Weird spoofed phone call

October 13, 2010 7:22 PM

Just got a crazy phone call from a spoofed phone number, not sure what to do...

Just got a call on my cell phone form what appeared to be a 718 number I did not know. When I picked up it was a male voice ranting about my calling his girlfriend in the middle of the night, and how he was going t f*cking kill me, and suchlike. BUT, and here's the crazy bit, it was actually just a recording having a one-sided conversation to try and sound like it was responding what it was saying. (i.e. crazy line, pause, crazy line that appears to be in reply to my most likely response, et al).

I shut up and just let it go, and it continued for 10-15 more seconds and then disconnected. I called the number back and got a there-is-no-such-number recording from AT&T. Looked the number up online (whocalledme and various reverse lookup sites) and got nothing, so I'm 99% sure it was just a random spoofed number.

S really, my question is, is there anything that I can or should be doing about this? It just weirded me out...

posted by anonymous to grab bag (9 answers total)

wild guess filter - some of your friends have pranked you using a service like:

http://prankdialer.com/

don't really know what's to be done, except to hope that they don't get in the habit of it. :-/
posted by randomkeystrike at 7:30 PM on October 13, 2010

check out www.prankdial.com

It has many spoofed recordings of exactly what you speak... fake conversations with "most viable responses"

It makes it really easy to spoof a caller ID and it doesn't have to be a real number
If you can even find the actual recording than you know for sure

PS. Often times when it connects the recording has already started a bit when the receiver picks up the phone so that could be another hint
posted by ptsampras14 at 7:30 PM on October 13, 2010

Sounds like a prank staged by your friends.
posted by Mid at 7:34 PM on October 13, 2010

Weird... I had a similiar thing happen once only it was an elderly voice going on about hair ties.
posted by biochemist at 7:35 PM on October 13, 2010

Weird... I had a similiar thing happen once only it was an elderly voice going on about hair ties.

That sounds like a John Cleese joke for some reason.

But yeah I agree, probably just your mates prank dialing. I'll admit it, I've done it before...
posted by rigby99 at 7:50 PM on October 13, 2010

It is kind of crazy how insecure the voice telecom world is. If you happen to know how it works and have access, this sort of thing isn't very hard to pull off. If it isn't prankdialer.com, it could easily be a couple of telecom developers blowing off steam and seeing what they can get away with.
posted by b1tr0t at 8:23 PM on October 13, 2010

Perhaps you've been Richard Christy'd.
posted by haqspan at 6:44 AM on October 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

I figured out who did this to me, by his poor choice in spoofed numbers (Pretty much his cell phone number, with the last four digits being switched).

Then I punched him really really hard.

I would wait and see if any of your friends act strange or cave and tell you they did it.

Mine would call me later in the day and just be like "SOOOOOOO how you doin, whats going on...."
posted by PlutoniumX at 11:35 AM on October 14, 2010

Perhaps you've been Richard Christy'd.

Sal and Richard were my first thought as well, but they use sound drops in response to what the callee says - in this case, if I understand correctly, it sounds like it was all recorded ahead of time with gaps left in for the OP to respond.
posted by amro at 11:57 AM on October 14, 2010