I get home at night and look at all of the “Out Of Area” telemarketer calls that were made to my cats.
Now I’m getting one call an hour at 10 before the hour (sounds like a machine dialed affair because of it’s regularity) that throws a number into caller ID.
And the Area Code is 168!
By God that’s what it says.
Any telephone people out there with the Straight Dope?
I’m sure you figured this out, but that cannot be an area code. Maybe it’s from out of the country? That wouldn’t make any sense, but still…
“That’s entertainment!” —Vlad the Impaler
I checked it through the US, Canada and over international waters. It came up empty each time. My guess is that 168 is an interplanetary code or something 
“I guess it is possible for one person to make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”
It’s the James T. Kirk Hair Club for Men.
WAG: If your caller-ID truncates to 10 digits, the call could be coming from outside North America, from some location using more than 10 digits, and the caller-ID is just chopping off some of the leading digits.
That would imply a mistake of some sort, since I wouldn’t imagine telemarketers would want to make international calls.
I work for gte, give me the next 3 nums (prefix), and i’ll look it up.
We live in an age that reads to much to be wise, and thinks too much to be beautiful–Oscar Wilde
Try www.ask.com ‘what is the area code 168?’
Or, why not just hit star 69? Find out where it comes from & who.
168 is not a valid area code.
Valid area codes do not begin in 1 or 0.
In the olden days, they used to have 1 or 0 as the middle digit, but that’s no longer necessarily the case.
168 isn’t a valid international code, either - 1 is North America and is the only code to begin with 1.
www.ask.com gives exactly the sort of useless irrelevant crap it always does: Geography and map of the Marshall Islands (it’s not the Marshall Islands), Update on the 809 Area Code Scam, Matisse’s Glossary of Internet Terms, stuff about Dreamcast, etc.
ben
Not only do no area codes begin with 0 or 1, no prefixes (the 3 digits after the area code) begin with 0 or 1 either.
This is because dialing a “1” as the first number tells the telephone switch that you’re making a long distance call. Dialing a second “1” means it’s an international call (or something similar). Dialing a “0” first means to connect with the operator before switching to the number you’re about to dial – although the “operator” can be a long distance carrier’s automatic touch-tone menu.
Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting episode of Telephone Switch Encoding, where we’ll learn why 10-321 became 10-10-321…
Well you have 011 for an int’l calls so maybe it is a country code for 68 and you just got the end of 01168.
I tried the *69 and got a recorded message that this call cannot be returned.
I’ll try the ask.com to search around.
Thanks!
For the record, what shows in the Caller ID window is 168-286-9324.
I hope it’s not a long lost relative.
But with the regularity of calling, it’s gotta be someone with something for sale.
Markxxx writes:
> Well you have 011 for an int’l calls so
> maybe it is a country code for 68 and you
> just got the end of 01168.
Doug Bowe writes:
> For the record, what shows in the Caller
> ID window is 168-286-9324. I hope it’s
> not a long lost relative. But with the
> regularity of calling, it’s gotta be
> someone with something for sale.
The only country code that might fit Markxxx’s suggestion, given Doug’s information on the complete number on the machine, is the Cook Islands, where the code is 682. They’re New Zealand dependencies in the Pacific Ocean. If the phone numbers there are six digits long, that might explain it. (In other words, the number is 011-682-869324, which is truncated to the last ten digits.) Unless you know somebody in the Cook Islands, ignore it. If they can’t be bothered to leave a message, it’s probably a scam.
Well, I just looked up the number in my trusty direct dialing guide, and there is no such number as it appears on your caller id unit.
We live in an age that reads to much to be wise, and thinks too much to be beautiful–Oscar Wilde
Other places to look: www.555-1212.com www.four11.com www.anywho.com None of them returned a request for the 168 area code. Whoever said the whole code number is being truncated is probably correct.
My WAG: It is a telemarketing area code based in Puerto Rico.
Has anyone thought of the horrible possibility that telemarketers have come up with a way to scramble the number as a weapon against caller ID?
If it’s true, is that a vote for Darwinism (they are a lower life form)?
DW3 writes:
> My WAG: It is a telemarketing area code
> based in Puerto Rico.
How could it possibly be Puerto Rico? The area code for Puerto Rico is 787.