To answer the questions about how a criminal call center apparently in Orange Co. CA is pretending to be home phones in other states, and what's needed to nail these crooks.....
In most cases, CID is generated in a telco central office.
For some businesses, with trunk connected PBX systems, starting around 24 lines and nearly universal for several hundred lines or more, CID is generated (or sometimes left blank) in the business' own phone system, that acts like a mini-central office in this respect. That's how some telemarketers or other con artists (eg, police benevolent associations, commercial marketers giving trivial payoffs to so-called charities to be partially exempt from DoNotCall) can set calling hardware to leave CID blank, or criminally forge someone else's number (as in this case). CID in non-fraud cases may also be set to a dummy reference number for out-only WATS, or be set to a real incoming line that misrepresents (but not fraudulently) the calling line to refer callbacks to an incoming line or main operator number of the same company.
That does not make these fraudulent calls entirely untraceable, but simply more difficult to identify. Telcos keep network operating logs for 2-15 months of all local and long distance calls in and out from each line. Those are based on SS7/ANI, the data packets used for call routing and billing purposes, that cannot be forged or left nul as CID can.
What's required in this case is for several of us, or the owners of forged numbers, or the real insurance businesses with names similar to the scam operator, to get incoming records of calls to us at known times and numbers to be traced against telco operational logs, to identify the source of the actual calls.
While in theory this is all illegal under FCC regs (can be reported on form 1088G online), what's needed are telco fraud investigations that trace internal technical records, linked to telco fraud complaints against the call center, and linked to local police, state attorney general, and FCC or other fraud criminal complaints, acted on within a time frame before the crooks responsible up and move. The challenge is to convince telcos on which calls are received, and local law enforcement or state AG fraud offices, that this is a far larger case than just one call to you, but a national interstate operation of large enough scope to be worth pursuing. It's likely that those behind this are entitled to thousands of counts of 5 figure fines and decades of Federal plus possible state prison time.
In addition, if the calling phone account(s) can be traced, that customer qualifies to have his entire telephone account and every line and other service disconnected for criminal use. That takes convincing the source telco's legal department that the customer is doing what it's obviously doing to generate this number of reports here and on similar sites.
In addition, this activity suggests further state and Federal investigations are invited, as to wire fraud, banking fraud, and insurance fraud. Is the company behind this selling real insurance policies using criminal tactics (and if so, for what real company, that might act against an affiliate if presented with evidence)? Is this company taking charge card info and pretending to sell nonexistent insurance policies, an outright fraud, where most "customers" don't discover they've bought fake policies until after the merchant chargeback period from their banks has expired? (If anyone bought through these crooks, go to your bank ASAP and ask their fraud division to investigate.)
Besides all of us commenting here, the other victims of this criminal operation are the legitimate owners of numbers forged in CID data (could you imagine the irate calls to your home if your number was used by these crooks, as a girl's in MS has been?), and real businesses selling similar products legally.
ATT Wireless declines to indepently investigate cases like this, suggesting targets need to file complaints with the FCC, FTC, FBI, or local law enforcement, to in turn follow legal process to have them investigate the actual call source in cases like this. Major PITA, but what's needed, to shut down these crooks.