Alright, so get this. For going on about two or three months now, I have been receiving these creepy phone calls at really odd hours. I’ve tried to peg down a pattern, and even thought I’d done so, until I sorted it out and realized that there are only a few things each call has in common with one another–but more on that in a second. So essentially I’ll get a few a day, or one every other day or so, but lately it’s gone up to at least once every day, and today’s calls both took place within about an hour and a half of one another between 10:30am est. and 12pm est. Often, I think I’ve noticed the calls will be around like 1pm est. to like 4:30pm est., but this pattern has been broken several times, with calls at REALLY odd hours like at 2:30am est. Well, I should state outright that I don’t know if that one call at 2:30am est. was part of the same group, as that call had this electronic beeping going on until I hung up, the rest do not have that beep. Every call save the one early morning always have the utmost of silence on the other side, like totally dead air. And today I think I discovered that if I say hello or basically anything twice, that is when it hangs up. If I simply say something once, the call goes on until I do say another word. But then again this could be just another theory of mine I’ll later debunk, as I guarantee these calls will not stop. The one early morning call has been the most creepy, but there have been others, I think, at other strange times; however by and large, these calls are generally placed in the afternoon. Does anybody have any idea what they could be, how to stop or prevent this from continuing, etc.?
Call the phone company.
If you are in the US, dialling *57 afterwards (you must hang up, get a dial tone, then dial) will put the calling party’s number in a tracelog that the police can get and use to investigate.
Could it be calls from a fax machine? I’m not sure how it happened, but one place I worked got several calls like that, and they involved beeping and/or a strange whine.
how long have you had the number ?
i had a similar problem recently when i moved and the phone
company assigned me a new number. Turned out to have been
recently used by a local business as a fax line !
The calls came all hours, day & night, and were not obviously
faxes or modems (ie no high pitched bleeping etc), but i set up
a software fax/answer machine (called supervoice) on my pc
and left it on (i share my phone and internet lines), and it
captured a few faxes coming in, so i was able to fax them back
and get them to take my number off their list.
This may be possible in your case, if this has only just started
happening - could be 1 business with the wrong number, but
for me i had an established fax number and couldn’t call everyone
who possibly still had it listed to correct the situation, so i
eventually had to change numbers …
aha! I hadn’t thought about it being a fax machine. See, I have been certain that this isn’t some goofy kid playing krank calls on me or some such thing, I’ve been through that and done the *57 thing before. You have to have a certain number of the same calls traced, like six of them or something, before the police will put the heat on a krank caller anyway. I remember I had to go through that nonsense for like three months before I found out who I’d feared was a stalker was in all actuality a thirteen year old junior high kid getting his shits and giggles by annoying me. The difference between those calls and these is that there was often t.v. mumblings or other ambient sound on the other line, whereas with these, there’s nothing on the other end at all. And then the fact that saying something twice will hang it up… that sounds like how a fax machine would respond to a phone line if it accidentally had been dialed to one. And calling the phone company is useless, they’ll just want to charge me gobs of cash to do anything about anything; verizon is not a philanthropic company guys. I also can’t think of too many things that will beep other than faxes or solicitation robots, but I’m on that “do not call” gov’t. list, so it’s illegal for solicitors to even call me.
Okay, so what you’re saying, though, is that if I want this annoying crap to stop, I pretty much have to change my number? I don’t have a fax machine, and I’m a cable user, so there is no way for me to fax anybody back.
Even if you’re a cable internet user, there’s nothing preventing you from plugging a phone line into your modem and using fax software to capture some faxes. All you need is a basic fax/data modem and software, and chances are there’s a modem installed already. There’s plenty of freeware fax software out there.
I get these all the time. I just assumed they were telemarketing firms trying to either (1) decide what time a person answers the phone so they could sell my number and time data to another bastard marketer, or (2) wait for an answering machine to pick up to leave one of their stupid, illegal, pre-recorded messages.
