Your phone number is being used for spoofing

People call you back about calls you never made. Your number is being used as the sender, and you cannot stop it.

People call you back about calls you never made. Your number is being used as the sender, and you cannot stop it.

Why you cannot stop it

In spoofing, the caller fills in which number the person being called will see. That takes no access to your line, your phone or your account: the call is made from an entirely different connection, with your number stuck on it as a label.

So the call never runs through your connection. It is not in your call history and not on your invoice, and your provider holds no record of it. There is nothing to block at your end, because nothing happens at your end.

For the same reason, a new number does not help. It can be imitated the next day just as easily.

What you can do

• Brief whoever answers the phone. People will call back angry or worried. One sentence is enough: our number has been misused, we did not call you.
• Put it on your own website. Anyone who looks your number up lands there, and then they know before they call.
• Report it to the regulator of the country the number belongs to. See below.
• File a police report if there is damage, to you or to somebody who fell for it.

Where to report it

Do not expect your report to start an investigation into your case. Regulators work on patterns: they need volume before they can hold an operator to account. That is exactly why reporting is worth doing, even when it solves nothing for you.

Who can investigate it

The trail always starts with the person who received the call, not with you. Their provider took the call in and knows the route it arrived by. From there it can be worked back towards the real origin.

On top of that, the legal route for having an unknown caller identified in the Netherlands applies only when the number is withheld. In spoofing the number is not withheld but falsified, so that route is closed. What remains is a police report: only the police can require data from the receiving party's provider.

In practice that means: if somebody is defrauded in your name, ask them to file the report themselves. A report from you alone, as the holder of the number, produces no call records.

Belgian and Dutch numbers are not in the same position

In Belgium, operators have had to block calls that come from abroad, show a Belgian number and are made to a Belgian number since 2024. In the Netherlands that duty does not exist yet; spoofing is prohibited, but blocking has not been imposed.

None of that changes what you can do yourself. It does explain why the same abuse is caught more often on a Belgian number than on a Dutch one.

The mechanism works the other way round too: a number on your own screen proves just as little about who is calling you. See The number you see does not tell you who is calling.