Spoofing, What is it?

Spoofing – the Art of Fooling and Deceiving

Spoofing refers to fooling or deceiving. In telecommunications, spoofing refers to the practice of altering one’s identity to appear as someone else. Caller ID spoofing and email spoofing are on the rise and something everyone needs to be aware of.

Caller ID spoofing is the practice of making a call appear to come from any phone number the caller chooses, rather than from the number the call originated. Caller ID spoofing is often used for fraud or prank calls. Fraudulent callers are able to get personal information using Caller ID spoofing because consumers believe the call is coming from the number that appears on their Caller ID and believe they know who they are talking to.

NDTC wants all of their customers to be aware that Caller ID spoofing is prevalent and to be very careful giving any information out to someone who calls you. If you ever doubt the identity of a caller, offer to call them back and verify who you are speaking to. Caller ID spoofing also allows prank callers to make calls without their identity being given or blocked.

Email spoofing is the practice of sending an email that appears to originate from a different source. This is usually used for spam email or phishing. Spam email is the sending of unsolicited bulk messages. The sender of these emails use email spoofing to make the messages appear to be sent from an email address other than their own. Normally the address the email messages appear to come from is an unsuspecting individual that has been the victim of a phishing scam.

Phishing is attempting to acquire sensitive information such as username, password, social security numbers, or credit card information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity. These emails appear to originate from a legitimate company informing the receiver there is a problem with his account and he must email back personal information, often a username and password in order to resolve the issue. Never respond to these emails.

If you receive an email asking for personal information and you think it might not be legitimate, do not respond to the email, instead call the company that the email is supposedly from. Be sure to use the phone number from a previous statement, not a phone number from the email.

NDTC does not send out e-mails or make calls asking for account information or other personal information from our subscribers. We want all of our customers to be aware of such scams as they are occurring in our area. Please contact NDTC at 1-800-880-4213 or 701-662-1100 if you need more information or believe you have been a victim of spoofing.