Yeah, basically because we’ve had it for 15 years. A surprising percentage of our customers call that number though. We also get people who go to voicemail, so they call our “other number”, not realizing how toll free numbers work.
From: Lewis Bergman Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2015 5:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] long messages on toll free number? Other than you have always had one, why does anyone have a tool free number anymore. I can remember the last time someone asked or catered who payed. LD is so cheap now. On Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 3:31 PM Ken Hohhof <[email protected]> wrote: OK, this is kind of OT, but maybe someone here knows the answer. For a few months now, we've been randomly getting long voicemail messages, always some guy blabbing about government programs and stuff, almost sounds like a radio show, not a political message like a robocall, I'm guessing just constant voice to keep silence detection from ending the message. I'm sure it's either a scam, or some attempt at toll fraud, but I can't figure it out. The calls come at all hours but mostly at night, and the caller ID will say something like NEW YORK NY or SAN ANTONIO TX. I was just looking at our Windstream bill (they redirect our toll free number because years ago we got that number from McLeod), and I realized these calls are coming in on our toll free number. Which is really just an alias for our local DID which goes to our VoIP PBX. Which had the max message size at default 60 minutes. So these messages were all 60 minutes long. I've changed the setting to 10 minutes, but that's still 10 minutes of toll free word salad. I can't figure out who is benefitting from these calls other than Windstream. It's not a ton of money, but I want to stop it. The calling numbers vary so I can't just block them. I looked up a couple of the numbers and they seem to be from bandwidth.com thousand blocks, so apparently VoIP calls, but I'm not sure that means anything other than VoIP makes it easier to fake the caller ID. What are these guys up to?
