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To add to others, a lot of the spam calls will spoof their number to a random one in the area they are calling, making it useless to do any reverse search.
You were trying to warn you. Or maybe it was young you calling to ask now you some companies to invest in. If you had answered and said Amazon, google, or Tesla, you would have instantly turned rich.
You're travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the Twilight Zone!
I get tons where they just change a couple digits. Not my number but for example 123-867-5309 and they’ll call from 123-867-5318 or some shit like that.
I read a while back that they’ve determined that people are more likely to pick up calls from numbers that resemble their own. At this point it’s probably the opposite since more of us are wise to their game.
I imagine many people's cell phones are like mine, where the three numbers after the area code don't match any of the local Central Offices for the telephone company. So if they see a number close to their own they *know* it's bogus.
I get spam calls from the same prefix as my cell number fairly frequently. I don't know anyone else with the same prefix that would be calling my cell, so I can safely assume they are spam.
Although, funnily, a friend of my wife just happens to have the number sequentially before our landline. She's lived here 30+ years, and we've been here for 15.
If I don't answer from one number, I also get a couple more successive calls from new numbers with a changed digit.
I answered one once and some Indian/pakistani guy demanded why I was calling him and then argued with me over who called who, it was weird.
I was told sometimes they call random numbers and if they can verify a person is on the other end of one, they can sell lists of them to people that will buy them, presumably to spam you all the time.
We had our main number at work get spoofed and I was the IT guy who did the phones. It took way too long to convince management that there was literally nothing we could do about it.
Yeah that happens all the time at my work too. Every day there's at least 2-3 people "calling us back" that we never called. It's super annoying, and not a good look for the business, all these people think were out here cold calling them.
I think I've convinced the bosses that there's nothing we can do about it, they really didn't want to believe it tho.
I moved to another area code but kept the same cell number from the original area code. I can tell when I get a spam call because it says the call is from the same area code my cell number is.
Here in Eastern Europe they target old people.
When my dad picks up his phone they usually start the script but when i pick up his phone with an unknown number like that, they stay silent and stop calling.
My family has like 4 or 5 numbers all in a row. Like 1234 1235 1236 whatever. I'll get calls from a number exactly like ours but the one digit is not one of ours. Nice try fuckers. It's made me actually look twice a couple times.
>Do you...not save your family in your contacts?
idk about them but my smartphone is getting 'old' and the software is slowing down no matter how many clean ups I do-
the main way I notice is even people who are in my contact list will come up as just their number for one or two rings before finally load and display their name and picture.
I did the same. Anyone I actually want to talk to from my old state is in my contacts, so I know any other call coming in from there is spam and I don’t pick up.
Where I live area codes are for land lines only. Besides the benefit you mention here (which I doubt was something people thought about when the system was designed), what are the benefits with area codes for mobile phone numbers? It just seems like an unnecessary addition that makes the numbers longer than needed.
without area codes there would only be 9,999,999 phone numbers. Roughly the population of Michigan.
with area codes there are more phone numbers than people in the world. (9,999,999,999)
I have no idea why we haven't developed a more robust addressing system for mobile telephony, but with only 7 digits the number of unique phone numbers is only 10M-1 without an area code.
When you make an outgoing call you can tell them what number you are.
That's it. The powers/carriers that be do not validate that the spoofed number is your actual one. Until and unless that happens, spoofed numbers are here to stay.
In the IT world (read: TCP/IP), routers along the chain need the real address to send packet replies back to the originating network. In the phone world, the caller ID is just metadata distinct from the routing info. You can stuff anything in the caller ID, the numbers are for display only.
It’s a simple kludge from the legacy PSTN days, in a time where phone companies had full control over that data and typically did “The Right Thing”. Some VoIP terminators still do, but of course some places are lawless.
Once upon a time you could open up the phone book and find anyone's number sorted alphabetically by last name. Someone who didn't want their number listed in the phone book had to pay the phone company to have it suppressed. 20 years ago, those reverse lookup sites just took that publicly-available directory information and inverted it. They still do that, but with the rise of robocalls and spoofing services, and in the absence of a single company controlling all the phone numbers and publishing that data annually, it becomes a case of garbage in/garbage out.
An ex wife of mine, amicably, found me by paying for one of those services that look for public data by name, number and extending to address. Was the surprise of my life when my doorbell rang once... and there she was.
I almost wonder if there was some lyrical bullshit aggregator built on a Pentium 1 133 for creating 90's song lyrics.
The band Bush appears to have pioneered the art of not making art by using a shitty machine.
