Think you know who's calling? Don't be so sure

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 26 September 2007 07:51

Your IT - Home IT

When your phone rings and the caller's number or name pops up on the screen, don't assume that it's really their phone calling you. You could be being tricked.

Los Angeles based Ligatt Security offers spoofem.com, a service that enables callers to change their caller identification number (CID) so that a different number shows up on the phone being called. The feature also works for SMS messages.

Gregory Evans, the inventor of spoofem.com, said: "When we launched spoofem.com our staff did not realise two things; one, that spoofem.com would be the largest telephone spoofing service in the world in less than nine months; two, that 72 percent of our customers would be curious lovers wondering if their soul mate or partner is cheating. We get phone calls from men and women who say, 'I think my husband is still talking to his ex-wife, I want to be able to find out; can you help?."

Spoofem.com claims to enable you to call any number and have any number you wish show up in the caller ID. Spoofem.com suggests that the service will also be useful to debt collectors, law enforcement agencies and for anyone wanting to make an untraceable cal anywhere in the world.

However, at present, for voice calls Spoofem.com can only offer termination in North America,  but it claims to be able to spoof SMS delivery to almost any country, including all four Australian networks.

Spoofem.com also offers voice changing. "You have the choice of changing your voice to male or female. The conversation can be recorded and then emailed to your personal email address.

"Currently, we have several celebrities and athletes using our service as well", Evans said. "It is a perfect fit for anyone who values his or her privacy in this fast paced information age."

To use the service, customer sign up and prepay for a number of minutes of usage ($US9.90 for one hour), then to make a call, go to www.spoofem.com, and enter the number they  are calling from, the number they want to call and the number they want to appear on the called party's caller ID. Spoofem.com then calls the user, calls the destination number and bridges the two calls together.