Reply All - #104 The Case of the Phantom Caller

Episode Date: September 7, 2017

A woman in New Jersey is getting strange phone calls to her office from unknown numbers. Every time she picks up, she finds herself eavesdropping on the life of a different stranger. Unsure what else to do, she calls in Super Tech Support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Vote. And I'm Alex Goldman. Alex Goldman. Yes. We are back. And I have a super tech support case for you. All right.

So obviously super tech support is when we try to help a listener with a overly complicated computer problem they're trying to solve. This one is absolutely the hardest one I've ever seen. Oh, I'm excited now. Okay. So this came in from a listener named Jody. Hello? Hey, Jody. Our first conversation was back in March.

Yeah, thanks for sending in a support ticket. It sounds very weird what is happening to you. Yeah, it is. Nobody can seem to figure it out. And I work with all kinds of web people. So the problem is happening at Jody's job. She works in New Jersey at this company that sells like dot law domain names to lawyers. Okay.

Anyway, Jody is the person who picks up the 1-800 number at work. And starting last December, she started getting these, like, weird phone calls. Define weird. So in the beginning, like normal weird, I would say. She'd pick up her phone and she'd just hear this screeching, like, modem noise. Like horribly loud feedback. Like really loud.

Or sometimes it would be like this melody. Okay, so just getting a weird phone call, it's just like hang up and move on. Sure. But then this thing starts happening where she'll be sitting at her desk. She'll pick up the phone, and she'll just hear, like, it's as if a stranger somewhere out in the world is just holding the phone up to wherever they are. It just sounded like I was outside or, yeah, like you could hear muffled voices or, like, traffic. Would any, like, did you try talking? Yeah, a lot.

I did. I would be like, hello. Like, I would get really loud. And I thought somebody will pick up or somebody will hear me, but then it never happened. If she doesn't pick up the phone, these will go to our voice mills, which is actually how we've ended up with, like, tons of recordings of these weird calls. I would like to hear some. I have a lot more questions.

Yeah. Let me play you this one. It sounds like it's a basketball game. Yeah, that's what I think. It sounds like a basketball game because you can hear a ball dribbling, and you can actually hear a sneaker squeaking. You can hear the sneaker squeaking. And then at the very beginning, you could hear a child saying something to their mom.

Like, it's being recorded from... What the hell is going on? I know. Let me play you another one that makes this more confusing, and like, to me, just weirder, okay? Okay. Where do you think you are? I hear birds chirping. I hear what sounds like a fly. Uh-huh. How does a fly pick up on a phone?

I know. But now there's car sounds. Are there storm sirens? I think so. This is actually distressing. I know. It feels bad. I know.

Also, once she started getting these calls, it was like some kind of damn head broken. Like she was getting them all the time. I get them on the weekend. I get them middle of the night. Like I'll come in and I'll have like three voicemails that have come from the evening. And it's like with each call,

she's just thrown into some totally different place. Like suddenly she's just in the middle of a town square somewhere. Or she'll just be in a laundry room. for some reason. There are a lot of offices. There are a lot of muffled conversations between strangers. There's also just crystal clear

phone conversations. So it gets in the way, because I'm trying to keep the area as open as well. There's not sure going to be any problem. They will take care of that also. They are used to that. Some of these actually just feel too private to share. Like, there's one where somebody's doing

a criminal background check on somebody else. does Jody have any theories? She does. But like when I pressed her on what she thought was going on, she got really embarrassed. Yeah, it's weird. And I mean, now in this day and age when, you know, cybersecurity is such a thing,

it just, you know, my mind is like, oh, gosh, like, what if the government is using my phone? But, you know, that's just, like, uneducated, I'm sure. So that's why I figured I'd email you guys. She's like, maybe the NSA is somehow accidentally forwarding me their wiretaps. So I didn't know. I honestly did not know if this was something that was happening, like, on purpose or by accident. But the thing that was clear is that every day in America, people's private lives are being broadcast to Jody.

So I asked her just like a couple more questions about her phone set up. We have a Toshiba phone, and then we use precision interconnect. It's like an authorized voice and data service agent. Got it. Okay. And I told her I'd try to get to the bottom of it. So I decided to start with the one clue that I had, which was just every one of these calls to Jody had shown up on her caller ID. Every single one had a different phone number.