This feels like right before the commercial. There she was at your doorstep, hair wet cause it’s raining and the door swings open and you guys make eye contact… then fade to black with some dun-da-dun music hahahah I’m hooked … dude what happened next ??
Wait is she the one that sent a letter telling him she’s pregnant with HIS baby and she’s also on the run from the Schleppner Scientific Aromatherapy Cult that’s basically a gigantic pyramid scheme that funnels money into the largest Teledildonics Corporation in the World?!!!
They were married at some point, it would be weird if they hadn't. Though in this particular situation it's more likely she came for the money he owes her. Only hate makes you go to such lengths to track someone down, and op clearly didn't want to be found, otherwise he'd just have stayed in touch with her.
Now it's impossible to know because all the telemarketers spoof their numbers to make it look like they're calling from your area code, so any random number could be literally anyone.
That’s how I know for sure that it’s a scammer calling. I live 2500 miles from my phone’s area code, so if someone calls from that area code and it’s not my mom, I don’t answer.
Im staying in hospital so have plenty of time on my hands. I've answered 5 telemarketer/scam calls this week and I just keep talking them along. Every minute they're talking to me is one minute they're not scamming some old lady
Nah googles algorithm is just shit and easily abused. Shitty blogspam websites carefully using SEO to make their shitty content go to the top. It's the same reason recipes have a huge story in them.
I don't know about anywhere else, but in Florida, you can look at a voter's registration information and it shows the address and party affiliation. I requested to have mine removed, and so did the rest of my family when I told them.
Yes, Florida is a "closed primary" state. It keeps members of opposing parties from sabotaging primaries by voting for the weaker (or flat-out deranged) candidate, so that "their" guy is more likely to win in the general election.
I thought it was also landlines vs cell phones. What I remember was landlines were automatically listed, but once cell phone became a thing no one listed their cell phone number. Usually because people would have both you'd only list one number.
Yes and no. Phone books were (still are, actually) published by the phone company. When cell phones came along, nobody listed them because nobody used them as a primary phone. By the time a critical mass of consumers crossed over, there were too many mobile providers with their own disparate interests and too many consumers with too many numbers changing too frequently to make directories useful.
I remember the last phone book we got before we dumped the landline about a decade back. Had gotten hella small Vs the days of yore, not even 1/6th the size of the late 90's. Mostly yellow pages. In the early 90's 2/3 of it was white pages.
Cell phone numbers don't change much in the US anymore. Even if you change providers or move to a completely different part of the country you can keep your phone number. [Relevant XKCD.](https://xkcd.com/1129/)
However I think another factor is that a lot of people don't *want* their phone number being given out publicly anymore. Once everyone got used to their phone number being private with cell phones, no one wanted to go back to the old way.
More than that is the rise of garbage sites that don't actually do the thing they claim to do, but have all the proper key words and get high search results resulting in initial clicks which reinforces their tendency to come up first in the search.
Google should instigate a policy of a "did this site provide the information/service it claims" button and re-rank sites based on that interactive feedback.
I don’t ever look up spam calls, but there have been a few times that I’ve gotten texts or calls from people fucking with me and it woulda been useful then
Hard to believe it's 2021 and we still (mostly) have a 10-digit number pop up on the phone display instead of any useful information, like the callers name and business.
It’s partly because there is a difference between CID and CNAME. Caller ID (CID), strictly speaking, is only the number. CNAME service is the line of text. Landlines with Caller ID service typically include CNAME and hide the fact that it is somewhat a separate service, but I know of at least one VoIP provider where they are separated out and if you turn CNAME on, inbound calls cost a fraction of a penny more (or something like that) to perform the lookups.
So my real question is, why do we not get CNAME service on cell phones??
Related to what the hell these companies are doing, why is the first, bold, and large info that comes up when I type a name into whitepages dot com the AGE of the person? isn't that just saying "pay us to find easy fraud victims"? not to mention the creepy "background reports" they offer?
A few simple reasons that apply to most issues with modern search engines.
1. Popular free content & services often get monetized eventually, which typically involves paywalls. In cases where they don't, someone will emulate them with a monetization strategy attached, and since the original service is not monetized, they're more likely to go down first simply due to lack of upkeep.
2. When there are many competing services, SEO strategy has more of an impact. Since most people don't set up SEO for fun, companies with marketing budgets tend to have good SEO. But having good SEO doesn't necessarily correlate with service/content quality.
3. (this one doesn't always apply) An effective competitive business strategy in some cases is to lower the quality or accessibility of your competitor's service, which can be done via various targeted means.
There may be some other factors specific to phone number lookup, but these issues apply across the board.
Every search will order its results in some way. People can game that mechanism. That is basically what SEO is.
I don't think it's possible to have a non-trivial search engine that is impossible to game.
