A scammy robocaller had spoofed Rodger’s phone number and angry recipients of the calls were calling him incessantly, but now it’s over. With AT&T’s help, he realized that the autodialer had spoofed his new work number, which was being forwarded to his cellphone. So he disabled the call forwarding, kept his cellphone number, and just had his new work number changed. Victory.

Unfortunately, due to deficiencies in the caller ID protocol, other victims might not be so lucky. The caller ID system is sent out directly from user device to user device and is easily manipulated. It might be time for phone companies to handle the caller ID so we can close this loophole and shut down auto-dialers more easily.

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