Telephone solicitors can imitate your phone number, but there is a solution to stop them.

A technique called regularly used by canvassers allows you to imitate your number phone to harass potential victims.

Cold calling is a real nuisance for many smartphone owners. If you use a phone, it is highly likely that you have already received a call from an unknown person trying to talk to you about insurance, a contract or a lucrative sale. Of course, these offers are often the limit of the scam and will especially come to drain your bank account for services that you will probably never need.

But did you know that some telephone canvassers can also pretend to be an individual, and in particular a relative? ? This technique has a name: telephone spoofing. It allows a person, a service or a company to hide their own number to display that of another entity. This is particularly useful when the person needs to call another number and does not want to display their own, so as not to be recognized or blocked. The worst part is that sometimes, it's your own number that is used by these unscrupulous interlocutors!

Spoofing is mainly used by two types of people: fraudsters and telephone canvassers. As a reminder, in France, telephone canvassing is regulated, particularly since a law launched on January 1, 2023, which requires canvassing companies to use very specific numbers for their activities. This allows users to identify these numbers and choose to ignore them when they receive their solicitations by call or text.

But the spoofing technique ignores this regulation by “borrowing” another person's phone number. This is why some people get messages on their answering machine telling them to stop calling them or even calls asking them to stop calling them… As if these people were the source of the cold calls!

Fortunately, spoofing may be living its last days. Since October 1, 2024, telephone operators have been required to block calls whose number displayed on a telephone cannot be authenticated. In other words, if the operator cannot correctly link the number displayed to the device that makes the call, it must block the communication.

Unfortunately, this law currently only regulates calls made from or to landlines. The Banque de France defends itself by estimating that the vast majority of cases of spoofing recorded come from landline numbers. For smartphone owners, there would therefore be little risk to fear.