And so I made a list of all those phone numbers. And I was like, I'm just going to start calling. Hi. My name's PJ Vote. I'm a reporter. I'm working on a story about somebody who's been getting a bunch of strange phone calls, and this is one of the numbers

that they've gotten a call from. I had a lot of awkward conversations with people who had no idea what I was talking about. The longest one was with this guy at a call center where I just ended up, like, consoling him. Yes, sir, I do apologize for that.

I do understand. I mean, like, it might... No, you don't have to apologize. I'm not upset. I'm just trying to understand... I'm so sorry about that. No, no, no, no, no needs to apologize. And it wasn't just that

nobody knew what I was talking about. It was like, the places themselves didn't even match up. Like, this is what I got when I called the number for the town square. We're a dental office. Interesting. Okay. The number for the distant ethereal music, that went here. The Carolina Renaissance Festival is open Saturdays and Sundays. Thank you for calling the Carolina Renaissance Festival. Hazzar. The number for that call that sounded like a basketball game, that belonged to this super-framingastrophe. woman in Montana who actually was just like willing to stay on the phone with me and go through her calendar and make sure that on the date of the phone call, she had been nowhere near a sporting

event of any kind. Yeah. No. Nothing. Weird. All right. I'm going to see what else I can learn about this. Do you mind if I, if I call you back at some point?

Keep calling me back because I'm curious of shit now. The one thing I noticed was that a lot of the people I spoke to, they said that their phones were voiced for IP, VoIP, meaning that they are making calls over. the internet, which felt like maybe something because Jody had VoIP too. Remember, she said she got it through that company, Precision Interconnect. And so I started to wonder about Precision Interconnect. I'd never heard of them. And when I looked them up, they had like one pretty basic website and then almost no web presence besides that. And every time I try to call them on the phone, either nobody would pick up or somebody would tell me that Harley Bitman, who was the woman I was

supposed to talk to you had just left until finally. Can I help you? Hey, this is PJ come back to see if Harley's in the office yet. Call down for one second, please. Sure. Hi, it's Harley. Hey, Harley, my name's PJ Vote. I've been trying to get a hold of you.

It's good to get you on the phone. How can I help you? Okay, so this is a complicated thing. Wait, where are you a customer of ours? No, but I'm a reporter, but I'm helping a customer of yours solve an interesting phone related mystery? You're a reporter? Yes.

You're a reporter. He's a reporter. You're a reporter for where? Okay, so I work for a company called Gimlet, and I make... Gimlet? Like a little, like part of a chicken, like? No, that's Ghiblet. Like, like, the drinks that people have, but it's not supposed to be referenced

that either. Anyway. Eventually, I was able to explain to Harley what was going on with Jody. I actually had to play her one of the phone calls for it to make sense. Does that sound like birds? or somebody playing games. To me, I listen to that, I'm like, that's a farm. Like, I think it's like a...

But so then why is... See, if it was harassment, they would be saying things, you know, unless they're just, like, who would do that? Pretty soon Harley was, like, just as fascinated with these calls as I was. She had just, like, she'd never seen anything like them. And the more we talked, the more I realized, like, that was a big deal.

Because Harley, her job brings her into contact with, like, more weird phone malfeasance than you could ever imagine. That's why she's always so busy. Like literally that day, the thing that she'd been busy with before she got on the phone with me, was a hacker had broken into one of her customer's phones and then made all these very expensive long-distance calls. Like to, you know, terrorist nations. That happens? Yeah, all the time. Not, I shouldn't say terrorist nations, not necessarily.

It's like people, it's always international. I have a customer that had $19,000 worth of international calls. one day to, I can't remember where those calls. Where were those calls to? All over the world? All over the world. But like, were they terrorist nations? You don't know?

I don't know. They were $19,000 worth of international calls. That scenario was happening all over the place. Okay. So what Harley calls terrorist nations, I looked into this. Here's what I think she's referring to. There have actually been phone scams targeting American. that have been used to fund terror organizations.

How does making phone calls fund a terrorist organization? So here's a real example from years ago. Okay. A bunch of hackers from the Philippines break into a bunch of Americans' phone systems. Uh-huh. They spend a weekend dialing and redialing a very expensive 900 number that they own, and they rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in charges. Uh-huh.

