Yay!
Telephone spammers and fraudsters rejoice.
A new VoIP service allows you to hide who you are by being web-based, having no registration checks, allowing you to spoof caller identity, and pay by Bitcoin. Bitphone calls itself the Bitcoin Payphone. As well as taking Bitcoin, the service accepts more than forty other altcoins. Users can pay with a Bitcoin transfer from a …
I find they keep calling until you slam the phone down on them or you get in first and sell them something.
Most call centres have a click the moment you say Hello, the moment I hear this *SLAM*.
On the odd occasion where this is missed I and I don't recognise the caller, I like reverting to trying to sell them something (Before they get the chance).
I very rarely get cold calls now, another tactic for work is forwarding the call to a fax machine.
Contact a GAMMA reseller - SIP channels at £15-20pm, depending on reseller, it includes 5000 mins to mobile and 5000 to landline. Best of all they stack, we've got 75 at present. We've ported our SIP in April, cut our bills from £6k per month to about £1500!
I know someone who had a revenue-shared 0705 number. He'd court the spammers and keep them on the line as long as possible raking in the cash. He built quite an elegant solution which even had a social good element sending the revenue to South African townships.
You can't revenue share 0705 any more.
"You can build some cases for wanting to do this – such as working from home and wanting work to pay for the calls and to show the work number – but these are edge cases."
Nonsense.
You could route VOIP through your VPN/Firewall so that your calls from home are coming from work.
So there goes your theory...
My home phone is the target of spam calls with spoofing ID's every day, including the case where the caller ID is my own phone number. I speculate the purpose of that particular spoof is to get you to answer the call out of curiosity.
Aggressive use of my VoIP service's Caller ID filtering feature now keeps the actual unwanted ring-throughs down to a typical of a few per week. Before I dumped my old land line in favor of this VoIP service, spam calls per day had reached an intolerable point.
The FCC will never catch up to these scammers / spoofers - they move much too quickly. It took the FCC years to shut down the infamous "Rachael from cardholder services" scam but within months imitators were back on the phone lines, even re-using the "Rachael" part.
I think its a cool service. How is this much different than Skype? There are also many Caller Id Spoofing services, just Google CallerId Spoofing. It's great it takes Bitcoin, makes payment easy and flexible. I don't see anywhere it says it's untracable? It is VoIP.