I’d just left a meeting today and was standing on the street waiting for a friend who was right behind me in the lift when my phone rang. I glanced at the number, but didn’t take it in: I thought it may have started with 06 — a legitimate code for Wanganui and environs.
On answering I heard a woman, who may have been Asian. Between street noise, low volume on the phone and the speaker’s accent I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I suggested she had a wrong number and she mentioned FirstBite Web Design, which is indeed me. My cellphone number is listed on my site.
Finally I suggested she call back later, though she never did. Now I’m thinking it may well have been an attempt at some kind of scam. Googling hasn’t brought me any particular answer, but now I’ve had time to actually read the caller’s number, I’ve pinned it down to China, which uses an 86 code. The caller rang from: 00868188011413.
A few weeks ago I received my first ever SMS scam message. Perhaps this was my first (attempted) cellphone scam call.
If you can shed any light on this, please do leave a comment.
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This is actually pretty typical in the US. Marketing calls. They’ll call any number they have, including cell phones. I get one or two a week. Yesterday, I got one trying to sell me an ad in the local phone book. They knew my company name and manually dialed. (We get lots of automated calls here, too, especially around election time.) I’ve also gotten calls trying to sell me Web publishing service (ha!) and health insurance and — well, you name it.
Is this unusual in NZ?
I get quite a few calls on the landline – asking for money for charities, real estate agents, polls and so on, but seldom to never get any on the cellphone.
The call in this post was very unusual though in that it came from China, not New Zealand.
The caller never did ring me back, so I strongly suspect it was a scam of some kind (rather than just a marketing call).
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