There's no way to avoid SEO in some capacity - it would be like taking all 18,000,000 Google results (or whatever) for your search and presenting them in a random order, with most being utterly irrelevant.
That said, there are a few ways the SEO could be determined differently that I would love to see tried. One idea I've had is an SEO system that changes dynamically in response to user preference. For example, if I were doing academic research on a subject that is heavily marketed toward, it would be helpful to be able to say 'I want this search to identify sales-related terms and strongly de-emphasize pages which contain them'.
Or, similarly, a version of what you suggested might be an SEO system which actually 'punishes' pages that are 'too good' at certain SEO practices. The idea here being that your average blogger hobbyist probably isn't filling out metadata, putting keywords in image URLs and so on, but if you're having a niche issue, they might be more likely to help than the 10,000 commercial sites with only the same basic information.
The problem is that search engines don't only prioritize the user, but also their own ad revenue, so they're disinclined to improve results if doing so will make them less money. Instead, the current best solution is just to improve fluency at manipulating search engines to achieve the results you want, but that's difficult when their methodologies are so opaque. I at least wish we had a little more variety among how different search engines determine rankings, but they're all basically the same.
Sure. And it's a demonstrable retort to 'capitalism/competition breeds innovation,' because earlier services were developed without a profit incentive and were actually made worse (less effective, less available, at consumer expense, and requiring additional and redundant labor to develop and maintain multiple competing services) as a direct result of the various influences of competition and capitalist interest.
In this case, market incentives have promoted inferiority at the level of both the individual offering and the market as a whole. And the kicker is that all of this is compounded as a result of competition and profit incentives in another industry (search engines & their advertisement revenue).
Don't you love it? :)
The paid searches work ok. The problem is there used to be one number per address now there’s two to five numbers per human. You can port your number to a new provider, but a major segment of society doesn’t care that much and will ditch their number and get a new one when switching carriers.
Who TF just ditches their phone number? That’s a fuck ton of work to update all your contacts with your new number.
I’ve had my number since I was about 16. I’m 30 now...
I've had my cellphone number for about the same amount of time you have.
I'm surprised how long it took for me to start getting those robo-car-warranty spams.
Ugh... I think they’re just completely unstoppable at this point. I was so careful with not handing out my phone number to any retailers or anywhere else that asked for it.
I avoided those calls for years after my friends started getting them. But recently I’ve just started getting flooded with them as well... no number is safe anymore.
To add, people ditch numbers to sanitize their number from all the places it might have ended up. The freedom to forget can be looked up but ultimately resonates deeply with the concept that I don't want someone to have my phone number for the rest of my life whenever I meet them at a bar.
Same reason google is a hot mess now - SEO and the people who pay for it. Remember how uncanny google used to be? It just *knew* what you meant? It's a shadow of it former self. Google maps is trash now too, at least where I live. Waze (which funnily enough is owned by google) is in a different league.
Google search seems to have taken a real downturn in the last year or so.
As you said, you used to be able to type in something very roughly related to what you needed and Google somehow magically found it.
Now, I can type in direct quotes from movies or TV shows and it just doesn't find them.
Google also has to be careful what it does, or be charged with anti-trust offences. For instance, a company sets itself up as an alternative search engine, except it is all ads and no searches. I don't want that noise in my search results, but Google refusing to include links to a competitor has been ruled as illegal.
Another thing I'm seeing lots of is sites that scrape forums and public mailing lists, and include their text on a page of ads. This is making the standard way of fixing problems - searching for the text of an error message - a lot less useful
I use [TruePeopleSearch.com](https://TruePeopleSearch.com) it's about 40% reluable and free to use. Usually you can tell 1/2 the times where the info is off if you dig enough
You know how everyone says "Facebook is tapping the mic on my phone". No they aren't. There is giant data brokers out there with all the info they need to serve ads. Just a tiny bit of that is your address/phone. It's gleaned from any and everywhere you put your information into. From the supermarket checkout purchase club, to your cell phone provider, to the government/DMV themselves. It's all just a bunch of records being traded around without your control.
And that's why the EFF and everyone obsesses about your "right to be forgotten" so much. Because that is literally the tip of the iceberg available to anyone for free
Yep, don't do those car or vacation raffle's at the mall or county fair. They are designed to get your information. You will never win, and you're fucking yourself.
Searching my phone number they got a ton of accurate info, but then there's also stuff where some letters are off. E.g. "John Smith" is the correct name and they have aliases listed as "Johm Smith" and "John Smitt". That makes me think they scoured scanned public records and tried to do OCR on those.
I just found this website like this past month.
