Just google “caller id spoofing” and you’ll see them listed. There are hundreds of internet sites available that provide this as a service. It makes it appear to the recipient that the phone call has been made by someone else. It involves tricking the telephone network to display a phone number on the recipients display that is not actually the originating number.
So how did those News of the World journalists hack into the mobile phones of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, relatives of deceased British soldiers and victims of the 7/7 London bombings? They used a technique called caller id spoofing. I wanted to make sure that the techniques Brody used were up-to-date and realistic. That, in those two years, the UK mobile operators would have increased the security measures on our phones. So, at the time of writing the scene in the book, almost two years on from the scandal, and many years on from the actual phone hacking events, I naturally assumed that it would be much harder to hack into a UK mobile phone’s voicemail service. Like most people, I remember the July 2011 phone hacking scandal that brought down the News of the World. There is a scene in my novel where I needed the protagonist, a computer hacker called Brody, to gain access to someone else’s mobile phone voicemail. 0 Is Your Cellphone Voicemail Still Wide Open?
