular alternative to land lines, hackers found a loop hole in the Vonage sign up system that allowed you to give any number as your Caller ID when you ported your existing number to Vonage. Other open source PBX programs have allowed hackers to create applications that would enable users to easily spoof their Caller ID for any situation. During 2005 and 2006 SpoofCard, SpoofTech, SpoofTel, and TrickTel opened for business and shortly thereafter became the target of investigation by the Florida Attorney General’s office. Even the FCC got involved asking for user records as well as company records. Why the FCC was interested in individual user records of a phone service when they never requested user records when investigating ISP and Internet issues no one knows. As calling cards go the minutes you purchase from SpoofCard are not that bad at about six cents per minute. You can use it as a regular calling card or add the spoofed Caller ID as you wish. Other companies like Telespoof.com and Phonegangster.com offer similar calling cards for a little less and all offer a free trial call so you can check out their services.