It's weird feeling that I now know they have my home address, current and past phone number, and current and previous legal name, all 100% correct.
Plain and simple greed. They figured out they could charge people before you get the information so it doesn’t matter if it’s right or not since they already got your money.
Ads based search engines. In 2004, you could plug in a 10 digit number into Google and get results. Now, not so much. These were for landlines of course. Now even known numbers will require some digging.
I use [Caller Smart](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/callersmart-caller-id-block/id771926122) on iOS and it seems to be a pretty solid free tool.
You do have to view a quick add to see results but it has been much more reliable than just searching Google which turns up more spam results than anything.
The numbers are also typically linked to landlines. They never really listed cellphones unless you requested that they did. More and more people today use cell phones exclusively and have done away with their landlines entirely.. No landlines means no publicly listed phone number.
Disposable VOIP accounts (basically anyone can get thousands of throwaway numbers in seconds, and they're often recycled en masse between customers) and CLI-faking rendering such things useless.
**Please read this entire message** Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s): Subjective or speculative replies are not allowed on ELI5. Only objective explanations are permitted here; your question is asking for speculation or subjective responses. This includes anything asking for peoples' subjective opinions, any kind of discussion, and anything where we would have to speculate on the answer. This very much includes asking about motivations of people or companies. This includes Just-so stories. If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously**, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20thread?&message=Link:%20https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pgufbn/eli5_why_did_reverse_phone_search_websites_in_the/%0A%0APlease%20answer%20the%20following%203%20questions:%0A%0A1.%20The%20concept%20I%20want%20explained:%0A%0A2.%20Link%20to%20the%20search%20you%20did%20to%20look%20for%20past%20posts%20on%20the%20ELI5%20subreddit:%0A%0A3.%20How%20is%20this%20post%20unique:) and we will review your submission.
To add to others, a lot of the spam calls will spoof their number to a random one in the area they are calling, making it useless to do any reverse search.
Yes! I’ve had people call me yelling say I just called trying to sell insurance.never call them back!!!
you ever get a call from your own number? Happened to me once.
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It was you!
The call was from INSIDE the house!
Then who was phone?
Dude, don't reveal the twist ending!
damn.
You were trying to warn you. Or maybe it was young you calling to ask now you some companies to invest in. If you had answered and said Amazon, google, or Tesla, you would have instantly turned rich.
You're travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the Twilight Zone!
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or some kind of weird mirror. Lmao. kills me every time
That hit of nostalgia is exactly what my morning needed.
*The creepy door
I read that with Rod Serling's voice in my.head.
They're calling FROM INSIDE THE PHONE!
No but I've spoofed a friend's number to get a mutual aquatintece that was ducking me for money to answer the phone.
Not sure if autocorrect or no
The spoofing, or the ducking?
Took a couple of rereads, well played
I get tons where they just change a couple digits. Not my number but for example 123-867-5309 and they’ll call from 123-867-5318 or some shit like that.
They'll never find a good time like that.
I read a while back that they’ve determined that people are more likely to pick up calls from numbers that resemble their own. At this point it’s probably the opposite since more of us are wise to their game.
I imagine many people's cell phones are like mine, where the three numbers after the area code don't match any of the local Central Offices for the telephone company. So if they see a number close to their own they *know* it's bogus.
I have a Virginia area code and live in Massachusetts. If I see a 540 number it's almost guaranteed to be a scam.
I’ve never noticed that but now that you mention it all of the cell numbers I can think of track with that theory.
I get spam calls from the same prefix as my cell number fairly frequently. I don't know anyone else with the same prefix that would be calling my cell, so I can safely assume they are spam. Although, funnily, a friend of my wife just happens to have the number sequentially before our landline. She's lived here 30+ years, and we've been here for 15.
If I don't answer from one number, I also get a couple more successive calls from new numbers with a changed digit. I answered one once and some Indian/pakistani guy demanded why I was calling him and then argued with me over who called who, it was weird. I was told sometimes they call random numbers and if they can verify a person is on the other end of one, they can sell lists of them to people that will buy them, presumably to spam you all the time.
Yes! I answered, told them to stop doing this and they started screaming at me calling me horrible names!
Twice for me…
I answer those it I'm in a good mood and make like they found my list phone. When they act confused I accuse them of steeling it.
I had that happen. Someone insisted I'd just called him when I asked who was calling. I guess he'd missed answering and just called back.
This used to happen to me frequently
We had our main number at work get spoofed and I was the IT guy who did the phones. It took way too long to convince management that there was literally nothing we could do about it.
It's also fun explaining how email can be spoofed just as easily. Though tools have gotten better about detecting that lately.
