Answered this call, caller knew my last name, said he was a contractor working in the area and if I was interested in home improvements. I said no thank you and to take me off his list.
1-650-711-8536 is not a valid number. If you are sure that you got a phone call from a number beginning with this prefix, the caller may have 'spoofed' caller ID.
Answered this call, caller knew my last name, said he was a contractor working in the area and if I was interested in home improvements. I said no thank you and to take me off his list.
Repeated calls from this number always hang up after 4th ring. Called ID shows "XXXXXXXXXX"
Please contact Consumer's Union and your congressperson to ask them to push for anti-spoofing laws for telephone service. On the internet, IP addresses cannot be successfully spoofed because it's so easy to send a packet back to that address to get authentication of the address. There is no such back and forth authentication process for telephone systems, although it would be relatively easy to implement. Telephone number authentication is key to stopping this kind of garbage, but the telephone companies would never spend a dime on creation of such a protocol without substantial pressure.
By the way, "spoofing" is the term used for faking your telephone number or internet protocol address. It's like sending a letter with someone else's return address. Normal people don't do such things, but people who want to engage in illegal activities don't want you to know who they really are, so they misrepresent themselves as having somebody else's identity, or in this case, somebody else's telephone number.