The telephony protocol permits owners of a local telephone exchange (any setting with many internal phones) to display a chosen number in the caller-id field. The intent was that outgoing calls would appear to come from the general number of the organization, rather than the individual who actually placed the outgoing call. Unfortunately, when this was designed, no thought was given to the possibility of (now widespread) abuse. One cannot completely blame the original designers: when they did their work, telephony was essentially a closed system controlled by a handful of large telephony companies. The rise of using the internet as a transport medium was not something they could have anticipated: there was no internet back then!

Not that this explains it, but IIRC, caller ID information is sent (or was, at one time with land lines) "out of band", in a particular data format, that occurs between the first and second rings.

IIRC, it's done using frequencies that either can't be heard (ie, outside the freq response of the phone), or the sound is "switched off" between rings (quite possibly this, since the "ring" voltage is completely different from the "line-in-use" voltage - so this voltage change can be detected and switch the signaling as needed).

At any rate, it's a known thing, and if you understand how it works, it's possible (well, again, was - for land line phones) to build a box that can inject these signals between the rings so the phone being called will display it. Normally, this is done (IIRC) by the CO, but I think if the info is already there, it doesn't override it.

I might be completely wrong, though; it's been a couple of decades since I last read about how it worked; also, I have no idea how it works in cell-phone land, but likely it hasn't changed because "inertia" and having to support older land-line phones...

For legitimate outbound sales, I might be calling from 617-867-5309, but want my caller ID to always show up as the office main number (perhaps 617-867-5300). Or I might want to show my Google Voice (or Twilio or other) number as my number even if I happen to be returning your call from a specific line or phone.

As for felony life sentence, while I'm sure that's facetious for effect (and I chuckled), if you accept any of the above reasons, it seems you also need to allow for inadvertent misconfiguration. Once we broke up the telephony stranglehold (overall a good thing, I think), we allowed a bunch of federated phone systems to start working together, most of whom are good actors.

You are probably banned in Google, so there is link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing