You Mail: Secure, Personalized and Flexible Voice Mail Replacement Service

Background: For months I was receiving harassing phone calls and voicemails from an unknown person. I tried everything I could to ignore the problem, even hired a Private Investigator to look into it things were getting so bad, until I recently discovered my voicemail account with Cingular had been compromised. A friend of mine received a forwarded voicemail supposedly from me at 4am one morning. I was not awake and this really confused me. Since this person elected to no longer remain my friend I was ticked off. I searched forums, googled voicemail hacking, bugged Cingular, etc.. in order to find out what was going on. My research taught me that Cingular's voicemail system is probably the most unsecure system out there. Sprint/Nextel users voicemail accounts are tied directly to thier phones ESN (serial number) and passwords are enabled by default. Cingular however ties its voicemail to Caller ID and you have to enable voicemail passwords in the system yourself. My mistake was that I enabled the password protection on my phone but not the voicemail system.

VoiceMail Hacking

My voicemail had been hacked and this is how they probably did it. Have you ever called lets say Best Buy at 1-800-BESTBUY? That number is 1-800-237-8289. Now Best Buy pays the phone company a lot of money to be able to use that particular number and they want everyone to use it when they call a customer service center. Now Best Buy probably has 2000 or so phones in their customer service department and they all can't have the same number. So the phone company sells a service called "Trunking" which routes all calls to 1-800-BESTBUY to those 2000 numbers. Follow me so far?