MGG - 5.52 - HWYD - 555-1212

OK, I might have been a little too subtle.

I posted, "My phone said I had a missed call from +1-604-555-1212.

"Can't quite put my finger on it, but I have the strangest feeling that it was from a scammer ..."

555 is, and has been for some time, a "reserved" exchange in the North American public telephone system (+1-).  No area is ever assigned 555.  For the most part, you will see all telephone numbers on Hollywood/American movies and TV shows are in the 555 exchange, since the telcos know that calls to those numbers don't go anywhere.

There are a few reserved numbers *within* the 555 non-exchange.  At one point various area codes used 555-1212 as directory assistance.

At one point I worked in telecommunications consulting, including some work with telephony, so I know these things.  I tend to assume that anything *I* know is common knowledge.  I *also* know that, these days, pretty much any call you get from a scammer is going to have a falsified number show up in automatic number identification (so-called "caller-ID).  (This is why the advice to block numbers from scammers on your phone is pretty much useless: scammers just generate random numbers, or numbers "near" your number, that they put out in automatic number identification.)  (Even I, with my *extremely* limited experience in telephony, and not being a phone phreak, know at least *four* *different* ways to generate false input to automatic number identification.)

So, when my phone told me that I had a missed call from +1-604-555-1212, I knew that that was impossible.  Being impossible, it *had* to be from a scammer.  So I figured that my colleagues in security would all appreciate the joke.

It turns out, the joke was on me.  As I knew, if I had thought about it for a minute, there has always been a gulf between telephony people, and data communications people.  And, even these days, when "the network is the computer," a lot of techies still don't actually know how the network works.  Even the data network.  So, a lot of them didn't get the joke, and went to work to help me out.  (Sorry, you lot.)

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