Twice a day, at 10:30 AM , and 2:00 PM , the phone rings. Caller ID shows unknown number. They never leave a message. If I’m awake and answer the phone when it rings, I get immediately hung up on. *69 doesn’t work on them. Anonymous call rejection doesn’t seem to work either. It’s strange. Anyone have any ideas as to why this is happening and how it can be stopped?
I’ve never had this problem before, but have you checked with your local telco to see if there’s anyhting they can do.
Is this an old rotary phone by any chance? I believe I heard somewhere that a guy had this problem at like 2:00 in the morning every night, but it was before caller ID. As it turned out, at 2am the phone company would do line tests and one of his lines wasn’t shielded very well (or something like that). Anyway, the electrical pulse was just enough to set of the bell in his phone. I doubt this is what’s happening to you, but hey, it could happen.
It could be one of those automated telemarketing calls. They hang up if no one answers or they get an answering machine. If it rings too long before you answer it they also hang up. I get them sometimes, and it never fails to piss me off. You pick up the phone and not only is it a goddam telemarketer, it’s a * recording * of a telemarketer. Sheesh!
There is a way to stop this. For a modest fee you can have the telco automatically reject ALL incoming calls that don’t have a Caller ID tag attached. The caller gets some sort of message informing them of this. They either have to re-enable the ID function or give-up. I’m not sure if this will block ‘Out of Area’ calls that give up no Caller ID info because they’re still behind the technology curve wherever they’re calling from (their telco can’t provide that info).
I know this stuff exists because my brother uses it in Phoenix.
Cecil has a somewhat relevant column:
Thanks Perderabo. I knew I had read that somewhere. Should’ve known to check the archives.
There’s a lovely feature available in most areas called Call Blocker. I don’t think you need to request it from the phone company, but if you do, it’s no big deal (however, don’t pay for it unless you know it’ll work). Here’s the instructions according to Southwestern Bell’s system:
If Call Blocker won’t work for you, make the phone company take care of it. They have ways and means beyond the abilities of us mere mortals.
Grumble grumble f*&^king phone company.
I’ve had something (sounds like a fax machine) calling me once in a while since I moved into my apartment 18 months ago. It calls at any hour, and it’s just a beeping sound like it is waiting for me to start speaking faxese. It was calling once per week in a cluster of 3 to 5 calls spaced out about 10 minutes apart, but now it only calls once every 90 days or so.
When I first moved in, I got a DSL connection and all the bells and whistles the phone company had to offer - caller id, selective call block (what Max Torque described), and a buncha other stuff. So, when this first happened I ignored it. Duh! After a 2 AM call I remembered why I was paying $15/month extra and instantly did the call block thing.
.
Grr. *69:
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OK, fine. I’ll block all calls from non-caller ID phones. RING RING. (Caller id sez: UNAVAILABLE) So why is it ringing?
Turned out there was not a single thing I could do with all that multitude of services to prevent this bastard from calling me whenever he wanted. Several nights I turned off the phone to avoid having to deal with it.
So, I called the phone company and detailed my experiences with call [not] block and caller ID [not] block and *[not]69, and got the explanation that yes, I was in fact SOL.
I said there must be something I can do - even in the seventies I remember people having this problem. The response was that there is a ‘nuisance call’ trap they can put on the phone. The way it works is they activate the trap (takes 24 hours, so it is impossible to capture a ‘fax attack’ cluster from the first call) and lasts N days (I think 10.) Then, whenever the offending call happens, you call a number and tell them the exact time it happened. If they capture a minimum number of calls this way (I think 2) then they can figure out who it is and stop the calls.
I asked if it cost anything and they said no, so I said "Fine - please cancel all my fancy services except call waiting, 'cause that one actually works and I use it. That seemed to peeve the rep who was talking to me for so long, but I’m sure she would have been more peeved if some faxhole was calling her at 2 AM. Then I called the nuisance call people and got the thing working.
It never did work because after I had reported three instances of calls and was still getting more I called them up - the trap was about to expire and they had ZERO traps. I asked how this could be and it turns out you need to report the correct time (according to the phone company) within 2 minutes or they can’t trap it. Nice of them to inform me of this ahead of time. I checked my clock against his and it was 6 minutes fast, so I reset my clock. But, for some reason he couldn’t go back and adjust my previous reported calls to catch the bastards (I asked “Just subtract 6 minutes!”), so I had to be extra vigilant to report the correct time. I extended the trap another time period, but the fax machine never called again during that time.
So, here I am over a year later in exactly the same position, although thank goodness the faxholes have learned that they don’t get responses from that fax number any more and only send them once in a while. For a while I was going to set up a computer with a fax modem to capture the fax (if that’s what it was) and see who it was and then return-fax an evil note, but now they don’t call enough to overcome my natural laziness.
Sorry - that was more a rant than an answer.
Summary: The technological solution (call block, caller-id block) may not work for certain bastards. One lady said 800 numbers had this characteristic of not being blockable.
The low-tech solution (having the trap put in) only works if you are lucky. If they call often enough you’ll be OK, just make sure you get all the details before you start - like if your clock is fast.
If they don’t call often enough for the trap, you may be SOL.
To kill faxes you can probably use a switching device such as ComSwitch:
http://www.command-comm.com/directory.html
It actually answers the phone and listen for the fax beep. If its a fax it will ring your fax machine (quiet if no machine attached), otherwise it will ring your phone. The nice thing is that whoever is faxing gets to pay for the call because the call is answered. Cost them, I hope!
I had a random ringing going on with my phone lines at 2am a while back when I first had them installed. It rings each line in sequence. It was obvious the phone company auto testing the line quality. They do that as a matter of routine apparently because my lines were installed as “business” lines. So I just get them to stop testing. Of course, you lose the ability of them preemptively correcting any line problems before you find out, but at least they are not interrupting my late nite modem connections.
Sure, you can get Caller ID so it won’t let them come thru but be sure to tell your women friends who have a block that they have to push *83 when they call, this flashes their number on the caller ID & lets the call come thru.