Now that’s what I’d been thinking this was, actually. I thought it actually was telemarketing robots calling and perhaps doing just that, monitoring my phone activity. However, about a month and a half ago I joined that “do not call” registry set up by Uncle Sam, and supposedly these people can be prosecuted if they call my number at all due to new legislation. I don’t know what it is, obviously since I’m posting for clues on here, but the fax thing sounds reasonable, too. I’ll maybe hook my Mac up to the phone and see if it will take faxes if these are faxes. But if it is telemarketers doing these scammy illegal calls, what can a guy do to prevent it from continuing?
Calling numbers currently on the DNC list will only be illegal after October 1 of this year.
I doubt that telemarketers would be so regular. They are responsible for lots of hangups, since their systems dial ahead, and if you pick up while the telemarketer is on another call you’ll get dead air. But not so often.
Faxes are possible. Have you *69ed the call if you don’t have caller id. (You didn’t mention if you did or not.)
There is another possibility - something with a broken “call home” capability. The Register once mentioned the case of a woman in
England who would get a call every night, with no one on the line. It drove her crazy. The phone people finally traced it to a toilet that was trying to call to say it needed service - the number had been put in incorrectly.
I’d call the phone company first - it seems unlikely this is a police matter.
I think Balthisar is correct, actually.
If you have Verizon, I don’t think changing your number will do you any good. I just started service with them and within an hour after I went live, I had several spam phone calls. I get about 4 or 5 of these automated phone calls every day that clog up my answering system. Then I get 4 or 5 other calls a day that I am assuming are real people but spam calls, they never leave a message. I have had phone service all over the US, I get more junk phone calls with my new Verizon number than I did with all of my other numbers combined. I will have to say my Verizon DSL is pretty spiffy though, no problems with that whatsoever.
I had something similar happen. I called it the Lone Ringer. Every night for almost a year I’d get at least one phone call after 9pm and before midnight. The phone would ring once and that was it. I rarely got to it in time to answer and the few times I did there was nothing on the other end. No beeps, no background noise, no nothing. It stopped a few months ago and that was it. The phone company wasn’t interested in checking it out, but I always figured it was some automatic call that kept getting the wrong number.
Cecil addressed some “ghost rings”.
This is definitely the way to go, rather than all this speculation. If it doesn’t turn out to be a modem or fax on the other end, then the line testing in Cec’s column linked by Q.E.D. is the next most likely candidate.
We had a similar situation, except the calls came at 6:15pm every day. One day my husband said just don’t answer it. We never got another. His theory was it was a telemarketing computer. Once we broke the cycle it stopped calling… I have no idea.
Well, my previous theories once again were debunked. The theory of regularity and of speaking twice being the key to it hanging up… bogus. A call today at 9am and another at 10:30am proved that. I answered the first and it hung up after I asked “hello?” the first time, and the second I let the machine get, which it hung up on before the machine went “beep!”
Alright, I read Cecil’s thing, and this may be so. In fact, my G/F had mentioned something much to the same effect–but we don’t have cheap phones like the writer who’d queried Cecil. Either way, Cecil mainly did address the deal with the phone company doing its “trunk testing” or it being telemarketers.
I want to take the advice on this fax test notion, so how do I set my computer up to answer as a fax machine after I’ve plugged the phone line into the wall as I’ve just done?
This freeware fax program has a 14-day trial. That should be enough to capture most if not all of the numbers that are calling, if they are fax machines. If not, It’s only $19 to register it. This is for Win 2k or XP. If you have something else, let me know.
I do have something else, I run a Mac G4 with that buggy OS 9.0.4. See man? Shit. That is like two strikes against me almost all the time with downloads. In the first place, nobody thinks of Mac users in the first place with freeware, shareware, movies, music, etc., etc. Secondly, if they do it ain’t with my OS they engineered their programs. Usually I find that OS X or some of the later 9’s will work with most everything, but have a computer that’s a first or second generation G4, and it’s becoming a dinosaur.