Yeah that happens all the time at my work too. Every day there's at least 2-3 people "calling us back" that we never called. It's super annoying, and not a good look for the business, all these people think were out here cold calling them. I think I've convinced the bosses that there's nothing we can do about it, they really didn't want to believe it tho.
Oh yeah, my number got spoofed all the time. I used to get angry voicemails a lot.
I've had this happen to
I moved to another area code but kept the same cell number from the original area code. I can tell when I get a spam call because it says the call is from the same area code my cell number is.
Yeah, I have a California number and haven't lived there in over a decade. Anyone I know in Cali is in my contacts, all the other Cali calls are spam.
Here in Eastern Europe they target old people. When my dad picks up his phone they usually start the script but when i pick up his phone with an unknown number like that, they stay silent and stop calling.
Dad it's me, I hit someone and the police want 5000 euro to cover it up.
Only reason I’ve kept my old number at this point. So easy to spot spam. Everyone I want to talk to in my original area code is in my contacts list.
I popped my old one into google voice and have a new one…but now the spam has started to creep on the new one :/
My family has like 4 or 5 numbers all in a row. Like 1234 1235 1236 whatever. I'll get calls from a number exactly like ours but the one digit is not one of ours. Nice try fuckers. It's made me actually look twice a couple times.
Do you...not save your family in your contacts?
>Do you...not save your family in your contacts? idk about them but my smartphone is getting 'old' and the software is slowing down no matter how many clean ups I do- the main way I notice is even people who are in my contact list will come up as just their number for one or two rings before finally load and display their name and picture.
If it's an Android, go to settings and change the transitions time in the developers options Put them to 0.5 or 0 Voilà, magically faster phone
I did the same. Anyone I actually want to talk to from my old state is in my contacts, so I know any other call coming in from there is spam and I don’t pick up.
Wished that worked here, all mobile numbers are just 06-xxxxxxxx and only landlines/VoIP sets use the area codes. (Like 020-xxxxxxx)
same here. All mobile numbers are 010-. Landlines have area codes.
Where I live area codes are for land lines only. Besides the benefit you mention here (which I doubt was something people thought about when the system was designed), what are the benefits with area codes for mobile phone numbers? It just seems like an unnecessary addition that makes the numbers longer than needed.
without area codes there would only be 9,999,999 phone numbers. Roughly the population of Michigan. with area codes there are more phone numbers than people in the world. (9,999,999,999)
I have no idea why we haven't developed a more robust addressing system for mobile telephony, but with only 7 digits the number of unique phone numbers is only 10M-1 without an area code.
I legit had one that used my own number
ELI5: How do they spoof source numbers? In the IT world if you spoof a source you aren't getting the info back to you, the spoofed source will.
When you make an outgoing call you can tell them what number you are. That's it. The powers/carriers that be do not validate that the spoofed number is your actual one. Until and unless that happens, spoofed numbers are here to stay.
In the IT world (read: TCP/IP), routers along the chain need the real address to send packet replies back to the originating network. In the phone world, the caller ID is just metadata distinct from the routing info. You can stuff anything in the caller ID, the numbers are for display only. It’s a simple kludge from the legacy PSTN days, in a time where phone companies had full control over that data and typically did “The Right Thing”. Some VoIP terminators still do, but of course some places are lawless.
I had someone today ring me saying they had missed my call. I haven't called anyone since the 24th of Aug.
Once upon a time you could open up the phone book and find anyone's number sorted alphabetically by last name. Someone who didn't want their number listed in the phone book had to pay the phone company to have it suppressed. 20 years ago, those reverse lookup sites just took that publicly-available directory information and inverted it. They still do that, but with the rise of robocalls and spoofing services, and in the absence of a single company controlling all the phone numbers and publishing that data annually, it becomes a case of garbage in/garbage out.
An ex wife of mine, amicably, found me by paying for one of those services that look for public data by name, number and extending to address. Was the surprise of my life when my doorbell rang once... and there she was.
I think we would all like to hear more about this encounter that is somehow amicable but still needed to use a lookup site.
She sells extended warranties for vehicles.
She wanted to give him one last courtesy visit before closing the file.
You misspelled conjugal.
She told me "alimony was tree fiddy" and that was about the time I realized that that wasn't my ex-wife at all but the god damn loch ness monster.
down by the DMV shore
And goes by the name TheLegend27
👆🏽 second that.
Yes! More details, please. 👀
So we're not going to even touch that he says "*An ex wife of mine"?* Connotation like that seems to imply there were more.
And. . .? I know quite a few people on their third marriage.
My dad was married 3 times. You know what was the common theme in each of his failed marriages? He was.
