The latest in 2020 Gothic

[brin_bellway]

[arguably cw: illness]


Why do I keep getting calls from a variety of local-area-code phone numbers that are just a robotic feminine voice saying "Time to stay home. Stay safe and stay home." and hanging up?

They leave messages, too, if you don't pick up or your phone was turned off.

Comments

[brin_bellway]

I just tried googling "'time to stay home' robocalls", and a bunch of other people are reporting them too. Nobody seems to know why, but what we do know is that the sender metadata is faked: the actual owners of those phone numbers are uninvolved.

(That sure does explain why a while back I got a somewhat testy voicemail from a guy wanting to know "who's been calling me on this number". Don't think I ever actually responded to him, and I'm not sure I even still have the voicemail. Well, at least now I know what to say to the next guy.)

[lunartulip]

That sounds both annoying and much nicer than the equivalent robocalls in my area. They use the same number-spoofing trick, but, instead of giving me relatively-brief exhortations to stay home, they give me longwinded warnings about my car's warranty. (I've never had a car.)

In the time since those calls started (a bit over a year, I think), I've gotten exactly one callback over them, someone annoyedly telling me to not call again. But that was near the beginning, over a year ago, and I've never gotten another, so I suspect people in my area figured out the pattern after a while.

[thedarlingone]

Yeah, working in the cell phone industry as I do, I get a lot of calls where I have to explain number spoofing (faking the caller metadata), but that's still weird as hell. Normal spoofing scams are either (1) trying to get sensitive information out of you by pretending to be the IRS or whomever else, or (2) trying to determine if you're a real person by getting you to pick up the phone, on which they will sell your number to other telemarketers. But this is obviously not the first one, and the second one doesn't usually leave voicemails.

(People have the oddest questions about spoofing, honestly. Every so often I have to reassure someone that their phone has not been hacked and is not making the calls without their permission, and that the calls will not appear on their phone bill. Which is not a fear that would have occurred to me.)

[brin_bellway]

>>Every so often I have to reassure someone that their phone has not been hacked and is not making the calls without their permission, and that the calls will not appear on their phone bill. Which is not a fear that would have occurred to me.

That seems like a pretty intuitive fear to me. It was certainly very unnerving those times I got Tumblr submissions from myself.

(You can barely find *anything* about Operation Beatlemania anymore, let alone anyone with an explanation for what the hell was up with that. I guess 2012 is an eternity ago in Internet years, especially given that Tumblr was never the most searchable or stable of places.)