Common phone number. Somehow.
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Wanted to post in the common email addresses thread but can't find it.
My phone numbers ends with 4321. It makes it easy to remember, but unfortunately I've learned that it's also a moderately common "fake" phone number that people use for registrations when they don't really want to register. So I get a ton of spam calls and spam texts everyday, such as an exclusive $50 discount for hair extension for someone named Diane. So a few days after getting that number I've already set up blocking all phone calls not from contacts, out of absolute necessity. Since this is Mericuh, people do actually record voicemail, so nothing important gets lost (I hope).
It's actually quite funny what kind of voicemail I'm getting. Despite being a thing for like 40 years, spammers apparently still haven't learned about it. That or cost efficiency. Anyway, they start their thing like nothing happened and don't even notice the "please leave your message" greeting. So almost every voicemail I get is missing the first 10 seconds of whatever they're trying to pitch.
Today's voicemail was different, though. It wasn't from a spammer. It was from a victim of spammers. Someone called me just to tell me to stop calling them - even though I've never done that. I guess people avoiding registration aren't the only ones using my phone number; spammers that spoof caller ID like it too. Le sigh.
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@Gąska One of my high school teachers told us about how he used to have a number that was off-by-one for the local taxi service. He changed it after getting one too many 2 AM calls from drunks at bars wanting a ride home.
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@Mason_Wheeler We had the same number as a travel agency - it just that the agency was in the Netherlands. So, if someone forgot the additional "0" when calling from Germany to said agency, we'd get the call. They were selling pilgrimages to Jerusalem and such stuff.
We tried to explain to the people how calling foreign numbers worked and also tried to contact the agency about it.
Well, the agency did not care and the people were irate that we didn't sell pilgrimages.
So, after a while, we did. We explained the mishap once and if they did not listen, we'd dutifully note their information, tell them that they'd have to pay only after the pilgrimage and tell them to show up at the airport on their chosen date.
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
It's actually quite funny what kind of voicemail I'm getting. Despite being a thing for like 40 years, spammers apparently still haven't learned about it. That or cost efficiency. Anyway, they start their thing like nothing happened and don't even notice the "please leave your message" greeting. So almost every voicemail I get is missing the first 10 seconds of whatever they're trying to pitch.
That's because it's just a recording, not an actual person. More cost efficient to just let it play rather than to build a system for detecting voicemail.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
It's actually quite funny what kind of voicemail I'm getting. Despite being a thing for like 40 years, spammers apparently still haven't learned about it. That or cost efficiency. Anyway, they start their thing like nothing happened and don't even notice the "please leave your message" greeting. So almost every voicemail I get is missing the first 10 seconds of whatever they're trying to pitch.
That's because it's just a recording, not an actual person.
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
Anyway, they start their thing like nothing happened and don't even notice the "please leave your message" greeting.
Because the odds are it's not a person. It's a robot.
edit:
'd
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
spammers that spoof caller ID like it too
Look up Neighbor Spoofing. I get at least one call per month from someone with a phone number close to mine yelling at me for calling them. For a while, I was trying to explain to them what was going on. That didn't work so well, so now I just say "it's not me" and I hang up.
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@Jaime blocking is so much easier.
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@Gąska
It's a different number each time, since the reason they're calling me is that a spammer picked my number out of a hat to use as Caller ID. Blocking is pointless and futile.
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@Jaime hence blocking all non-contacts. Of course that only works if you can rely on unknown numbers you DO want to hear from (banks, package delivery, hospitals, your child's school office etc.) leaving you message. I'd never dare to block all non-contacts in Poland, for example. On the other hand, spam calls aren't nearly as big of an issue over there - you get 2-3 a year, compared to 2-3 a week in US.
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Jaime hence blocking all non-contacts. Of course that only works if you can rely on unknown numbers you DO want to hear from (banks, package delivery, hospitals, your child's school office etc.) leaving you message. I'd never dare to block all non-contacts in Poland, for example. On the other hand, spam calls aren't nearly as big of an issue over there - you get 2-3 a year, compared to 2-3 a week in US.
I have Google Fi for service, and they have an automatic call screening service that's pretty darn good about picking up for suspected spam. And regular calls come through fine.
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@Benjamin-Hall I looked up Google Fi once and it would cost me about twice what I pay now.
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
Since this is Mericuh, people do actually record voicemail,
Do they? I guess with a larger sample size that the statistics make it seem more, prevalent, but I personally have a mere 91 voicemails from the last six years... And most of them are from automated messages or intentional callbacks like reminders...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
Since this is Mericuh, people do actually record voicemail,
Do they?
I receive more voicemail in one month than I received in Poland throughout ten years. Even if you exclude spammers, that sentence is still true.
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Benjamin-Hall I looked up Google Fi once and it would cost me about twice what I pay now.
You must use a lot of data.
Since I'm on WIFI 99.9% of the time, my cost is ~$25/month. And I only pay for what I use.
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
Since this is Mericuh, people do actually record voicemail,
Do they?
I receive more voicemail in one month than I received in Poland throughout ten years. Even if you exclude spammers, that sentence is still true.
