Several times a week, I get calls from strange, out-of-state phone numbers. If I bother to answer, no one is on the other end of the line. I assume this is part of some sort of spam scheme to determine if the number is in use or something, but I really have no idea. Does anyone know what these calls are all about? I suppose they could all be wrong numbers, but typically someone answers in those cases.
Rob
Often robocallers dial several numbers at once, and if someone else picks up first, not answer you. They are either going to try to get you to accept a collect call at obscenely inflated rates, or perhaps it’s that $(^&%(* from Credit Account Services playing an automated message telling you to press 1 to be removed from their list.
If you do press 1, that tells them the number is active and they will then call you three or four times a week. Yes, it’s illegal. No, there’s nothing you can do. Just don’t answer.
Regards,
Shodan
There are also calling centers, for both telemarketing and telephone product research, where the call itself is placed by computer, then linked to the next available human employee. The calls are placed in advance and sometimes get ahead of the pool of available humans if several calls prior to it end up taking longer than average.
In my experience the calls are almost always political in nature. Of course the politicians ensured that calls soliciting for political parties or candidates are exempt from the Do Not Call list.
i cant verify if but i have heard such calls are used to determine what time of day people are home and then this data is used to update the call frequencies of real sales calls
And there’s also a reason why they are typically coming from out-of-state (possibly depending on what state you are in).
Some of the more enlightened states have their own state laws restricting telemarketing calls or robocalls or other such common nuisances. But such laws can only be binding on calls that originate within the state. They can’t control calls that originate out-of-state. Only Federal law can address that (or try to anyway).
So the telejackasses program their telejackass machines to make only out-of-state calls. If they are located in a state with such laws, they won’t make calls to in-state numbers. However, if you live in a state without such laws, then I suppose you could receive calls that originate in-state as well.
Some of those out of state calls are from out of the US; there have been scams where taking one of them would cost money without even being collect. Check out the North American Numbering Plan Area information.
A lot of them are phony (forged) numbers; the call center may be somewhere overseas, beyond the reach of Do-Not-Call enforcement, or just somewhere else in the U.S. that they don’t want you to know, and the Caller ID information is fake. (Rachel from Card Services being a particular offender.)
You can check the numbers at these spam-reporting sites:
Yeah, forging numbers to fool you into picking up seems pretty common these days.
Recently I got a call from the security and fraud department of my local credit union. Of course I picked up thinking there might be a problem with my account. It was a forged number and didn’t have anything to do with my credit union. So how did they know to fake my credit union? That’s a bit worrying.
They were particularly bad before the election, but there are still plenty now, almost none political. The political ones don’t forge numbers, but they do block them, so something like “Toll Free” shows up.
We have a phone which announces the number calling. It is well worth it, since you usually don’t even have to get up to know it is a phony.
I have made it a practice, when I actually pick up, to not say anything, and certainly not give my name when one of these things comes in.
Maybe, maybe not. When you call hundreds or thousands of people every minute, somebody will use that credit union; if it’s a large credit union or one with a broad customer base in a particular area, many of the call victims may be customers. (The FTC says that some of these robocallers place 2.5 million calls a day.)
It’s the same logic, on a smaller scale, that drives the spam emails that purport to be from Capitol One or Citibank or DiscoverCard: lots of people are customers of these financial behemoths, so a certain percentage of the spam recipients will be customers no matter who the recipients are.
Another reason out-of-state marketing calls have increased so much is that with the diversification of the phone systems long distance doesn’t much exist anymore, so there’s no increase in cost to call local vs. nation-wide.
Do you happen to have a toll-free number? There is a scam involving toll-free numbers and small-time telephony companies. When you call a toll-free number, the toll-free number owner pays for a CNAM (caller name and number) lookup and the minutes and the local carrier will get some of that money.
There is sometimes a revenue sharing agreement with the local carrier and the scammer initiating the calls.
The TeleZapper comes to mind. Not perfect, but a big step in the right direction.