Ed Ravin reports...
"A friend of mine uses Vonage (VoIP) for her primary phone line. Their VoIP system gave her a nightmarish experience during the wee hours of December 15.
The problem started around midnight - her VoIP phone rang, and caller-ID showed it was a number local to her area, but she didn't recognize it. She answered, but there was no one on the line. Her phone rang again several minutes later - same caller-ID, again no one there. And a few minutes later, the phone rang again, same caller-ID, same nobody there.
Then her cell phone rang. The cell phone's caller-ID showed the same phone number as her VoIP phone did. Again, the line was dead when she answered it. Twice more in short order, the phantom caller rang her cell phone.
Now wide awake and rather disturbed, she went to her computer to look up the phone number of her putative persecutor. Google helpfully provided a reverse directory lookup - to a person with an Arabic-sounding name that she did not recognize. With the help of Mapquest, she found out that this unknown person lived only a few miles from her. Worried and feeling vulnerable, she was unable to get to sleep, thinking that a strange person in the neighborhood was calling both her home phone and cell phone for no apparent reason.
At 3 in the morning, her VoIP phone rings again - this time, the caller-ID says that her own cell phone is making the call! But the cell phone is turned off and is sitting on her nightstand. She finally smells the rat, and at 4 AM calls the Vonage customer support line After a 30 minute wait, a polite but difficult-to-understand person explains that Vonage has been experiencing a problem with "phantom calls" and it should be resolved soon.
My friend had her Vonage account set up so that if her VoIP number was down, it would automatically forward calls to her cell phone. So Vonage's software PBX had her cell phone number on file, and it apparently went haywire and began placing calls to numbers in its database, and using other numbers in its database as the caller-ID.
The biggest risk here is believing what you see on your caller-ID display. Using computerized tools to compound your error and jump to the wrong conclusions is a close second. Then there's the well-known "mission creep" risk, where data supplied for one purpose is (mis) used for another. Even though the misuse was unintentional, it's a stark reminder that phone numbers are a special kind of data with real-world implications, especially when in the hands of buggy software that can make phone calls. ...from Risks-Forum Digest - Volume 25 : Issue 02