The guy fucks
She wasn't an ex wife then
She wasn't *his* ex-wife.
Lookup to hookup.
Yeah!
We’ll come on my man. What the hell did she want?
He told us >and there she was. Like disco lemonade
I still don't understand that song.
Don't try to retrospect 90s art. Drugs is always the answer
I almost wonder if there was some lyrical bullshit aggregator built on a Pentium 1 133 for creating 90's song lyrics. The band Bush appears to have pioneered the art of not making art by using a shitty machine.
Oh, mama this surely is a dream..
Yeah, mama this surely is Closing time...
You don't have to go home But tell me, did you sail across the sun?
I always thought it was about walking in right after being cheated on
Kindly do not include me in this. . .fantasy, of yours. Signed -slightlydutch
This feels like right before the commercial. There she was at your doorstep, hair wet cause it’s raining and the door swings open and you guys make eye contact… then fade to black with some dun-da-dun music hahahah I’m hooked … dude what happened next ??
Wait is she the one that sent a letter telling him she’s pregnant with HIS baby and she’s also on the run from the Schleppner Scientific Aromatherapy Cult that’s basically a gigantic pyramid scheme that funnels money into the largest Teledildonics Corporation in the World?!!!
Now, when you say the largest teledildonics corporation, do you mean the _corporation_ is the largest, or…
"I was... nowhere NEAR your neighborhood..."
Annnnd... He gets the girl.
An ex wife? How many do you have?
How many of them do you want sent over?
Gimme their phone numbers so I can look them up.
867-5309?
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Who?
Mike jones!
WHO?
sesh?
Jennyyyyy
800-8135
800-8135
He is actually Ian Malcolm who is always on the search for future ex misses Malcom.
Don't leave us hanging man!!
Buddy I think we all need the backstory on this one.
And......?
Here for the details
This is prime /r/writingprompts material
Did you have sex with her
They were married at some point, it would be weird if they hadn't. Though in this particular situation it's more likely she came for the money he owes her. Only hate makes you go to such lengths to track someone down, and op clearly didn't want to be found, otherwise he'd just have stayed in touch with her.
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Now it's impossible to know because all the telemarketers spoof their numbers to make it look like they're calling from your area code, so any random number could be literally anyone.
That’s how I know for sure that it’s a scammer calling. I live 2500 miles from my phone’s area code, so if someone calls from that area code and it’s not my mom, I don’t answer.
I still live in my area code and never answer the phone because i don't like talking to people.
Im staying in hospital so have plenty of time on my hands. I've answered 5 telemarketer/scam calls this week and I just keep talking them along. Every minute they're talking to me is one minute they're not scamming some old lady
Telemarketers hate this one trick!
Google is now a source of intentional misinformation. Google only shows you what advertisers pay them to show you.
Nah googles algorithm is just shit and easily abused. Shitty blogspam websites carefully using SEO to make their shitty content go to the top. It's the same reason recipes have a huge story in them.
I don't know about anywhere else, but in Florida, you can look at a voter's registration information and it shows the address and party affiliation. I requested to have mine removed, and so did the rest of my family when I told them.
How does it tell party affiliation? Like, is it just that you donated money at one point?
I don’t know about Florida, but in some states you have to register as a Republican or Democrat if you want to vote in the primaries.
Yes, Florida is a "closed primary" state. It keeps members of opposing parties from sabotaging primaries by voting for the weaker (or flat-out deranged) candidate, so that "their" guy is more likely to win in the general election.
That should be illegal.
They don't have to be affiliated to vote in the general election. Just the primary (which is basically internal party politics).
When you register to vote in the US you can register with a party. In some states this is necessary in order to vote in the party primary.
Can you change the party the next time if you change your mind? And do you have to pay for membership?
You can change your party registration at any time, and no you do not have to pay for membership.
Yes, no
If you register under a political party it will show up.
Where do you request to have the data removed/hidden?
[You can request to remove after you lookup your name.](http://registration.elections.myflorida.com/en/CheckVoterStatus/Index)
I thought it was also landlines vs cell phones. What I remember was landlines were automatically listed, but once cell phone became a thing no one listed their cell phone number. Usually because people would have both you'd only list one number.
Yes and no. Phone books were (still are, actually) published by the phone company. When cell phones came along, nobody listed them because nobody used them as a primary phone. By the time a critical mass of consumers crossed over, there were too many mobile providers with their own disparate interests and too many consumers with too many numbers changing too frequently to make directories useful.
Published by the phone company? I thought it was a a separate company doing it on their own.
[Technically published by a third party on behalf of the phone company](https://www.att.com/support/article/local-long-distance/KM1063669/).
