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Random phone calls from the UK

This thread has nothing to do with flying, but since there are many members from UK here in the forum I thought of asking. You might know something about this.

During the last few months I have been getting calls from random UK phone numbers. They call and when I answer they simply hang up. If I don’t answer it keeps ringing for a bit longer. I suspect some kind of scam where they want me to call the number, but I’m obviously not going to do that.

Has anyone else here experienced anything similar? Do you know what kind of numbers are those?

Here is my call log as far back as since I got my new phone:

2018-02-19 10:24Z: Call from +44 22 0387 7062
2018-02-07 17:54Z: Call from +44 22 0050 7100
2018-02-02 18:14Z: Call from +44 22 0038 3619
2018-01-02 11:00Z: Call from +44 22 0003 3617

Don’t call any of those numbers, it might be some kind of scam.

ESME, ESMS

If I get a call from an unknown number, I’ll put it into Google before answering the call. 9 times out of 10 it’s listed on a ‘who-called-me’ type site as a spammer’s or scammer’s phone number.

Andreas IOM

It’s not a valid UK dialing code so it is a fake number presented over VOIP – trivial to do.

Curiously this one isn’t listed on google (as a UK matter – without the +44 it is a Chinese number).

There are many scams where somebody sets up a number which yields them a commission on it being called. One can get up to about £3/minute that way in the UK.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

So I assume it would be safe blocking all +44 22 * numbers.

ESME, ESMS

Don’t see how it is a scam since those numbers won’t go through. But the caller appears to have a block of numbers, so not an innocent individual mis-programming their Voip.

So maybe it’s just a routing error somewhere in the network? In UK there is supposed to be some body that will investigate nuisance calls, don’t know if that exists in US…

Edited to add of course it could be a hacker searching for unpublished routings .. around 1970 a bunch of students (not me of course) purloined an engineer access number and then reverse engineered the whole UK STD (Subscriber Trunk Dialing, not the other thing) architecture long before it was publicly available, producing a usable free long distance directory. They did it by dialing the area codes 000, 001, 002 etc. one at a time from a telephone booth in the College foyer. Knowing that a call with the test number would come up in an exchange, it was just a matter of asking “Hello, where is that?” and writing down the answers! Once in possession of that, calls to numbers in those locations would just go through for free, because the GPO, now BT, hadn’t built any blocking into the network at that stage. The practice ended after someone became a little jokey with a distant exchange and made them suspicious. Shortly afterwards the same group of students (how many can you get in a phone box?) found they were surrounded by Police, who didn’t share in the joke.

Last Edited by Aveling at 19 Feb 12:42
EGBW / KPRC, United Kingdom

You have to remember that parts of the UK phone network was a creaking antique, with mechanical Strowger exchanges lasting into the early 1990s (where I lived our local exchange was Strowger until about 1991, I think) so there was probably no practical way of implementing any kind of blocking! (The phone bills were apparently prepared by someone going to the exchange and photographing the timers and manually comparing them with last month’s bill – I remember my father’s exasperation about how ludicrous it was he couldn’t get an itemised bill – there was no physical way in the late 1980s on the exchange we were on it was possible to do, the equipment simply didn’t exist there).

Andreas IOM

Aveling’s story was replayed at countless callboxes around the UK in the 1970s, after the discovery that pressing the on-hook switch 64 (?) times added a massive credit to the call. When I was at univ, there was a long queue of (mostly in those days) Iranian students, outside the callbox

The most annoying dodgy phone call hassle these days is phone calls saying “we understand you have been involved in an accident…” but presumably they work often enough.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

My memory of the story, and I did work for the Post Office, later BT, at the time, is that you were supposed to avoid charges by imitating the Strowger clicks on the handset rest to avoid charges. You were supposed to click the numbers and pauses just like the dial would. So The Speaking Clock, 123, would be {click}{pause}{click}{click}{pause}{click}{click}{click}{pause} (though it was only worth doing for foreign calls, which were very expensive in those days.)

I tried it once, out of interest, and just got an irritated engineer on the line.

Last Edited by Timothy at 19 Feb 16:48
EGKB Biggin Hill

It worked on older payphones, as Timothy describes, when they still had mechanical (round) dials. When you picked up the receiver you got a dial tone, and if you turned the dial without any coins in the system AND it wasn’t an emergency call, it would hang up for a second to reset the connection.

If you could use the hook to simulate the clicks of the dial (which electrically did the the same), that mechanism didn’t cut in and you could talk for ages.

I don’t think this trick survived the introduction of push-button payphones.

Biggin Hill

Hilariously I have just got a call from +223 69959911, which hung up when I answered.

That one does come up on google as from Mali.

Probably the same guy flogging fake certificates and passports on here this morning, checking if the mod is near his phone

BTW the early push button phones did use pulse dialing etc. They had a chip which when you pressed “6” would click a relay 6 times. This trick of sending codes via pressing the hook switch was also useful for making calls from phones which had the dial locked (people did that to stop e.g. cleaning staff making calls). I used to do that

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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