Who Owns Your Phone Number?

First, let me ask some easier questions.  You buy a house and one day you come home and find someone else living there.  Who owns your home?  You buy a unique painting and come home and its missing, but you see it on EBay.  Who owns your painting?  You buy the use of a parking space in front of your apartment from the landlord, and come home and see someone else parked in it.  Who owns the parking space?  You go into a Verizon store and buy a phone and they say: “Here’s your phone and your new phone number.”  Who owns your phone number?

Now, you think you know the answers to those earlier questions, and you are probably right.  You buy something, you own it, even if what you buy is the use of something.  It’s yours.  Relative to the phone number, every month you get a bill; it lists that number and calls you made, texts you made and received, and minutes used.  You pay for the use of that number.  It would seem Verizon owns that number, because they bill you under it.  Or --- perhaps you own that number, but Verizon is billing you for the airwave usage you accomplish using that/your number.  I guess you could assume either way.  But what does Verizon say?  They say: “I dunno.”

Last month I received a couple of nasty emails to my cell number, a nasty call (I couldn’t get a word in edgewise), and then a more polite call asking me to stop calling someone --- someone I never heard of.  Someone had hacked and was using my number.  (and lest you think someone sent me malware in an email, I have a flip phone, not an iphone --- I don’t get emails on my phone.)  I was a little anxious over the texts and calls because of the vehemence of the anger in them.  Knowing a phone number, it is easy to find the owner’s address ---- I was watching my door closely for a few days.  But I heard nothing else.

Until today.

Today I received a call from a nice-sounding elderly gentleman asking me why I was calling him so much.  He saw my number in his machine, but he didn’t answer because he didn’t recognize the number.  He called me thinking perhaps there was some sort of emergency, since I continued to call him.  I told him I hadn’t called, but apparently someone else had hacked my number.  Then I called Verizon.

Their customer service response was: “Yeh, you’ve been hacked.  Nothing we can do about that.”  I suggested cancelling my number for a month or two, allowing no calls from it, and maybe the hackers would move on.  “No,” customer service responded, “Your cancelling your service would not prevent them from continuing to use that number.”  “So, a number that was no longer validated by you could still continue to be used?” I asked.  “Yes, there is no way for us to stop that.”  “Well, if an invalid number can still be used, I guess I’ll just reprogram my phone to some fake number and get free service from now own --- you’d better look for a new job, your company is going out of business soon, if anyone can use a fake number and you can do nothing about it.” 

My local police department was more polite in their response.  Yes, Verizon can track outgoing and incoming calls from a number, and could identify a call-source.  (Gee whiz, you mean GPS really works?  Wow!)  But tracking a source can be masked.   But if it’s not masked --- like I don’t do --- Verizon could tell if my number was being used from my location, and block any other usage ----- if they wanted to.  But it’d be a hassle, and they’d rather leave that to the police, who don’t have the technology to do that.

So, if you find out your number is being used for harassing calls, well, this is just another reason for owning a gun.  No one else seems to be able to protect you from overt threats.

Oh, and after all this, I’m still not sure who owns my phone number.  So, I guess I won’t go out hunting for the guy using my number harassing people; He may have a legal right to do that.  At least Verizon seems to think so, because they don’t want to try to stop him.