Every once in a long while, a customer will contact us and tell us that their phone system is going haywire.  They say that a particular person or group of people keep getting calls from their company, often in the middle of the night, on a regular basis.  As they are not physically making these calls, they ask us to investigate what’s going on.

What we invariably find in these situations is that something known as Caller ID spoofing is taking place.  This is the practice of calling someone and having a number other than your own phone number show up on the other person’s phone display.  This is similar to what spammers do with email, where the person who sent the email appears to be someone other than who it actually is.  There are a number of reasons that Caller ID spoofing is used, such as for pranks, or with the intent to harm or defraud someone.

But not all Caller ID spoofing is malicious in nature.  Sometimes, companies do it unintentionally by accidentally transposing numbers in their phone system programming.  There are also legitimate reasons to do it on purpose, for example, when a commercial service is making a call on behalf of their client, or when used by law enforcement in the course of an investigation.  ESI (the manufacturer of the phone systems we sell), even has a feature on its systems equipped with ISDN PRI lines called Intelligent Call Forwarding™, which works when a caller calls into the business and is transferred out to another phone number.  With Intelligent Call Forwarding™, the recipient of the forwarded call sees the Caller ID of the original caller.  This is very useful, and a great selling feature.

While Caller ID Spoofing has been around for awhile and some have been inappropriately using it for many years, it is taking time for the laws to catch up.  There are a couple of bills in Congress that would amend the Communications Act of 1934 to prohibit manipulation of caller identification information.  On June 27, 2007, the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation approved and submitted to the Senate calendar S.704, a bill that would make it a crime to spoof caller ID.  The “Truth in Caller ID Act of 2007″ would outlaw causing “any caller identification service to transmit misleading or inaccurate caller identification information” via “any telecommunications service or IP-enabled voice service”. Law enforcement is exempted from the rule.  On June 12, 2007, a similar bill (H.R. 251) passed in the House of Representatives by a voice vote.  It now awaits passage in the Senate, after which it would need to be signed into law by the President to take effect.

You can protect yourself from Caller ID Spoofing in general by making sure you don’t reveal passwords, account information or other sensitive information over the telephone to someone who has initiated the call to you, unless you know the person and have already verified their identity and credentials.  Just because their Caller ID shows that they are from your bank doesn’t make it so.  Unfortunately, if someone else is spoofing your number, you may have a more difficult time getting the behavior to stop.  This is because the phone call whose caller ID is being spoofed could originate from lines anywhere in the U.S. or Canada, and unless the person on the other end of the line is willing to tell you who they really are, your only recourse would be to go through a legal process of getting the call traced, or to have the authorities help you.  Because there is no national Caller ID spoofing law yet, and local laws on Caller ID spoofing don’t exist in many places, your best bet in getting the authorities to help you would be to convince them that other laws are being broken (such as identity theft or fraud).

With the economy in a shaky state, many businesses are clamping down on purchases to ensure that they are able to weather tough times.  But there are some good reasons to forge ahead with a new phone system, and to buy sooner rather than later:

(1) Tax benefits. This year, Congress passed the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 to help individuals and businesses and to spur economic growth.  You’ll want to consult your tax professional for all the details, or check out the IRS website here, but in brief the following benefits are among those in the Act:

• increases the limit up to which a business can expense property purchased and placed in service during its 2008 tax year;
• provides an additional 50 percent special depreciation allowance for property acquired and placed in service during calendar year 2008.

To take advantage of this, the equipment you purchase:

• must be new equipment;
• must have been acquired in calendar year 2008; and
• must have been installed in calendar year 2008.

(2) Special deals. Many phone equipment manufacturers and resellers are now offering very good deals on the purchase and installation of new phone systems and voicemail in an effort to get your business.  In general, you can expect lowered prices and added value to work in your favor.  (Check out our current specials for phone systems in Phoenix or surrounding areas.)

(3) Opportunity Costs. Phone system technology has improved significantly in the last few years, and now provides efficiency gains that you may not be enjoying on your current system.  Increased ease-of-use, tightly integrated and more responsive and powerful voicemail, flexible auto-attendant, and other productivity-enhancing features such as Unified Messaging, phone control via your PC, and Voice Over IP are all things that businesses with new systems can enjoy and use to their advantage.  In economics, opportunity costs are the value of an alternative foregone as the result of making a decision.  In this case, you should evaluate the cost to your business of staying with your current phone system and foregoing increased efficiency, competitiveness, and client satisfaction.

(4) Doing your part. While placing tight restrictions on spending is becoming more common for many businesses, experts agree that this actually exacerbates the country’s economic woes.  Making an important investment in your company’s future not only strengthens it in the long run, but makes your company part of the country’s economic solution.  And, because both Telco Ltd. and ESI (our phone system manufacturer of choice) are U.S.-owned and operated companies, you can feel good knowing that the majority of your dollars will continue circulating in our economy long after you have spent them.