Have you ever had your own phone call you? (details inside)

Yes, it’s called phone spoofing, and it’s terribly widespread. The bad guys buy or steal names and phone numbers from some source.

Spoofing a caller ID is super easy to do; they load the numbers and make calls.

You are correct to ignore them.

I won’t say it, I won’t say it.

Once. The phone rang when I was home and I checked the caller ID and the call was from me, with my home phone number. I didn’t pick up.

Yes, just recently the caller ID on the screen was my own number. I have also gotten robo calls showing my husbands number – and of course I answered.

Yes. Scammers can now change the CallerID information that is transmitted when a call is placed. It’s called spoofing.

More often then not I get calls from people in my contact list who say I’m calling them when they are actually calling me. I’ve gotten a few from my own number too.
In my case, it’s usually just friends messing around but it can be scammers messing with you too. If it’s happening all the time though, it might be someone pranking you?

I had this happen once, I called customer service right away for them to check it out.

Well, do I need to do something about it? Or just ignore it?

Yes. I get bogus calls all the time and ignore them. I did get a phone call from my own number twice. I did not answer the phone either time. @elbanditoroso is correct about the spoofing. I always heard it called shadow calling but it amounts to the same thing.

But isn’t it a dumb thing for a scammer to do? Obviously, you’re not going to be calling yourself, so it’s got to be a scam call, so you know not to answer it. Why even try the trick?

@SQUEEKY2 It happens to me, too, but only on my landline. Should I give that up, too?

@2davidc8 “Obviously, you’re not going to be calling yourself, so it’s got to be a scam call…”

I think it’s an effective tactic because a sufficient number of people are dumb enough to not figure that out. They may be curious as to how it’s possible that their own phone can be calling them. Also, this tactic has the benefit of filtering out smart people who are scam-savvy. The cost for a scam center is the hourly wages of the dickheads making the calls, so making their time as productive as possible by having them run their scam on the dumbest people is actually a “win” in all likelihood.

@2davidc8 The issue isn’t that they are trying to get just you. They are shadowing your phone number to computer call a whole bunch of people. I have texted back to numbers that called me and the person who got my text said they haven’t used their phone and had no idea who I was. There was no record of a call from their phone. The scammers just let the computers randomly dial numbers in the area code and every so often you get a call from yourself.

@gorillapaws Interesting way to look at it.