The other night I wrote down a phone number wrong. Instead of writing down 202-679-xxxx I wrote down 202-609-xxxx. After I realised my mistake, I apologised and said I had a wrong number.
The guy I called keeps calling me back and demanding that I tell him who I am and how I got his number. He called last night at 11:08.
I am tolerant to a point, but it is time that he stopped this shit. To whom do I report him? The local police? The call originates way outside their area. The FCC? Someone else?
Try calling the phone company. Back when this happened to me about a hundred years ago, they put a “trap” on the phone. Now that there is caller ID, it might be different, but there are laws against it. Are you a man? He may have a wife who’s floozin’ around on him and he wants answers.
The local police is where I would start. Wheather you do it in your locale or his, probably won’t matter, if you pick the wrong one I’m sure they’ll correct you (for the record, I would start with his since if it’s a small town or they’ve had trouble with that person before they may just use it as an excuse to stop by). Also, I wouldn’t bother with the phone company, without a police warrant or subpena, they’re not much help. As for the FCC, I’m thinking they have bigger fish to fry, but if the police arn’t any help, it may be the next logical step.
One last thing. How long has this been going on. It’ll most likely die down after a few days.
I was having some problems with faxes coming to my voice line and had the phone company put a trap on my line. After a while they told me they know the number, but would only release it to the police, so it didn’t really do me any good.
I figure I’ll be patient for a little while longer, but as I said, I am tolerant to a point, but it is time that he stopped this. Sorry I wrote the wrong number down. Get over it moron.
Unless you live in a very small town the cops are not gonna be bothered with your harassment issue. The cops are too busy for that petty stuff. Of course it ain’t petty to you.
When I had a similar issue the phone company told me they would change my number for free (Which they did). You can get caller ID, which will allow you not to answer the phone, or some phone services from SBC (Now AT&T) and other phone calls allow you to block a number on a per number basis, but that comes at a monthly charge.
I found the most effective is caller ID. Just pick the phone up and say nothing. You might want to also try a good loud whistle in the mouth piece.
Man - I wish I’d know about “traps” a few years back! We were getting calls every day, at the same time, with a male voice saying nothing but “sorry, wrong number”. Very creepy. I called the phone company and they said nothing about the ability to do a trap. In fact the phone company was worse than useless - they never even mentioned their call blocking service that forces unidentified callers to announce themselves before the phone even rings through to the house (I forget what the service is officially called). I had to ask them about it and got “Duh, I guess that would work too”.
Never did find out who was calling but the day the service started, the calls stopped.
Awhile back I had calls coming in on my cell phone from a number listed as private. Most came in around 2-3 am. I called Sprint and they wanted to charge me around $50 to start tracking calls to capture the number, and they said even if they did that they could only release the number to the police, and since the caller never said anything harassing (or anything at all, just ambient noise) that there was really nothing I could do. So, for a few more months my phone kept ringing in the middle of the night, and eventually it stopped.
