Caller Identification (ID) services is a feature in which the public phone system can provide the receiving party with the phone number associated to the calling party. The caller ID number is passed through the university's phone system to and from our telecommunications carrier on each call.
Outbound Caller ID Number
The number is set in the Cisco system per station. The outbound number is by default set to be the calling extension. Each campus phone is a unique public number on the world-wide telephone network (unless it is a 1XXX number, which is not real but a "self-provisioning number" waiting for someone to be assigned).
If you want to have this number presented as your department number, then you can make a service request to change that. Please be aware that this has impacts on the precision in which any 911 call placed can have as it will now appear from your department number. This change however makes sense for some business reasons.
Outbound Caller ID Name
The public telephone system is only able to pass the phone number through the call; it cannot pass the name. The number is not passed outside of North America at all. The name is in a database that is shared between telecommunication carriers and is not frequently updated. Think of this database like a cell phone's contacts list: if someone changes their number and you don't update your contact list then information displayed can be wrong when someone else calls on that number. Carriers are pretty bad at passing current information around. This applies only to land lines, not cell phones.
However, latest generation voice systems do pass caller ID with a name and the name is set in our Cisco system. The university uses AT&T services and if you call another AT&T customer you might see super precise caller ID name information when they answer the call.
Inbound Caller ID Number and/or Name
As like with the outbound calls, we receive the caller ID information that is passed to us. Usually the caller ID number will be accurate but because it is prone to failures (as noted in the section above), you need to take it with a grain of salt.
Spoofing of Caller ID
It is very easy to "spoof" caller ID information because the caller ID system was not built with consumers in mind. It was based on the idea only the telephone company would update the information and then changed to allow businesses to update. So now voice over IP consumer services, nefarious organizations intent on impersonating others to scam someone, and numerous smartphone apps let you easily change your outbound caller ID information. Scammers can place a call pretending to be anyone/anywhere the phone service allows. Scammers are very happy to find an entry in the caller ID name database that people recognize - more people will answer and trust their scam. Refer to this article by Trapcall that talks about caller ID spoofing and a database service that tries to identify spoofing through a crowd source app.
We are aware that scammers like to use UWRF numbers for spoofing. There are countless calls a day spoofed from our numbers. If you receive calls from people complaining about a call from you, please advise them of spoofing and to contact their local law enforcement if they were scammed.