Anyone gotten one o’ these recently?
I thought they’d gone the way of the dinosaur what with modern technology, but some guy called my cell phone from a private number at 12:45 last night offering to-er-masticate my furry feline.
I kinda laugh/scoffed and told him that I DID believe he had the wrong number.
He said no he didn’t, he wanted to blah blah whatever as I was hanging up.
So the deal is, he called my cell phone. Came up private number. I guess you can do that by hitting *67, right?
Didn’t sound like anyone I knew, no one who has my number would be that vulgar, they know I have a 15 month old and wouldn’t call me so late.
Question is, if someone was prank calling randomly, what are the odds they’d hit a cell phone # and have a woman answer?
Is that a popular teenage pastime these days?
Or is it more probable that it’s someone who already had my number somehow?
Ignoring the recent advent of cellphone number portability, every phone whose number is like yours is a cellphone.
Let’s say your number is (303) 456-9872. Every phone is area code 303 starting with 456 is a cellphone from the same cellphone company as yours, i.e. Sprint, AT&T, whoever.
And if you’ve had that number for more than a few months, it’s a good bet that nearly all of the 10,000 numbers between (303) 456-0000 and (303) 456-9999 are already assigned to somebody.
So if somebody dials (303) 456-???, they’re probably going to ring somebody, not get a recording for a disconnected or unused number.
Now of all cellphones, how many are owned by women and how many by men? I bet it’s close to a 50/50 split.
So whenever somebody dials (303) 456-???, they’ve got about a 1-in-2 chance of a woman (or her voicemail) answering.
Statistically speaking, the odds are very high that he was calling at random. The statistics can seem misleading depending on your viewpoint.
From his point of view, he gets a woman on every other call. From your point of view, what are the odds that you’d be the number he picked? Damn low. But almost every time he dials, somebody’s phone rings. And that somebody is wondering why they got the call when the odds seemed to be so low.
Here’s a nice quip that will stop 98% of men in their tracks:
(breathless sexy voice) “I know why you’re calling big boy…It’s because I look just like your mother” The sound of the erection deflating should be nearly audible.
Been a while since I agot a prank call, but someone called me 6 times within 30 minutes with the wrong number a few days ago. I can definitely vouch for what LSL Guy said, because I get wrong numbers all the time, and I got my phone about 6 months ago from T-Mobile. My boss got his activated a few days after me, and his number was xxx-x4xx mine was xxx-x0xx
I may be wrong about this, but I think the ‘withhold outgoing caller ID’ thing only stops the recipient seeing the number when the incoming call rings - I think I’m right in saying that regardless of dialled the ‘withhold’ prefix, the number is still visible to the telco, who may have a log of it (they probably won’t divulge it to you, but they might take action against an offensive caller, or they might hand it over to the police).
I knew a woman who got an obscene phone call while she was pregnant. The caller told her he could see her and that she was standing in front of her window naked and then began listing all the things he wanted to do with her.
She replied “Wonderful! Come right on over! Because I’m 8 months pregnant and my baby needs a father!”
Click. End of phone call as Mr. Pervo suddenly decided he had better things to do.
Correct me if I’m wrong but you are charged for that call. I would call your service and tell them you recieved a call at this time/date and you do not accept the charges because of the nature of it. Se if they can block the number from future calls. Don’t know if it is possible but you could try it and report back.
I got a call about six months ago from a woman who said she wanted to “suck my c@ck”. I was a bit taken aback. I told her she must have the wrong number, but she insisted on giving it a good licking. I continued to tell her she must have the wrong guy. Eventually she allowed that she didn’t know me, but couldn’t we just have phone sex anyway? I was at least partly deterred by the freakiness of it all and partly deterred by the wife and kids in the next room, so politely declined. I still wonder if I would have handled it differently, so to speak, had I been home alone.
The cell phone company can see the number but they cannot give it to you. My company offers free number changes for these sorts of calls but unlike our local phone company, we cannot do a trace (our land line company has a special $5 trace feature that flags the call (the last incoming call made) and allows police to access that call).
Personally, I’d love to get a crank call. I can trace (rather illegally) any calls made to my phone and my GF’s phone. If by chance the other caller belonged to my company, I’d probably start sending abusive text messages to them
Wow-LSLguy-that was impressive.
Thanks!
You aren’t, by chance, a stats professor or anything are you?
Now that I’ve read this input it sounds much more plausible that it was a random call. I guess I was thinking that when you factor in all the disconnects, voice mail, not in service, etc., the odds would be pretty low on reaching a real live woman at 1 am, but then again maybe the guy was really working on it.
Damn. I almost feel sorry for the poor pathetic cat.
It WAS Friday night, after all…
