When your phone rings, your first instinct is to see who is calling. If no phone number is displayed, many people are already reluctant to pick it up. Without caller ID, you would not be able to call back the people who called you. This useful service has become an essential part of our everyday lives. However, most do not even think about whether the ID displayed is actually the real phone number of the person calling them. 

In reality, however, caller ID was originally intended as a convenience service and can be changed by either the caller or the operator involved in transferring the call. This is comparable to writing any return address on an envelope; at worst, if you do not provide your own address and the mail is not delivered, you will not get it back.

However, the possibility of number spoofing can also represent a threat when fraudulently used to take money from unsuspecting victims, trick them into revealing their personal details or gain access to their bank account or card details. Fraudsters may also use a spoofed number to try to lull victims into a false sense of security or appear trustworthy, for example, by pretending to be calling from a bank’s customer service number.

Number spoofers may also seek to hide their identity: by setting up an arbitrary number, they can make it harder for victims to pursue them, or even worse, victims may end up making angry calls to innocent third parties who know nothing about the whole thing.

In Hungary, thanks to the cooperation between the NMHH and major phone operators, serious steps have already been taken to reduce number spoofing. Since October 2025, telephone operators have been monitoring calls from abroad to their networks and if they find a spoofed Hungarian ID, they will block the call so that it cannot reach the intended victim. For the time being, this obligation does not apply to mobile phone numbers as operators need time to prepare so as to ensure that subscribers who are actually located abroad can still make calls to Hungary.

As a result, now there is much less worry about whether a Hungarian landline number or green number calling you has been spoofed. For mobile phone numbers, operators will implement the same checks starting this summer so, it will be much less likely, for example, for fraudsters to call others using your number, saving customers a lot of embarrassment.

Even with the regulation and behind-the-scenes efforts by operators, it is still important to remain alert and spot the telling signs of fraud. In this context, useful advice and up-to-date information is available on the CyberShield website. This is also important because fraudsters can call you not just from Hungarian number but others as well and may also use an increasing range of applications and services for voice calls, in addition to landline and mobile phone services.

As a result of the steps taken by the NMHH and operators, you can now have more confidence that when your phone rings, it is actually the person calling whose number is displayed.