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A Call From 1-888-888-8888 [followed by other weirdness]

PostPosted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 10:35 pm
by happenstance
I get a phone call from 1-888-888-8888 in the middle of the night.

Answer it. Nothing.

The next morning when I go to dial into my cell phone's voicemail my house land line rings. My cell phone voicemail no longer dials into my messages...it dials to the land line in the house where I live. A telephone number not in my cell phone contact list AT ALL I should add. A telephone # serviced by a completely different company than my cell phone I should also add.

Googling the strange 8's telephone number yields a whole number of odd reports about getting calls from the number.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=telephon ... 2LdvTVQwLA

Anyway, I'm a little freaked out. Will call my cell provider tomorrow.

Anyone have ideas or info on stuff like this? Seemed like a topic RigInt would possibly know something about.

PostPosted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 11:01 pm
by mentalgongfu2
The 888 bit could be done by one of the programs that exists to create a false caller ID number.

I can't speak to the other strangeness, but I somehow got on a list and for a while was receiving a lot of phone calls from various area codes and numbers that winded up being automated recordings telling me it was my last chance to renew my non-existent vehicle warranty.

PostPosted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 12:50 am
by Luther Blissett
Wow what a coincidence. I got a 1800 call last night (Sunday) which was very strange. Normally I only get 1800 calls between the hours of 9-5, and they are always from my couple of debt collectors. I don't remember the number, but it wasn't the string of 8's, and it wasn't my collectors. I hit the key on the side of the phone that silences the vibrate for the rest of the call, but instead, it said "Busy Signal Sent" which is not the function that this key performs.

After the call, my phone shut down, and ever since, it will not turn on. Google tells me I need to flash it, but I can't exactly figure out how to do that.

Also, this was about an hour after posting that thread about my wife on here, which is the only subject that makes me personally paranoid.

Hopefully I'll get into the shop tomorrow and have it looked at.

PostPosted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 1:17 am
by Percival
Have you ever heard some SHORTWAVE radio stations where this monotonous voice just reads seemingly random NUMBERS continuously over and over and over all day and night, very strange stuff, I have heard it has to do with the passing of information by intelligence agencies but I dont know the official name of that particular thing so I cant seem to find any info to research it.

ANYWAY, the last week I have gotten PHONE CALLS that sound EXACTLY like those radio stations on shortwave, some strange and very creepy extremely monotonous voice on the other end just repeating seemingly random numbers when I answer the phone, they dont respond in any way when I speak and ask what the hell it is about. It probably a recording but why are they calling my house, it has happened at least 4 times that I know of in the last week at my house. It is creepy as fuck.

PostPosted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 1:30 am
by Penguin
Percival wrote:Have you ever heard some SHORTWAVE radio stations where this monotonous voice just reads seemingly random NUMBERS continuously over and over and over all day and night, very strange stuff, I have heard it has to do with the passing of information by intelligence agencies but I dont know the official name of that particular thing so I cant seem to find any info to research it.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station

Numbers stations (or number stations) are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters (sometimes using a spelling alphabet), tunes or Morse code. They are in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually women's, though sometimes men's or children's voices are used.[citation needed]

Evidence supports popular assumptions that the broadcasts are used to send messages to spies. This usage has not been publicly acknowledged by any government that may operate a numbers station, but in 2001, the United States tried the Cuban Five, a group of individuals, with spying for Cuba and receiving encoded messages from a Cuban numbers station.[1] In June 2009, the United States similarly charged Walter Kendall Myers with spying for Cuba and receiving encoded messages from a numbers station operated by the Cuban Intelligence Service.[2]

It has been reported that the United States itself uses numbers stations to communicate encoded information to persons in other countries.[1]

Numbers stations appear and disappear over time (although some follow regular schedules), and their overall activity has increased slightly since the early 1990s. This increase suggests that, as spy-related phenomena, they were not unique to the Cold War.


What, anyone could be receiving them...US use of that as a charge sounds rather like a coverall..

According to the notes of The Conet Project,[3] numbers stations have been reported since World War I. If accurate, this would make numbers stations among the earliest radio broadcasts.

It has long been speculated, and was argued in court in one case, that these stations operate as a simple and foolproof method for government agencies to communicate with spies working undercover.[4] According to this theory, the messages are encrypted with a one-time pad, to avoid any risk of decryption by the enemy. As evidence, numbers stations have changed details of their broadcasts or produced special, nonscheduled broadcasts coincident with extraordinary political events, such as the August Coup of 1991 in the Soviet Union.[5]

Number Stations are also acknowledged for espionage purposes in Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton's Spycraft (p. 438):[6]

The one-way voice link described a covert communications system that transmitted messages to an agent's unmodified shortwave radio using the high-frequency shortwave bands between 3 and 30 MHz at a predetermined time, date, and frequency contained in their communications plan. The transmissions were contained in a series of repeated random number sequences and could only be deciphered using the agent's one-time pad. If proper tradecraft was practiced and instructions were precisely followed, an OWVL transmission was considered unbreakable. [...] As long as the agent's cover could justify possessing a shortwave radio and he was not under technical surveillance, high-frequency OWVL was a secure and preferred system for the CIA during the Cold War.

Others speculate that some of these stations may be related to illegal drug smuggling operations.[7] Unlike government stations, smugglers' stations would need to be lower powered and irregularly operated, to avoid location by triangulated direction finding, followed by government raids. However, numbers stations have transmitted with impunity for decades, so they are generally presumed to be operated or sponsored only by governments. Also, numbers station transmissions in the international shortwave bands typically require high levels of electric power that is unavailable to ranches, farms, or plantations in isolated drug-growing regions.

