Where did this number come from?

Factual Questions
1

So I had a missed phone call a couple of months ago.

My caller ID on my cell phone said that it came around 6:00 AM EST, and the phone number was 10 digits long, starting with 0. It wasn’t an American area code. In addition, my phone usually divides phone numbers with dashes between the first three and the second three digits. This was shown as one long string of numbers. So what could it be? I apoligize for not being able to remember the whole number.

Gestalt

2

Probably a telelmarketer. They can send bogus callerID to your phone to disguise who they are.

As to the dashes, the computer in your cellphone is the one that inserts the dashes in the display. The callerID info sent to the phone is just pure digits. If yourphone is anything like mine, it only inserts punctuation when the number is one it recognizes, ie one that matches the US domestic 10-digit pattern. Anything else it just leaves as-is. You can probably see the same thing when dialing a number.

3

The zero at the beginning makes me suspect it was an international call. It could have been a telemarketer or one of those pay-per-minute call services that tries to trick you into calling them.

4

I don’t know about the US cell system, but in most of the rest of the world, the caller ID on incoming calls from overseas start with the plus sign, followed by the country code. Thus a call from Thailand (66) would look like this:

+6612345678

5

I’ve never seen a plus sign on my caller ID.

6

Specifically cellphones, I mean. Have you had international calls to your cell? I do know the US cell system is a bit different to the rest of the world.

Don’t know what it would be like on a landline system - maybe preceded by “011” (our landline caller ID uses our international dialling code - “00”, followed by the country code).

7

I’ve never received an international call on my cell phone, so I’m not sure what it would look like. However, there is a very small chance that a friend I have in Africa may have been calling me, which would explain the really early time. Is there any chance it could be the number of someone using an international calling card?

Gestalt