Because almost all phone calls are routed through Internet switches a good hacker can make a phone call appear to be coming from anywhere: Texas, Washington DC, Tokyo... All while calling from Pakistan.
Interesting the use some people have made of technological advances. It seems lately things like unending unknown callers come in waves, last for a couple of days, are from a repeating pattern of three different area codes and then they go away for a few days. Finally added caller ID in January on the business lines and we just don’t answer any calls that would seem to be suspect, letting them go to voice mail but no one leaves messages.
One of the issues we are encountering occurs because we have so many people calling our office who have moved to Houston this past year but kept their old number in their previous area code. Sometimes it just gets to be a judgment call and we choose to error on the side of caution and don’t answer.
I have also noticed the same increased pattern in suspect emails and the count of emails routed directly to spam really spikes one day a week, generally on Tuesday.
Not like we don’t already have enough to worry about when trying to run a business now but have this added burden, too.