Help! My mobile number has been spoofed

honeybea

so today I got around 10 calls from mobiles trying to call me back 😢 all between 11 am and 3 pm

My number doesn’t appear on “who’s calling me”

I would be loath to change my number. Sounds like there’s nothing I can though though :-(

honeybea

this is getting worse! I’ve just got a call from someone who’d be rang from my number and asked for a verification code. They said they were from Amazon and they were going to send him a code to log in into his account. He didn’t trust it and he hang up and called me to make sure.
so this is worse than I thought. It’s not marketing calls they’re using my number for, it’s actually scams!

victor2

I get many calls on my landline appearing to be from UK mobile numbers. If I answer them it's an initial silence before it connects you to a scammer. I don't answer them any more and they never leave a message.

I suspect the scammers are enable to generate a random UK mobile number from wherever they are. If that happens to be a live UK number, you get the circumstances the OP is in. As the OP's number will probably end up on a blacklist, the scammers will drop using it. Annoying, but there's nothing else you can do except suffer the inconvenience of changing your number.

JSmithy45AD

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82056588#Comment_82056588

It was always going to be scams, that was 100% guaranteed.

JSmithy45AD

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82056601#Comment_82056601

You don't have to change your number at all, eventually they'll change to a different number. The rise of VoIP has made it easy via computer to generate endless numbers and target the correct country codes and even area codes for landline numbers.

jimjames

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82056032#Comment_82056032

Android call screening works well for this too, none of them answer any of the call screening questions. I get many missed mobile calls each day, I assume all are spoofed like this.

victor2

I thought I recalled that the government support of the rollout for digital voice/VOIP etc. had told us that spoofing numbers would be harder. ChatGPT (what more reliable source could you ask? 😉) said:

For example, in November 2025 the government announced measures including:

blocking spoofed phone numbers, so scammers cannot as easily pretend to be calling from a UK bank or government department;

In reality, it is apparently a lot easier to do than ever before.

mta999

I believe spoofing LANDLINE numbers is now more difficult which is why the scammers have switched to mobile numbers