[taterhog]

Originally Posted by j-mac

OK here is where my crack investigation has taken things:

1) When you try to connect straight to his voicemail with SlyDial, it just rings and then gives a fast busy. Not what happens with a cell phone. So it's not simply a disposable cell, or a boost mobile or whatever.

2) Calling the number (using *67 of course), the phone rings 8-9 times before the voicemail picks up. Way too many rings for it to be a cell phone.

3) Here's the interesting thing that may give us a little clue: When the voicemail picks up, the greeting says "The person at EXTENSION 1[FULL NUMBER] is not available. Please leave a message at the tone yadayada" This is the default greeting for a PBX system, such as in an office. NOT a default greeting for a cell phone or even a home phone. And cell phones don't have extensions.

To summarize, we can assume it's a "spoofed" number. But not in the way you might think. Remember, it has a PBX extension. So what behaves like this? DID over VoIP. In English, he, or the company he works for, purchased a Direct Inward Dialing number from a Voice over IP company. Probably with a Virtual PBX service as well. When you sign up for such a service, you can choose the area code and prefix you want to use. So you can have salespeople all over the country, but have a "Virtual Office" in Iowa, sending and receiving calls from that DID line, with extensions, voicemail, etc. And since its VoIP, there's no Long Distance. Kind of like Vonage for businesses.

As for the texting, most of those Virtual PBX (also called "Hosted PBX") providers also have an app you can download for your phone and computers so that you can send and receive any texts from the DID number. Or he could have bought an SMS spoofcard to accomplish the same thing? Not sure..

Anyway, this is just my educated guess. I'm not an expert by any means!

or he knows a little unix and built an asterisk box to play with.