Random phone calls from the UK

What is funny that even current exchanges still support pulse dialling, which is almost 120 years old technology.

I get several calls most days, where there is silence, then cut off. Sometimes a female voice says “Goodbye”. Usually the number is withheld. If it is available, of course I don’t dial back normally.
Some left puzzling recorded messages, and I did dial back on one, as the voice sounded decent. I learned my number is the same as a garage in central England, and the area codes differ only in one pair of transposed digits.
Fraudsters may be searching for numbers which are never answered, to use with an online scam, to give an appearance of an address.

This 004422 thing starts to look more sinister. I wonder what they gain by calling and hanging up?

Re the ‘flash dialling’, yes that worked from the old ‘Push Button ’B’’ coin boxes (Anyone here remember those?) and circumvented the coin mechanism, so allowing unlimited free calls. We Those students I mentioned got really good at tapping out 10 pps (pulses per second), a bit like learning morse. Incidentally, I used to have one of those that ‘Push Button ’B’’ mechanisms, and the amazing sounds (a mechanical escapement mechanism) it made was exactly like being in a time machine, teleporting you back to the 1950’s!

Timothy wrote:

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

Yes, they did this by putting the call box on a loudspeaker in the exchange, which was audible throughout the building. You could immediately tell when someone was flash dialling and grab the line. But in the exchange I was familiar with the loudspeaker was used differently. It was permanently connected to the line of vicar somewhere in East Anglia who had a number of, err, lady friends. The calls were often quite salacious and provided day long entertainment for the engineers and a somewhat broadened education for a young teenager.

Cobalt wrote:

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.

They ended up getting wise to that. They made the exchange control the call, and the phone would send coin pulses down the line to tell the exchange the value of the coin inserted and the exchange would control how long you got to talk rather than the phone. The coin pulsing IIRC put a certain resistance over the loop rather than disconnecting it (pulse dialing is loop disconnect dialing, the pulses are sent by briefly disconnecting the local loop) so you couldn’t simulate the coin pulses by anything on the outside of the payphone. You’d have to actaully break into an exposed wire somewhere and apply the correct resistance.

That number googles ok…