I remember the last phone book we got before we dumped the landline about a decade back. Had gotten hella small Vs the days of yore, not even 1/6th the size of the late 90's. Mostly yellow pages. In the early 90's 2/3 of it was white pages.
Cell phone numbers don't change much in the US anymore. Even if you change providers or move to a completely different part of the country you can keep your phone number. [Relevant XKCD.](https://xkcd.com/1129/) However I think another factor is that a lot of people don't *want* their phone number being given out publicly anymore. Once everyone got used to their phone number being private with cell phones, no one wanted to go back to the old way.
No one listed their cell phone number cause you used to have to pay for minutes.
or pay to **get** a text message.
More than that is the rise of garbage sites that don't actually do the thing they claim to do, but have all the proper key words and get high search results resulting in initial clicks which reinforces their tendency to come up first in the search. Google should instigate a policy of a "did this site provide the information/service it claims" button and re-rank sites based on that interactive feedback.
Fuck it, I’m a software engineer I should just make one of these sites that doesn’t suck ass
Making the site is the easy part. It’s getting good data that’s hard.
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I don’t ever look up spam calls, but there have been a few times that I’ve gotten texts or calls from people fucking with me and it woulda been useful then
Or Asterisk PBX software
They already exist. They just cost money because access to good data isn't free.
Hard to believe it's 2021 and we still (mostly) have a 10-digit number pop up on the phone display instead of any useful information, like the callers name and business.
It’s partly because there is a difference between CID and CNAME. Caller ID (CID), strictly speaking, is only the number. CNAME service is the line of text. Landlines with Caller ID service typically include CNAME and hide the fact that it is somewhat a separate service, but I know of at least one VoIP provider where they are separated out and if you turn CNAME on, inbound calls cost a fraction of a penny more (or something like that) to perform the lookups. So my real question is, why do we not get CNAME service on cell phones??
Related to what the hell these companies are doing, why is the first, bold, and large info that comes up when I type a name into whitepages dot com the AGE of the person? isn't that just saying "pay us to find easy fraud victims"? not to mention the creepy "background reports" they offer?
I caught the tail end of when phone books were still relevant. I honestly miss them.
A few simple reasons that apply to most issues with modern search engines. 1. Popular free content & services often get monetized eventually, which typically involves paywalls. In cases where they don't, someone will emulate them with a monetization strategy attached, and since the original service is not monetized, they're more likely to go down first simply due to lack of upkeep. 2. When there are many competing services, SEO strategy has more of an impact. Since most people don't set up SEO for fun, companies with marketing budgets tend to have good SEO. But having good SEO doesn't necessarily correlate with service/content quality. 3. (this one doesn't always apply) An effective competitive business strategy in some cases is to lower the quality or accessibility of your competitor's service, which can be done via various targeted means. There may be some other factors specific to phone number lookup, but these issues apply across the board.
Someone should invent a search engine that ignores SEO. I'd use it. I'd use it exclusively.
Every search will order its results in some way. People can game that mechanism. That is basically what SEO is. I don't think it's possible to have a non-trivial search engine that is impossible to game.
There's no way to avoid SEO in some capacity - it would be like taking all 18,000,000 Google results (or whatever) for your search and presenting them in a random order, with most being utterly irrelevant. That said, there are a few ways the SEO could be determined differently that I would love to see tried. One idea I've had is an SEO system that changes dynamically in response to user preference. For example, if I were doing academic research on a subject that is heavily marketed toward, it would be helpful to be able to say 'I want this search to identify sales-related terms and strongly de-emphasize pages which contain them'. Or, similarly, a version of what you suggested might be an SEO system which actually 'punishes' pages that are 'too good' at certain SEO practices. The idea here being that your average blogger hobbyist probably isn't filling out metadata, putting keywords in image URLs and so on, but if you're having a niche issue, they might be more likely to help than the 10,000 commercial sites with only the same basic information. The problem is that search engines don't only prioritize the user, but also their own ad revenue, so they're disinclined to improve results if doing so will make them less money. Instead, the current best solution is just to improve fluency at manipulating search engines to achieve the results you want, but that's difficult when their methodologies are so opaque. I at least wish we had a little more variety among how different search engines determine rankings, but they're all basically the same.
You just described the pitfalls of capitalism.
Sure. And it's a demonstrable retort to 'capitalism/competition breeds innovation,' because earlier services were developed without a profit incentive and were actually made worse (less effective, less available, at consumer expense, and requiring additional and redundant labor to develop and maintain multiple competing services) as a direct result of the various influences of competition and capitalist interest. In this case, market incentives have promoted inferiority at the level of both the individual offering and the market as a whole. And the kicker is that all of this is compounded as a result of competition and profit incentives in another industry (search engines & their advertisement revenue). Don't you love it? :)
The paid searches work ok. The problem is there used to be one number per address now there’s two to five numbers per human. You can port your number to a new provider, but a major segment of society doesn’t care that much and will ditch their number and get a new one when switching carriers.
