CallerID By Physical Location, not Area Code?

This just came up. We maintain offices & call people in several states from a central Call Center, & present the CallerID of the office in the state in question, based on Area Code. Y’all helped me get this fixed earlier this year. It works fine.

Here’s a problem: If a callee has a cellphone registered in State A, but they’ve moved to State B & haven’t arranged a new cell # yet, FreePBX will treat them (by Area Code) as if they’re still in State A. This means when we call them, the CallerID looks out-of-state, so it’s less likely they’ll pick up.

We know (from studies & reports) that people are strongly DISinclined to pick up a toll-free CallerID, and somewhat disinclined to pick up calls from out of state. So even if we match this callee’s State A Area Code like the scammers do, since they’re in State B, it will look “out of state” & they might not pick up.

Finally a question: Is there any way to programatically set outbound CallerID other than by some part of the phone number?

Unless you have access to something like a reverse E911 database, I don’t think the data source you’re looking for is available for free.

I do know a data aggregator that can produce an address from phone number database, but he’s not letting that go for less than $$$ per number. Even that wouldn’t be guaranteed to be accurate, since mobile phones are (as the name implies) mobile since the updates would be batch (and not real-time)…

Someone else might have some better ideas for you, but I don’t know of any way to make this happen without looking like a complete douchebag.

Thanks for giving me a nice, comfortable LOL!!! this morning, Dave!

It’s a shame the spammers & scammers are the real douchebags in this. But for the abusers, CallerID could be very useful. I can even ~see how to script “pull the Area Code and Exchange from the dialed number & make up a 4-digit Station # to present as CallerID”, but the douchebags are already on top of that & many (most??) of us are wise to that scam already & refuse to pick up “very local” numbers.

It’s an interesting challenge, and I’m sure (unless we kill all the scammers) it will come in handy someday, but for now, I don’t think I have time or mental capacity to be able to give a caller the ability to identify (to Asterisk/FreePBX) the State (or Country) a callee is currently in. I was thinking of something like “Country Codes” but to include smaller geopolitical divisions.

Maybe that’s something for the CRM plugin to do…

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What you are describing is a crime. The FCC recently fine one guy $120 million for doing this. I hope you are made of money. Also, this will 100% turn all your callee’s into enemies. Maybe that is your goal. How about just not. The world is bad enough as it is.

Ummm… No, it’s not. It’s only a crime if it’s done “with the intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongly obtain anything of value.” The world is bad enough without anonymous Blog Snot that’s just wrong. But since I’m a nice guy, LMGTFY.

Thanks for your comment. Please try to learn stuff before you try to say stuff. You’re not helping.

The ONLY reason anyone would need to defraud and deceive their “customers” is if they are attempting to commit a crime.

End of story.

Hi!

No…

About 20 years ago a place where I worked used to do something pretty similar…

They would take the same area code + Central Office/Exchange as the main phone number + the 4 digit extension number.

Now, for extensions which were externally reachable (back then numbers beginning with 8 and later 7) this was a legit phone number which they owned but for all the other extensions it was a number they did not own…

When I said this was not OK and asked why I was told that this was done because some people (which owned them money I believe if this was done for the department I think) would filter out their calls if they saw the generic phone number of the company…

Now it wasn’t very legit to do what they did but the actual intent was not to commit a crime but to reach customers which were failing to meet their obligations towards them…

There was nothing I could do about it (beside saying this was not ok) since I was just normal IT staff…

They eventually stopped doing that…

Have a nice day!

Nick

Whether the intent was to commit a crime is not really the point. Caller ID means just that - Caller Identification - and having it do anything other than that is at the least dishonest, and possibly illegal.

I get particularly annoyed at the scammers, because I am on a pay-per-minute Cell Phone plan, and every one of these telemarketer calls costs me money. Apparently these telemarketers have no ethics. I get the same calls several times per week, and the caller ID changes all the time.

Since actual numbers are so cheap, it is entirely possible that these companies do, in fact, own the numbers, but is still aggravating, and since my numbers are on the do-not-call registry, they are also illegal in my book…