And then they take that money and they hand it over to their sponsors, a Saudi Arabia-based terror group. That is so convolut. eluded. Yes, it is. Also, it does not explain what's going on with Jody because we checked her phone bill. It's completely normal. Right. So, okay. Harley is like, I don't know what this is, but I know it's fishy. I mean, the thing that bothers me the most about the whole story is that she called back the numbers and it's not the people. Why does that bother you the most? Because it means that it's intentional that somebody's putting in a different number. Somebody was covering their tracks. But that was all she could tell me, which meant that it was time to call Dave Maynor.

Hello? Hey, Dave. Yes. How's it going? Dave's the guy who helped us, episode 53 in Atlanta. He is super tech support, super tech support. I told him everything that was going on, everything we learned. And he was like, this is much ado about nothing.

None of this is like strange, right? It feels strange to me. So you don't hear this and think like malfeasance, hacking, government wiretaps, etc. No, no. There's a logical, like, answer. Like, so this is really, like, this is a technical problem. We just need to debug. Dave told me, like, basically all he needed to do was just, like, visit Jody's office, look at her phone, and he can figure out what kind of banal crossed wire had created this problem.

Okay. I was like, okay, but just in case, could I send you the recordings, just so you can hear him? Two hours later, I got a message from Dave that just said, what the actual hell? When you described them, I was like, I can't be that. It can't be that interesting. It's just going to be like, whatever. When you listen to it, you're like, holy crap. Yeah.

Like, almost like episodic TV shows, right? Yeah. Like, ah, what's going to happen next? Yeah. He was convinced that they were basically like one big story that had been chopped up into all these phone calls. And if he could just lay them all in the right order, he would know the story. Right. And I was like, all right, we'll start correlating this.

where would there be an ambulance or police car? There's also like a church bell or something right. And that is how Dave ended up making his big discovery. So I got to play two calls that came into Jody's phone, three weeks apart from each other. The first one is from March 6. It's the one that sounds like it's from a basketball court. And here's a call she got on March 28th

from a completely different phone number. It's the same call. That doesn't give me any ideas about what this might be. Me neither. I was like, why is that so important? He was like, what that means is that somebody made this. There is a person or persons who have designed this to do something. Dave's fascination with these recordings and my fascination with these recordings

and Jody's fascination, your fascination, we've been eating like bait in somebody's trap. Coming up after the break, we get answers. Welcome back to the show. Here's where we are. Dave is convinced that these phone calls are actually recordings and that they were made on purpose by somebody, but why would someone make recordings and just play them for people

in a way that is designed to make me feel deeply uncomfortable? So Dave actually was like, what I don't know, but I am sure that basically this is about money because there's so much money to be made in phone. fraud. He's like somebody would not come up with something so new and devious unless they were using it to make money. How would someone make money from one of these calls? So that's what I actually Dave couldn't answer. He was like, I know a lot of guys who work in this field. I spend time dabbling in this field. What is so weird to me is I see the beauty and the genius of the bait, but the

trap is totally invisible to me. Dave said all of that. And then he disappeared into Ukraine. like the country was crippled by this horrible ransomware bug and he had to go fix it. And so he was just like gone. And so I was just left with this question. And basically like for months I just roamed the earth looking for somebody else who could explain what this trap was to me. I talked to this like white hat phone hacker in Berlin who seemed kind of promising, but he'd never heard of it. There was a guy in Washington state who'd gotten 10 years for void packing. No dice.

I learned about Wangiri fraud, toll bypass fraud. wholesale sip trunking. Nothing explained these spooky calls. And nobody I talked to had even heard of them. Until the end of July, when I found this guy in Santa Barbara. Say your name and how you want us to identify you. Sure. James Brown.

I'm a senior manager of cloud operations at Moka. James works for this company that does call tracking and analytics for other companies. I got James on the phone, did the thing I always do, which is like, told him about Jody, told him about the phone calls. James reacted completely differently. She would just hear, like, ambient recordings from, like, God knows where in the world. Yeah. Does that sound familiar to you?

Yeah, very. Really? You have a toll-free number, like, at an office or something that's getting called. Toll-free number at an office. She works, but basically a few different 1-800 numbers that are widely advertised on the internet go to her. Yep. This is all true. I like that you're already able to fill in.

