What's going on with these phone calls?

In My Humble Opinion
1

First, some background: my cell phone area code is for a city where we used to live, and where we still own some property. It’s not out of the realm of possibility we could get a call regarding the property, although we get it mowed, and the property taxes are all paid up (paid ahead, in fact). We haven’t actually gotten a call regarding the property ever. We got a letter once, three years ago. Anyway, I wouldn’t recognize the number, although I should recognize the prefix as coming from the city (349).

In the last two days, I have gotten four calls from this area code. None of them had the prefix of either the city buildings, or private residences in the city where we own the property (I know all the prefixes used in the city, but I don’t necessarily know all the prefixes used in the whole area code), and no one answered when I called back yesterday. One said “Please enter the extension of your party,” one had some person saying “Howdy! Leave a message!” and one just rang and rang. The fourth one, this morning, I finally got a person, but he said it’s a cell phone, and he’s been driving, and did not call me. He mentioned the name of his carrier.

I looked up the other numbers: one was the landline of a past life regression therapy place (the one that rang and rang). The one that asked for an extension was the number of a different carrier from the other two, and there was no information. The “Howdy!” one belonged to a person, and the name came up, but I’ll leave the person out of it.

Four numbers, three carriers, two landlines, two cells, one area code, and prefixes all beginning with 22-, which seems to be a neighboring city.

I would suspect my phone of going haywire and just calling me with random numbers, except that these all seem to me real, assigned numbers, and that seems like too much of a coincidence.

No voicemails have been left. I called the numbers back, and left “Howdy!” a message that I was returning the call. “Howdy!” called again, but I missed the call again, and “Howdy!” did not leave a message, again.

Is this some kind of telemarketer bypassing the “do not call” list by having the number show up as random assigned numbers in the same area code as the phone being called?

I should add that since I don’t actually live in the area code where my cell phone is coded, I rarely get calls with this area code, so four in two days is really unusual. My friends who live there mostly text and email.

I put this in IMHO, so guesses are welcome. I’ll run down all possibilities until I solve the problem, or it stops by itself.

2

Yes.

I probably get two or three calls a day on my cell phone, with Caller ID indicating a number from my area code, with the same prefix (which, at least when I got my cell phone, 20 years ago, was dedicated to mobile numbers). A message is never left, though the one or two times that I’ve (mistakenly) answered such a call, I get connected to a robocall from “Joanne from Cardholder Services,” or such.

We get similar sorts of random calls at home, too. Spoofed Caller ID, always telemarketing junk – probably 3 or 4 a day of those, too. It’s annoying, and over the past year or so, the frequency of these calls has just been increasing. My guess is that they’re originating from outside of the US, and thus ignoring the Do Not Call registry.

I always assume that, if it’s someone who legitimately wants to reach me, they’ll leave a message.

3

The callers are “spoofing” — faking their phone number on the caller ID system. Caller ID Spoofing | Federal Communications Commission

I think the reason for it is to make the call look local. All the spam calls I get on my landline show up with the local area code, and often share my exchange.

Edit: ninja’d

4

A thread from a few weeks back on this very topic.

5

So, unless the prefix is the city, or I recognize the entire number, ignore it? Thanks.

Since there’s already another thread on the topic (I didn’t think to search), mods feel free to close this, or merge them.

6

I don’t answer any calls I don’t recognize.
If it’s important, they will leave a message.

I hardly ever get any messages.

7

Actually, I went ahead and answered one, so I could tell them to take me off their list, because they were calling 4 times a day. Turned out to be a company that wants to “help” (yeah, right) me pay off my payday loans. That I don’t have. I told them that, and no more calls.

I have no idea how they got my name in the first place.

8

98% of the telemarketer calls I get show up with my area code and first three numbers. I expect its just some modern day spoofing practice to convince you that it is local.

Of course, I never answer my phone unless I know who is calling or am expecting a call.

9

Did you leave a message, so they can call you when they return to their current lives?

10

It’s important to keep in mind that a legitimate business is not going to call you repeatedly using a spoofed number and never leaving a message. You are at best wasting your time answering, and at worst are giving them proof that your number is in service and you’re the kind of person who’ll answer these calls. Even if this particular scam group agrees to stop calling you, they can sell your number to someone else.

A while back I was getting a bunch of “There’s a problem with your computer” scam calls and reported them to the FCC. The guy I talked to there advised me never to speak to these people, not even to say “I know this is a scam”, but to hang up immediately or just not answer.

11

Like many people, I have moved far away from the location of my cellphone area code.

So, any call from my area code is a spoofed telemarketer. Neither Verizon nor the iPhone provide a facility to block all calls from a specified area code (I have no idea why), but last week I finally found an app to do it, called WideProtect. It sends about 5 calls a day from my area code straight to voicemail.

