Neighbor Spoofing

Neighbor spoofing exploits the psychological tendency to answer calls from numbers that look local or familiar. By displaying a number with the same area code (and often the same first three digits) as the victim's own phone number, attackers achieve dramatically higher answer rates than calls from unknown or international numbers.

The technique is routinely used by robocall operations and vishing campaigns. Victims who answer and engage with the recorded message are transferred to fraudsters who may pose as banks, government agencies, or tech support. Because the number looks local, victims often assume it is a neighbour or local business, lowering their guard.

Caller-ID is a soft signal — it can be set to almost any value by VoIP providers with few safeguards. Carriers in the US have implemented the STIR/SHAKEN authentication framework to verify that calls genuinely originate from the stated number, and similar work is underway in the UK and EU. Users can protect themselves by treating unexpected calls from 'near' numbers with the same caution as unknown ones.