This makes me feel like I'm... close to this. Turned out James was way further down the rabbit hole than me. For instance, I have 62 of these recordings. James has collected over 10,000. I'm so curious if you've heard the ones I've heard. Like, there's one, it sounds like it's outside, and then there's like something that sounds almost like an air raid siren that's really,

a lot of them are creepy to me. Do you know that one? Yeah, I do, yeah. If you clean it up, it actually sounds more like a train horn. Huh. Like trains going by, but yeah, it's funny because when I, first heard it, I thought the same thing. I was like, what is this in like a nuclear like test in Russia? Yeah. I just feel so excited to meet you because I've been spending so much

time in the audio of these calls. It feels like finding out somebody who likes the same band as you that you never meet anybody who likes the band. It's been pretty fascinating. It actually like two and a half years ago, one of our customers reach out to our customer success team with a call recording. And they're like, hey, what is this? And why are they calling me? And I listened to it and I was like, what the? So that got my curiosity perked in.

Yeah. And so the first thing that James notices is that these weird phone calls, they're only going to the customers who have 1-800 numbers. Okay. All right. And so James decides to build a honeypot. He registers 20,000, 1-800. numbers, and he monitors everything that goes into them.

Every weird phone call they get, he records it, and he looks at the metadata. And he figures out that what he's looking at is a computer program. It's a massive computer program designed by somebody to scrape the internet for 1-800 numbers, including Jody's, and then place hundreds of thousands of calls to these 1-800 numbers every day. And the program has been designed to hide itself. It's supposed to look like normal phone traffic so the phone carriers don't realize what's going on.

It starts ramping up about 6 a.m. and hits peak probably around like 9 or 10 a.m. And it tapers back down with business hours. They literally fall in. Here's even getting better. We caught them one time where they messed up because they forgot to turn off their traffic on a holiday. So we saw their traffic go through the roof

and they realized it at like 2 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon and they cut it. And you just saw a clip. Like their traffic is going and then boop. It just falls off. Wow. Because they're usually very smart about it. Like, they'll honor, like, bank holidays.

They just try to blend it in. And so James then starts going to phone companies and being like, okay, how would somebody make money off of somebody else by calling their $1,800 number and playing, like, spooky sounds over the phone line? And he's able to piece together an explanation, which I am now going to give to you, which is you're just going to have to bear with me. Okay. Okay. So in the 1960s, I'm here. I'm here for this. So in the 1960s, toll-free numbers are invented, okay? The way that the toll-free industry works is that it's a reverse payment system, right? So you have a toll-free number. I call you, I don't pay, right? The remote end pays.

So that I knew. But like, what I didn't know is that when a company has a toll free number and they pay like the phone company a dollar or whatever, the phone company then takes that dollar and it shares it with every other phone company that helped make the connection. So like I'm making this up. But like if I call Jody right now, I'll place the call. It'll go to like an AT&T tower near me and then a Verizon Tower in Manhattan and then over to a Sprint Tower in New Jersey to Jody. So there's one, two, three hops down the chain. Each one of those, you know, for a $1 phone call is getting like maybe $0.10, right? Carrier 2 is getting 10 cents.

Carrier 3 is getting 10 cents. So it's actually even less money than that. But there's so many of these calls happening every single day that even though the phone companies might just be dividing like fractions of a penny each time, those fractions of pennies add up to like millions of dollars. Right. And so what happened a few years ago, apparently, is some brilliant person was like, huh, I would love to take some of that money.

And what they did is they went to like a shady telecom company somewhere, like Crazy Eddie's phone service. And they were like, listen, I am going to place a ton of 1,800 calls through you. And when you get paid for them, share that money with me. So the more phone calls I can make, and the longer that those phone calls stay up, the more money that I make. Okay. So then how does that get us to like spooky phone calls from nowhere? Aha. So let's think about that, right? Okay. I send out a bunch of phone calls and they're just silent, right? It takes you what? A second, two seconds. Hello? Hello? Like, damn it. Hang up the phone. Yeah. You're done. You're gone. So how do you keep people on the phone? Right. You appeal to their curiosity.

Right. So like those first calls that Jody was getting, like the stats. and the music, those would have been like first drafts. And then the later calls, it was like the scammers were actually figuring out how to be interesting. It's so brilliant. It's so stupid and so smart at the same time. Also, James doesn't think this is like a bunch of scammers doing the same thing. He thinks all of these calls are coming either from one small group or even like one person. and he has theories about who that person would be.