12

Well, like I said, I answered one, told them I didn’t have any payday loans for them to lend me money to pay off, and they have totally stopped calling.

It makes me wonder how many people out there are under payday loans that cold-calling people actually benefits them. I mean, that’s not the same as sending out emails, which is pretty much free. Cold-calling is people-hours, and the more they call people who don’t want their service, the more they risk operators getting abused, which affects turnover, and that affects the training budget.

I did get a payday loan from a brick and mortar place back in the 1990s, when I had a vet emergency, and I paid it in full out of my next paycheck. It was one of those things where I’d depleted savings on something, and then property taxes were due, so there was no extra money that paycheck, and it was that month that one of the pets had an emergency. This was during my credit card fiasco, so I didn’t have that as a resource. But really, the one-time payment on the loan wasn’t that bad. I needed only like $150, and I’d been approved for up to $600.

I wonder if the brick and mortar place went under, and sold their list of everyone they ever made a loan to, to an online place, or something, which to a gamble that people who took out a loan once probably did so again.

Thing was, the payday loan was a bit of a wake-up call that I really needed to get out of my credit card debt.

I worked really hard to get out of them, and then just had the car and the mortgage, and finally just the mortgage. I have to thank my parents for an interest-free loan that didn’t pay off the debt, but did give me an emergency fund in the bank. After the cards were paid off, I paid off my parents. Basically, if I had another emergency, I had a fund to dip into, and didn’t have to use one of the cards I was working hard to pay off. I took a second, P/T job, and that plus a tax refund, and a lot of belt-tightening, did it.

13

This isn’t just about payday loans. This is about selling security systems (bogus), selling extended auto warranties (bogus) other debt relief services (bogus), and most importantly, finding live numbers that somebody answers. They then sell those numbers up the chain to other telemarketers.

Do Not Call list? Bogus.
It is only valid if the call originates within the US. 99.9 % of these automated robocallers are dialing from overseas. Using VOIP and other similar services, they aren’t even paying for the phone calls.

14

This doesn’t work for me because everyone in my company has a cell phone, and we all share two entire exchanges. I don’t have the entire Fortune 10 company in my phone book, so I have to take the call assuming it’s someone that needs to get a hold of me.

It’s hard to tell Rachel from Cardholder Services to suck my dick when I’m in my office, too.

15

AT&T can block them.
Long story shortened, I was getting them a year ago and called to complain extensively to AT&T that they were morons as these numbers were all owned or at least from their number block and if they couldn’t detect these obvious spoofs they were a shit company and I couldn’t trust their software or security in the slightest. I told them and made them write a note in my account that if my daughter on the family plan ever received a call from a spoofed number (she has a number which is never written down or given away not even to her friends), I was moving our family to another provider. They continued to say, “there isn’t anything we can do.”

Two weeks later she got 3 spoofs in one day while at school. I called AT&T and told them we were moving to Verizon after 10+ years with AT&T as per our earlier conversation. It got escalated to customer retention and they “believe we have implemented a solution which should work”. I don’t know what they did but in the year since then we have not had a single one of those calls to any of our 4 phones.

So please call and complain like hell. The phone companies are making money off these calls by eating minutes and charging the incoming caller. It might only be pennies per month so if everyone threatens to leave, maybe they can actually just fix the problem. A simple number lookup to their own database would take microseconds to complete before connecting a spoofed number to a phone-- they just don’t want to do it. As consumers we need to make them!

16

I don’t have AT&T.

I’m not really that bothered; I was just concerned that there actually could be someone trying to get hold of me for something important, but I was reassured, and now the calls have stopped for the time being. I really don’t mind if again, four months from now I get another cluster of calls, and have to tell someone else I don’t need debt relief, aluminum siding, or whatever they are selling. It took about 30 seconds.

I did hate it when the Alumni assn. at my college tracked me down, and kept calling, even after I said “TAKE ME OFF YOU LIST, AND STOP CALLING!” like five times. They wanted freaking donations, and you know they just wanted to build more scoreboards for the football stadium, or something.

17

I use an app called “Should I Answer” that lets me block incoming calls. It has many features, and uses crowdsourcing to identify callers as spammers, etc. I just set it to block all calls from numbers not in my contacts list. All other calls go straight to voicemail.

The most inconvenient part of this is when a real friend has a new number, or when I’m waiting for a plumber or someone to call before they come to the house. But I get a notification that the call has been blocked and can usually check voicemail quickly enough that it’s not a big problem.

I don’t pick up calls to my landline anymore unless I recognize the number. At least 80% are spam with spoofed local numbers.

18

Does it have a whitelist option? My parents haven’t moved since 2005 and I’d like to get calls from them still.