High frequency radio signals transmitted at relatively low power can travel around the world under ideal propagation conditions, which are affected by local RF noise levels, weather, season, and sunspots, and can then be received with a properly tuned antenna of adequate size, and a superb receiver. However, spies often have to work only with available hand held receivers, sometimes under difficult local conditions, and in all seasons and sunspot cycles.[8][9] Only very large transmitters, perhaps up to 500,000 watts, are guaranteed to get through to nearly any basement-dwelling spy, nearly any place on earth, nearly all of the time. Some governments may not need a numbers station with global coverage if they only send spies to nearby countries.

PostPosted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 1:56 am
by Percival
Wow, thanks for this information, very interesting indeed and this is EXACTLY the type of phone call I have gotten for a week now, WTF is THAT all about, I am all paranoid now LOL.

PostPosted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 2:32 am
by happenstance
Image

The cover of the album is a picture of Marina City in the band's adopted hometown of Chicago. The album was named after a series of letters in the phonetic alphabet that Tweedy had heard on the Irdial box set The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations. On the fourth track of the album a woman repeats the words "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" numerous times; a clip from this song was placed in the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot song "Poor Places". Irdial sued Wilco for copyright infringement, and a settlement was reached out of court.

PostPosted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 3:32 am
by Penguin
What, Irdial got copyright on something they recorded from the radio?
Jeebus.

PostPosted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 3:39 am
by cptmarginal
Penguin wrote:What, Irdial got copyright on something they recorded from the radio?
Jeebus.

The Lord works in mysterious ways

PostPosted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 5:19 am
by Occult Means Hidden
Weird, I've gotten two different calls from two different 810 numbers, and I know nobody from Michigan. hmmm.

PostPosted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 6:31 am
by wheels of if
Hello, This is all very strange...exactly to the day 2 years ago I moved into a warehouse primarily to set up a studio space/workshop but also to live as I had just got divorced and had sold our flat. The owners next door had an office and a massive sever room full of tech equip that genuinly looked like something out of "24". To get my phone line I had to come through their system and spent an hour in there with a Telstra tech who just keep saying "fuck this is some set up"
From the moment I pluged my phone in I started getting calls at 2/3 in the mourning with just as you described ;monotone,female , nondescript voices reading numbers.
I rang Telstra, My service provider and Consumer rights ,as I thought for while it might have been an automated dialing program form some telemarketer in God knows were and for them it was 4 in the afternoon. No one A: cared or B: knew what it could be. The closet any one came was Telstra who have a recorded message they play when you get a wrong or unavailable number.
I have heard it quite a few times and beleive me it sounds like phone sex compared to these broadcasts.
I will admit my life was pretty weird back then any way, as it turned out the owners next door wern't to happy with the idea of someone living on their property and as my lease was for six months I had no option but to hide out like Anne Frank untill I could move, yes some very weird times.
As it turned out the Mob next door ran prison monitering systems and that kind of stuff, while not being spook stuff IMHO fairly borderline.
So sure I was a recently single middle aged man living alone in a warehouse pretending he wasn't there....but ....OK so I became obsessed with what they were and that lead me to Numbers Stations, and a number of other things.
I have since tuned my little shortwave transister radio to what I beleive could a nos station (it seems to just brodcast morse). I don't know what they are or why, I don,t think they are mundane ordinary things, it takes to much effort to fake them for this long but maybe it the best way to transmit "pure" information. I don't know.
But back to the phone, they stopped as soon as I moved. Got a new number so that m ight have helped. I still have this lists of numbers I made and will probaly try and use them in an artwork but if yours continue would be interested in what they are.

PostPosted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 6:52 pm
by daba64
Luther Blissett wrote:Wow what a coincidence. I got a 1800 call last night (Sunday) which was very strange. Normally I only get 1800 calls between the hours of 9-5, and they are always from my couple of debt collectors. I don't remember the number, but it wasn't the string of 8's, and it wasn't my collectors. I hit the key on the side of the phone that silences the vibrate for the rest of the call, but instead, it said "Busy Signal Sent" which is not the function that this key performs.

After the call, my phone shut down, and ever since, it will not turn on. Google tells me I need to flash it, but I can't exactly figure out how to do that.

Also, this was about an hour after posting that thread about my wife on here, which is the only subject that makes me personally paranoid.

Hopefully I'll get into the shop tomorrow and have it looked at.



In matters of Luther Blissett there is nobody you can trust.

PostPosted: Wed Jul 08, 2009 3:14 am
by AhabsOtherLeg
It's soooo hard to find recordings of Numbers Stations online.

Hehe.

My favourite is The Licolnshire Poacher, because it reminds me so much of the first ever episode of The Prisoner, where they play that weird avant-garde version of Pop Goes The Weazle.

http://irdial.hyperreal.org/the%20conet ... /disc%201/

Remember, my fellow UK-ians, that it is technically illegal for us to listen to these unauthorised broadcasts. So don't. Unless you want to, like. 'Cos no one will mind.

Numbers Stations, as interesting and creepy as they are, are now like the chaff a jet fires out to throw heat-seaking missiles off track.

The thing is that no power on earth can be entirely sure that there will never be a real message passed through the numbers stations - so they all have to allocate a part of their limited resources to listening to each other all the time regardless of what's being broadcast or recieved. It's like the nuke race - they're all just trying to overstretch each others budgets.

It's not funny really. The money could be better spent. On booze and pizza, all things considered.

Why would Numbers Stations become more numerous after the end of the Cold War, though? They're not high-tec... anybody can listen in... and increasingly everyone knows about them. Why are they more common now?

Re: A Call From 1-888-888-8888 [followed by other weirdness]

PostPosted: Wed Aug 28, 2013 5:44 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen
I'm surprised that this clip hasn't been posted on this thread before:



All time favorite weird phone call.

"eye told you i was here..."

PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2015 4:03 pm
by IanEye