Lucky!
My voicemail greeting (which, cringe, I made nearly a decade ago and now that I'm listening to it I might re-record it) explicitly says that if they're hearing this to leave a voicemail, because if they don't I will not call back.
Of course, I have a different greeting (shorter but less cringe) for people on my contacts list.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Benjamin-Hall I looked up Google Fi once and it would cost me about twice what I pay now.
You must use a lot of data.
The opposite - I use quite little. I currently have service with Mint Mobile, and I pay $15/month for 3GB. The only downside is that I have to pay a full year in advance.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
My voicemail greeting (which, cringe, I made nearly a decade ago and now that I'm listening to it I might re-record it)
Protip: the default greeting from your operator works just fine. There's no need (I'd even go as far as say no point) to record your own.
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
My voicemail greeting (which, cringe, I made nearly a decade ago and now that I'm listening to it I might re-record it)
Protip: the default greeting from your operator works just fine. There's no need (I'd even go as far as say no point) to record your own.
I wanted to encourage people to leave voicemails if they were calling instead of texting, since (in my case) literally nobody was doing so.
I get somewhere around 66x more calls than I do voicemails. I wouldn't even care too much if they were spammers leaving voicemails, but no, nothing....
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Years ago, I moved into a new house and immediately started getting phone calls from people trying to contact a local exterminating company.
After getting several of these calls I looked up the company and it was "off by one". My phone number started with 323 and theirs was 324. OK, I guess a lot of people are mis-dialing?
After a while I put a message on my answering machine that said "This is not _____ Exterminating, you have the wrong number". But that didn't help. One day I came home to a message "I know this isn't the right number but I tried calling the other number and it was busy".
A few months later I had a problem with ants and I thought "Hey, I know the phone number of an exterminator." While the guy was at my house I said "Hey, I keep getting a lot of calls from people looking for your company, what's up with that?"
"Oh, yeah, we had your phone number for about 20 years but then the phone company said 'You're supposed to be in the 324 exchange not the 323 exchange' and we had to change our number."
After a year of this, I was getting pretty tired of it. One day I got a call and I said to the person (not very nicely) "Where did you get this number?" The person said "from my bill". OK, so I guess they were getting the phone number from an old bill.
No. This was a recent bill. As in last month.
Apparently the exterminator was cheap, and when they changed their phone number they still had a lot of bills with the old phone number on them. To save money they just kept using the bills with the old phone number.
So I called them and said "From now on, when I get a call for you I'm telling them that you went out of business".
No more calls.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
Since this is Mericuh, people do actually record voicemail,
Do they?
I receive more voicemail in one month than I received in Poland throughout ten years. Even if you exclude spammers, that sentence is still true.
Lucky!
My voicemail greeting (which, cringe, I made nearly a decade ago and now that I'm listening to it I might re-record it) explicitly says that if they're hearing this to leave a voicemail, because if they don't I will not call back.
Of course, I have a different greeting (shorter but less cringe) for people on my contacts list.
My voicemail greeting says speak slowly and clearly, and that I prefer text or email.
Fuck everyone who leaves a message rushing through their name, company, and number.
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@Karla my voicemail lets me check the message metadata directly, including the incoming phone number. You can't fix stupid with technology, but you can work around most of it.
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Karla my voicemail lets me check the message metadata directly, including the incoming phone number. You can't fix stupid with technology, but you can work around most of it.
I can see the provided number on my phone. Spam, usually doesn't bother with a message.
Recruiters are what I'm mostly complaining about. Fuck, don't you understand, I don't want to talk to you on the phone until I know I might care what you have to say.
I have a job, give me a call
Fuck you, tell me why I would want it.
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Hahaha - very harmless to what happened some where in Russia.
Around 2002, I wanted to travel to Leningrad (Peterburg now). I tried to reach the office of Lufthansa (German Airways) there - I got the number from their Frankfurt office. No one took up the phone... After trying several times, I heard a voice of a woman in Russian. I kindly asked if she spoke some English or German. And she kindly replied: "You want Lufthansa? Numbers changed month ago, this not Lufthansa..." Poor woman...
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
he used to have a number that was off-by-one for the local taxi service.
@Rhywden said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
We had the same number as a travel agency ... We explained the mishap once and if they did not listen, we'd ... tell them to show up at the airport on their chosen date.
I've posted before that when I was in college, the phone number of the house I lived in was off-by-one from Domino's Pizza. We got a lot of wrong numbers. Sometimes we told the callers they had the wrong number. Sometimes we took their order. Sometimes we took their order and called it into the right number for them. Sometimes we took their order and called it into the right number for them — with a little creative license; Domino's didn't offer anchovies as a pizza topping, but they did offer jalapeños. Somebody may have once gotten a pizza with "Happy Birthday" spelled out in jalapeños.
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@Rhywden said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Mason_Wheeler We had the same number as a travel agency - it just that the agency was in the Netherlands.
So, after a while, we did. We explained the mishap once and if they did not listen, we'd dutifully note their information, tell them that they'd have to pay only after the pilgrimage and tell them to show up at the airport on their chosen date.Would it not be easier to just make a deal with the travel agency and get a cut?
