My mother called me that her phone bill contains 6 or 7 phone calls to another state. It’s not a phone number she knows.
She’s called the phone company and they tell her somebody is calling that number from inside her house. Since she’s home most of the day she knows that’s not true. She has no equipment like a fax or some other machine that will do an auto call. (I’ve researched the number through spokeo and there’s no owner or address to be found).
It’s a landline, not her cell. The phone company won’t write those calls off as fraud.
Anyone know how this is being done?
(PS I told her to cancel her land line and just go with her cell phone, so we’ll see what happens when she tells the phone company that.)
The only other option is the NIB. There’s a gray box on the outside of her house. You can open it with a regular screwdriver and there’s a phone jack inside. That’s the exact point there the telco’s equipment and your equipment change hands. Problems on your side of that box are your problem problems on the other side of the box (and out towards the pole) are the telco’s problem.
Anyways, it’s trivially easy to plug in a phone there, in fact, that’s what it’s designed for. If you’re having phone issues, you can plug a phone in at the box, if it works, there’s likely a problem with the wiring in your house, if it still doesn’t work, it’s likely the telco’s problem.
If she continues to have problems, she can put a small padlock on the box.
Ten or twenty years ago when long distance calls were expensive, people used to come up with all sorts of schemes to steal long distance service. But now, within the US, there is no reason to pay more than 5 cents a minute (and you shouldn’t even be paying that much) so it is hard to imagine why anyone would go to much effort to steal long distance service. Most stores in poor neighborhoods sell phone cards that let you make even international calls for a single-digit cents per minute rate and if you have a cell phone, there is no additional charge for long distance with the United States.
If they are short calls, I would wonder if perhaps one of your mother’s phones has a flakey keypad and she is getting wrong numbers. Find out the number and google it and see if it is anything interesting.
I should add, that if it does end up being someone tapping into her phone system via the NIB on the back of the house, it’s usually kids doing it because they’re bored and because they can. Same reason kids steal a fifty cent candy bar when they have a ten dollar bill in their pocket.
She’s in an apartment, so I don’t think it’s someone tapping into the gray box. But it’s a good suggestion.
I thought it was someone cramming her phone, but it’s just a number not a business. There’s also some possibility that it’s a *73 scam, but she would just hang up on someone.
I’m all for having her cancel her service since I pay for and can monitor her cell phone bill.
Forgive my ignorance, but long distance?! Who the heck still incurs domestic long distance charges anymore? I thought those pretty much ended like a decade or more ago?
No…with a land line (non VOIP) you either pay a monthly fee for long distance or you pay per call. If you don’t call much long distance, it’s much more economical to pay per call. That’s what I did until I got VOIP.
It’s not uncommon for older apartment buildings to have been wired with a multiple-pair cable going into each apartment, with one pair being the line for that apartment, and other pairs serving other apartments, and usually some spares.
Given a situation like that, say a neighbor in another apartment needed another phone outlet, and got a grandson ‘who knows all about wiring things’ to connect it for her. And he found this 6-pair cable in the box, and tested pairs until he found one with a dial tone, and connected that pair. Only the dial tone is from your mother’s line, and calls made from that box are charged to your mother. The neighbor doesn’t know anything is wrong; the phone works fine for her. And likely won’t notice some calls missing from the bill.
If this happened, it could be a neighbor on that floor, or an apartment directly above or below her, depending on how the building was wired. Or if it’s a mis-wired connection in a junction box in the basement, it could be any apartment in the building.
This could even be a mistake in the original wiring of the building, which nobody ever noticed before. Or somebody just got an extension phone in the room with the mis-wired phone outlet, and is now using it occasionally.
It’s really hard to track down such a wiring problem. Generally best to work from the other direction – you know the number of the phone that was called – talk to the people there and ask about the calls. Do they have a relative who lives in the same apartment building? Once you find out who is calling them, from what apartment, an electrician will know where to look to find the mis-wired connection.
In any case, the phone company doesn’t have to write these off – they can just charge the calls to that other number. My mother had them do this several times. Iit was easier back in the days of one Bell System nationwide, but is still an option under most state regulations. Tslk to your state Department of Commerce about this if the phone company won’t work with you on this. (And your idea of mentioning cancelling her landline altogether will indeed make them work with you!)