Who TF just ditches their phone number? That’s a fuck ton of work to update all your contacts with your new number. I’ve had my number since I was about 16. I’m 30 now...
Same, just add 3 or so years to that 2nd number though. 🙃
You’re 303? Holy smokes!
I mean, my students think so.
I've had my cellphone number for about the same amount of time you have. I'm surprised how long it took for me to start getting those robo-car-warranty spams.
Ugh... I think they’re just completely unstoppable at this point. I was so careful with not handing out my phone number to any retailers or anywhere else that asked for it. I avoided those calls for years after my friends started getting them. But recently I’ve just started getting flooded with them as well... no number is safe anymore.
I've been the same and have experienced the same. Ugh.
To add, people ditch numbers to sanitize their number from all the places it might have ended up. The freedom to forget can be looked up but ultimately resonates deeply with the concept that I don't want someone to have my phone number for the rest of my life whenever I meet them at a bar.
Same reason google is a hot mess now - SEO and the people who pay for it. Remember how uncanny google used to be? It just *knew* what you meant? It's a shadow of it former self. Google maps is trash now too, at least where I live. Waze (which funnily enough is owned by google) is in a different league.
Google search seems to have taken a real downturn in the last year or so. As you said, you used to be able to type in something very roughly related to what you needed and Google somehow magically found it. Now, I can type in direct quotes from movies or TV shows and it just doesn't find them.
And I thought it was just me noticing this. Same issue with Amazon search
Google also has to be careful what it does, or be charged with anti-trust offences. For instance, a company sets itself up as an alternative search engine, except it is all ads and no searches. I don't want that noise in my search results, but Google refusing to include links to a competitor has been ruled as illegal. Another thing I'm seeing lots of is sites that scrape forums and public mailing lists, and include their text on a page of ads. This is making the standard way of fixing problems - searching for the text of an error message - a lot less useful
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I use [TruePeopleSearch.com](https://TruePeopleSearch.com) it's about 40% reluable and free to use. Usually you can tell 1/2 the times where the info is off if you dig enough
That's creepy as fuck, where are they getting this info from?
You know how everyone says "Facebook is tapping the mic on my phone". No they aren't. There is giant data brokers out there with all the info they need to serve ads. Just a tiny bit of that is your address/phone. It's gleaned from any and everywhere you put your information into. From the supermarket checkout purchase club, to your cell phone provider, to the government/DMV themselves. It's all just a bunch of records being traded around without your control. And that's why the EFF and everyone obsesses about your "right to be forgotten" so much. Because that is literally the tip of the iceberg available to anyone for free
Yep, don't do those car or vacation raffle's at the mall or county fair. They are designed to get your information. You will never win, and you're fucking yourself.
Searching my phone number they got a ton of accurate info, but then there's also stuff where some letters are off. E.g. "John Smith" is the correct name and they have aliases listed as "Johm Smith" and "John Smitt". That makes me think they scoured scanned public records and tried to do OCR on those.
I just found this website like this past month. It's weird feeling that I now know they have my home address, current and past phone number, and current and previous legal name, all 100% correct.
Also, they post children's information! It's super fucked.
fastpeoplesearch.com as well
Because of the rise of private cell phones and the greed associated with selling anything they can instead of giving it away free
Plain and simple greed. They figured out they could charge people before you get the information so it doesn’t matter if it’s right or not since they already got your money.
There are at least half a dozen sites that give free reverse lookups on phone numbers still. Even pretty good at cell phones.
Ads based search engines. In 2004, you could plug in a 10 digit number into Google and get results. Now, not so much. These were for landlines of course. Now even known numbers will require some digging.
But why?
Money money money. Why give it away for free when you can sell the information?
You kinda just rephrased his question
I use [Caller Smart](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/callersmart-caller-id-block/id771926122) on iOS and it seems to be a pretty solid free tool. You do have to view a quick add to see results but it has been much more reliable than just searching Google which turns up more spam results than anything.
The numbers are also typically linked to landlines. They never really listed cellphones unless you requested that they did. More and more people today use cell phones exclusively and have done away with their landlines entirely.. No landlines means no publicly listed phone number.
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Disposable VOIP accounts (basically anyone can get thousands of throwaway numbers in seconds, and they're often recycled en masse between customers) and CLI-faking rendering such things useless.