Once or twice every day, my phone will ring once and then stop. If I pick up anyway, I just get a dial tone. Any idea what is going on?
Can you see the numbers that called you in your phone history? Are they unknown or fishy somehow? Sometimes scammers do this to move you to call their number back.
believe or not, I refuse to pay for caller ID. This is a landline.
Then don’t think further about it. They’re certainly scammers you avoided.
If it is a true landline (POTS), you probably have a water short in the outside plant wiring. The ringing voltage, which is quite high, shorts to ground and this causes the central office equipment to think the phone has been answered (going “off-hook”). The CO equipment then stops the ringing voltage. This is a very common problem. Sometimes a bit of corrosion or a cut-off from a punch-down tool can have the same effect. A TELCO service technician should be able to find the problem in the wiring very quickly. They will usually just switch you to another copper pair.
It is also possible that you have malfunctioning telephone or a bad modular connection, but this is not as common.
(This is a greatly simplified description of a phone system.)
Either (as noted above) scammers trying to make you call, or people who have recently called you, mistakenly called you again, than hurriedly hang up making your phone ring once.
The following happens to me from time ti time:
- I call someone from my iPhone’s list of recent calls.
- After talking, I finish the call by hitting the red hang up button.
- … but the other party has been quicker to hang up by a few tenths of a second.
- Result: While my finger is on its way to the hang up button, the screen changes from the screen for an ongoing call to the recent calls list. My finger then hits the entry that is where the hang up button had been a few milliseconds ago.
Telemarketers and scammers don’t call one number at a time, let it ring to see if someone picks up, then move onto the next number. They have systems that call multiple numbers simultaneously and as soon as one of the lines gets answered connects the telemarketer to that line and hangs up on all the other lines. When it just rings once on your end I imagine the telemarketer got through to someone else first and hung up on you.
Note that if you have NoMoRobo set up on your line this is the expected outcome for known spam callers.
For a while a few months ago we got many calls that weren’t in the NoMoRobo blocking database and there was never anyone there. Just silence if I or the machine picked up. But there was always at least 4 rings (which was the machine’s pickup count).
Since we have NoMoRobo I couldn’t say if any of the single rings were just the caller themselves hanging up.
Of all the answers, this one makes the most sense.
Scammers checking to see if the number is real. If it gets a dial tone you can be put on a call-back list, or that number may be sold to other lists.
When I was a wee lad, my mom’s friend had financial problems and her telephone long distance service was affected.
She lived about two miles away from us, but she couldn’t call us because it was a long distance call. So she’d dial our number and hang up, signaling my mom to call her back.
There’s no need to hang up the other lines. If a second call gets answered it will go to the next telemarketer.
If one is available.
But you won’t know if an agent is available until someone answers a call. Unless the pool of agents of tiny, they will constantly be freeing up. The system will optimize around getting calls answered and connected to agents.
The system will adapt the outgoing call rate based on the availability of agents, but once it makes calls it’s already decided it wants them. There won’t be special logic like “last agent is busy, hang everything up”.
Even if you were running a system by yourself in the basement it would be better to lose an occasional connection than to wait around for the next connection. Plus you could always drop the current connection if there is another one in the quere.
There’s likely to be something like that, but it’s not the likely reason the OP gets a couple of calls like that every day. I don’t think it’s needed very often, especially if the operators are working remotely they could have many getting ready to pick up a call at any time, maybe only get paid piece meal when they actually take a call. With a busy operation it still could happen every day. An unanswered number probably gets recycled, maybe with some maximum number of repeats.
Many of the spammers are independent contractors, and so would not want calls on their list to go to anyone else. This from watching some YouTube videos from people who counter hack the spammers.
I sometimes pick up a call on a second ring, and 90% of the time no one is there and it hangs up. I do have NoMoRobo, but you do get multiple rings before the number or pattern goes into their database. I usually let the answering machine handle it, (I can hear what is going on) and 95% of them get hung up with no message or person - maybe higher.
She reminds me of my old acquaintance Bob Wehadababyitsaboy.
When I was in college, and all I had was a payphone, the standard gimmick was to make a person to person call home for some odd name, which would be a signal for my parents to say no such person, hang up, and call the payphone number. Much cheaper than collect
Infinite talking for one low rate was science fiction back in the early 1970s.
In my family, when one of us went on a trip somewhere it was standard practice to call home person to person, asking for oneself. I am sure the phone company knew this was happening, but couldn’t figure out how to stop it. Phone calls are now so cheap, no one bothers.
One curious thing. Back in 1998 when I was in Japan, calls to North America cost about $18 a minute. But there was a toll-free number you could call that phone you back and allow to call any number in North America for something like $1 a minute and charge the call to your home phone. This had to be some kind of gouging by the Japanese phone company. There were similar services when I was in Barbados. Then along came Skype. Although I cannot recall the last time I used that. I must have a small credit balance with them.