He says, retired in their mid-40s used to work at one of the big phone companies. I'm convinced that that's who it is because it has to be someone that's very intimate with large-scale traffic, right? James says that the list of people with the know-how to pull off this scam is so short. He's basically talked to everyone on it while he was learning about it. Did you ever feel like maybe you were sitting across from the person? So many times. Really? Yeah, so we go to conferences and stuff like that

And people ask questions and like Almost like this exchange right Where they would be asking these questions Oh, that's so interesting, so interesting And then I'd start thinking like I wonder if he's trying to like find counterintelligence He's trying to figure out how to be We also saw two occasions where within 12 hours

Of attending the conference we saw the traffic shift significant Either the carriers that the traffic were coming into changed. So it was like a game of cat and mouse, you know. Do you ever wonder why the person, the fraudster, hasn't stopped? Like, they've made a lot of money. They know that people are pursuing them. My guess is because they are not afraid. I mean, I think they're literally thumbing their nose at government agency. If you look at some of the recordings that they use, they're literally reading news articles often.

Whitehouse.gov, like the FCC website. To me, that seems like a very literal thumb to them, because I think they know that it's very difficult for them to get caught. Basically, to get them, you've got to go to like, crazy eddy telecom and be like, listen, all that money you're making off of one of your customers, you need to stop. It's illegal. I need all the information on them, hand it over. And they have no reason to cooperate. Basically, James would need subpoena power. Yeah, can you just say, just so I have it for Arthin, can you just say your name and what your job is? Yeah, so my name is Pat Armour, and I'm a special agent with the cyber division of the FBI. James has reinforcements.

He is now sharing his honeypot with the FBI and the FCC. There's an open investigation. And I asked Agent Armour, like, do you agree with James that it's possible that this whole mess, hundreds of thousands of phone calls every day, phone companies losing like untold guys. of money, could it all really be the work of one person? A lot of the characteristics of the calls tend to be the same. I'd say it's not coming from a ton of different folks. I guess I'll just keep it at that.

Is this person or persons, are they catchable? Like, can they be caught? Yeah, they will be caught. Okay. Yep. No doubt about it. There's a lot of money involved. he sounds awfully confident that he can catch this person.

Yeah, I kind of believe him. So, like, I still had to call Jody back. So I called her. I was like, we can't actually stop these calls, but the FBI is on it. And when they arrest the person, then I think the calls will probably stop. She was basically just excited to finally know the origin

of these weird phone calls she'd been getting. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I fell into the trap, because I used to, like, leave them on for 20 minutes that's when I picked up the call. This person probably really liked you a lot. Oh, man.

I mean, I guess I made somebody some money, so. She said I could close her ticket. We hung up, and then she got another phone go off. Here, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea, though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with a swelling thereof, Ceylon.

There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad, the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High. God is in the midst of her. She shall not be moved. God shall help her and that right early. The heathen raids, the kingdoms were moved. He uttered his voice. The earth melted.

The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah. Come, behold the works of the Lord with desolations we have made in the... Reply all is hosted by me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman. Show is produced this week by Shruti Pinnaminani, Fia Bennon, and Damiano Marquette. Our editor is Tim Howard. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. We were mixed by Rick Kwan, and our intern is Anna Foley. Special thanks this week to Coli Prasinos and to Christy

Thompson and Pam Arluck of the FCC. Also, if you are getting spooky calls and you want them to stop, you can file a complaint at consumercomplaints.fc.gov. Just use the words toll-free traffic pumping. We'll have links on our website. Also, if you want another podcast to check out, I was interviewed on the podcast Woodland Secrets a few weeks ago. really fun. If you're not listening, you're missing out. Matt Lieber is those popsicles you thought you were never going to find at the deli again. Replyal is now available on Spotify, so go check us out there. You can also listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, wherever you want. Thanks for listening. We are very glad to be back, and we'll see you in two weeks.

Good morning. I feel like the same melody has been in my dreams for as long as I can remember. Saving Dream Sequence. Error. But I can never remember how it goes. Just take us somewhere peaceful, would you? We need to think seriously about how we're getting home. Icicle Planet! Icycle Planet! All that was good.

You know me so well.