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
My voicemail greeting (which, cringe, I made nearly a decade ago and now that I'm listening to it I might re-record it)
Protip: the default greeting from your operator works just fine. There's no need (I'd even go as far as say no point) to record your own.
I used to have "hello?.......... Ha, tricked you. It's an answerphone"
I had a lot of voicemails from my mum that were simply "fuck's sake"
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In college, someone decided it would be funny to put an advert in the local paper advertising my number as a plumber. This happened on the day I misplaced my phone. When I got it back a day or so later I had a mailbox full of people asking my prices, and I kept getting calls for a while until I changed my voicemail greeting to "I am not a fucking plumber"
Good times
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
Wanted to post in the common email addresses thread but can't find it.
This you check behind the fridge?
https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/18563/popular-gmail-address
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@Jaloopa said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
This happened on the day Oli misplaced my phone.
Silly Oli.
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
On the other hand, spam calls aren't nearly as big of an issue over there - you get 2-3 a year, compared to 2-3 a week in US.
Over here you get a spam call every... um, I don't really remember, I'd say less than once a decade.
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@topspin they tend to take you off their lists quite quickly if you fuck with them. I haven't been called about an accident that wasn't my fault in over a year
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@loopback0 said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Jaloopa said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
This happened on the day Oli misplaced my phone.
Silly Oli.
Silly fat thumbs and tiny backspace key
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@Jaloopa said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@topspin they tend to take you off their lists quite quickly if you fuck with them. I haven't been called about an accident that wasn't my fault in over a year
It's hard to get taken off a list when all you get is dead air and then a hangup click. And these are spammers who don't care about do-not-call lists.
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@dcon workplace laws isn't the only area where Europe offers much stronger protections than USA. Stalking laws are pretty harsh too, and they apply to marketing companies as well.
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@dcon said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
these are spammers who don't care about do-not-call lists.
I'm sure there are lists shared among scammers. My grandma got a glut of Microsoft tech support calls after she fell for the first one, and I wouldn't be surprised if they sold each other lists of time wasters too.
Although there was one that kept calling me every few weeks for ages , wanting me to answer questions for an ill defined survey, starting with asking if my address was still one from over 10 years ago. Repeatedly asking where they got my details and why they had such an out of dads address if it was something I'd agreed to a year ago didn't work, and they really didn't want to answer any questions. Telling them I live at Buckingham palace, answering yes to multiple choice questions and saying I'm in a polyamarous relationship with my pet dogs when asked about marital status didn't work. When I got bored and started swearing at them until they hung up they did eventually stop calling
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@Jaloopa said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@dcon said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
these are spammers who don't care about do-not-call lists.
I'm sure there are lists shared among scammers.
Not shared - sold. That's why immediate-hangup spam calls are a thing - some spammers aren't in advertising business, they're just checking if the phone number is live as they're composing a database for sale.
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@dcon workplace laws isn't the only area where Europe offers much stronger protections than USA. Stalking laws are pretty harsh too, and they apply to marketing companies as well.
I don't know how it is in Europe but we have anti-spam laws and do not call lists in Canada. It's just hard to enforce them on call centers in India or China or wherever, that spoof local numbers.
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@Gąska said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@Jaloopa said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
@dcon said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
these are spammers who don't care about do-not-call lists.
I'm sure there are lists shared among scammers.
Not shared - sold. That's why immediate-hangup spam calls are a thing - some spammers aren't in advertising business, they're just checking if the phone number is live as they're composing a database for sale.
The other thing (from my understanding) is their robot caller just calls and assigns the answered call to the next available operator. If none are available, you're effectively put on hold. Or just dropped.
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@Jaloopa said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
saying I'm in a polyamarous relationship with my pet dogs
*perks up*
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@hungrier said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
I don't know how it is in Europe but we have anti-spam laws and do not call lists in Canada.
We do in the U.S. too. My personal phone numbers are on the do-not-call list and I was surprised to find that works fairly well, I usually don't get spam calls to my cell phone. Oddly enough, though, I'd say I get at least one spam call a day (sometimes up to five or six) to my government desk phone. Which certainly should not be listed anywhere. I don't understand it at all.
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The Skepticality podcast (back when, you know, they actually did any) used to play messages from there voicemail number of people trying to buy saddles. Apparently, the number was close to one for a saddlery, and people would just ignore the message about the podcast and try to order stuff for their horses.
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@heterodox said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
I don't understand it at all.
probably just dialing a bunch of numbers rather than using a list. Given how easy it is to make phone calls it's pretty trivial...
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@dcon said in Common phone number. Somehow.:
The other thing (from my understanding) is their robot caller just calls and assigns the answered call to the next available operator. If none are available, you're effectively put on hold. Or just dropped.
Those are called "predictive dialers". Should be illegal everywhere on Earth, but aren't.
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Related story: some German football star decided that his number must be "666666". His phone provider fulfilled his wish.
Soon, that poor fucktard was fed up with the number...
(hint: pronounce "6" with a Scots accent or in German)
