Are you getting a lot of angry phone calls and texts from complete strangers accusing you of spamming them or trying to trick them into a phone scam? You may be the victim of someone using your phone number without your knowledge, using a technique called phone spoofing.

That's a fancy way of saying that your phone number appears as someone else's caller ID when they call or text you.

Phone spoofing can be used legally by businesses and individuals. For example, a lawyer may want to spoof his own office phone number when making an after-hours business call to a client from a personal smartphone.

Unfortunately, this feature is often abused by scammers who use it to hide their real phone number and replace it with a number closer to the people they want to reach.