Getting Calls At Home From Your Own Home Number?

It's happened a few times in the past couple of weeks. My home phone, aka connection to the ghosts of communication past, rang. I looked at the caller ID and to my surprise the display suggested that the call was originating from my own home. It had my number and even my name on the display. It's situations like this when the thoughts start racing.

I remember a movie from my teenage years where a babysitter was being stalked by an evil doer. The baby sitter kept getting eerie awful calls from this creep and so the police, as they tend to do in movies, traced the call. It turns out the bad guy was calling from inside the same house. It was at that point in the film I had a K-Mart moment and shipped my pants.

So, after a quick check of all the rooms in my home and a peek in the attic I determined there were no bloody thirsty psychopaths other than myself in the house. Since this is 2016 and "I got the Google". I went online and discovered that I am not the only person that has experienced this kind of thing. As you might have guessed it's more evil doers trying to do evil among the good people of the world.

According to the Federal Trade Commission if your phone rings and it's a call from your own home number don't answer it. It's a scammer plain and simple. By answering the call you are validating the number and the scammer might then use your number to robocall other innocent people.

Scammers use this tactic to avoid detection by law enforcement and make it hard to trace their actual location. So as much as you'd like to pick up the  phone and scream into the receiver, don't.  Don't push any buttons or speak or ask to be taken off of the call list. Once you've connected the call the scammer knows your number is a working number.

By the way if you want to have your phone removed from legitimate telemarketing lists you can register your number with the FTC's Do Not Call Registry. Since I did that my telemarketing calls have been reduced to only a few a week.