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telephone spam!!! >:(

shecky

shecky

Guest
Original poster
May 24, 2003
2,580
5
Obviously you're not a golfer.
we have been getting freaky spam phone calls all hours of the evening. just wondering if anyone has any similar experiences/solutions:

we got a home phoneline from verizon a few months ago. in addition to the "normal" telemarketing crap while we waited for our number to propagate with the government "do not call" listing, we were getting a lot of calls all hours of the day and night from "Unknown Name/Unknown Number" and then 1 minute later from "Unknown Name" with a phone number with a fake exchange (for ex. 500-201-1550 or 211-987-6020). on picking up these calls all we would get is a beep - sort of like a fax machine and thats it.

these calls would happen every hour or 2 hours all day and night. we would get as many as 20 calls a day.

after speaking with verizon we got 'call intercept' which is supposed to block anonymous calls. i programmed in any numbers i already has in my caller ID and after a few days it looked like it was working. we got no calls for 6 weeks or so.

then all of a sudden yesterday they started again. one thing thats particularly of note is that even phone numbers i had correctly programmed into call interecept to block were still coming thru.

after 2 hours on the phone with verizon they really had no good answer for us. they did not know where the calls were coming from or if they were even real calls and not some computer thing. they said a spammer can spoof any number they like so who knows what it is. they are putting a trace of some kind on a few numbers i gave them, but she said ultimately the only answer that might work is to get a new phone number entirely, deal with the "normal" telemarketing calls for a month until the governmentd DNC list kicks in, and hopefully not get any more of these more freaky calls. she also suggested that i dial *57 as soon as i get any of these calls which institutes some kind of investigation trace on the number. so right now i am holding off until saturday to see if any of these things help but she said it was unlikely.

just wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this - i can live with a few spam calls a day during normal hours, but 10 calls between midnight and 7AM is just not acceptable. i really do not have a huge problem changing my phone number, but if we do change it and this all happens again i am going to freak out :)
 
This sounds to me like a war dialer looking for fax machines. These devices dial every number in an exchange in sequence, and when they find one, the number is recorded. This data is sold to junk faxers. I don't know why they'd keep hitting your number, though. Usually this is a one-time event -- unless of course they detect a fax machine.
 
Interesting story.

In Canada, this practice is technically illegal, but it happens pretty much 24/7 to everyone here anyway as those kinds of laws and no-call lists are rarely enforced and exist mostly as a sop to critics.

What I find especially entertaining about this whole thing is that most phone companies nowadays are gouging the customers over price issues because of the monopoly they enjoy and nickel and diming everyone to death with fees for this that and the other thing.

If you look into it (at least when I did here), it turns out that the phone company itself is the one selling your phone number to the spammers. Then when you complain about it, they *sell* you an extra "service" (call-blocking) that supposedly keeps your number private.

I mean, where is the logic in that? The phone company creates a problem (or several) for consumers through their immoral behaviour and profits handsomely with that. Then the consumers complain to the government and the government puts the phone companies in charge of fixing it, which they do, for a fee, and profit handsomely again.

The whole thing is nuts really. :mad:
 
Yeah, weaksauce Canadian laws -- the only way something can be done about enforcing illegal calls (after hours calls and automated message calls) is if the caller is in your same province. Doh! So marketers from the US and Mexico get a free ride with no enforcement. EVEN THOUGH your local telco is making a cut of the long distance tolls on each and every one of those calls. The more spam you get, the more money your telco makes. Fancy that....?

The latest trick the telco pulled was charging $3 a month for "long distance access fee" -- whether or not you used long distance.
 
War dialing and junk faxing is illegal in the US as well, and many states have even stronger laws against them on their books. The problem is that catching the miscreants is virtually impossible. We're talking about devices that can fit easily into a closet. Shut down one, another pops up somewhere else. Some of the junk faxers have even moved off-shore, to places where no law can touch them.
 
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