Weird recurring wrong numbers to our business

clarecooney

This is such a strange problem but I am desperate to know if other people are suffering the same thing because I suspect it might be an internet scam that nobody is yet really aware of.

Our business has had the same number for 15+ years, at three different locations and we've had VOIP lines on the number for about half that time. For the last year, we've been getting frequent calls from people responding to a variety of supposed adverts they've seen on the internet. To begin with, we assumed it was a single advert with a digit wrong but as time went by it started to be for different things. We have several months where we got continual calls from people thinking they were responding to advertisements for rental properties - and to be clear our business is nothing to do with that.

Recently it's been people apparently responding to gumtree adverts, for among other things cars and a playstation. We always try and get as much information as we can but it's quite difficult to get people to divulge information, usually because they themselves are highly confused by the fact that they've ended up talking to somebody at an unrelated business, who's pumping them for information.
What we have been able to find out is that the callers are not calling our business number - they're calling a regional phone number with our area code - and the number differs with each caller. Our phone system provider has investigated and they're bewildered because all they can see is the number hitting our phone system on the main number, which means the diversion to our number is occurring outwith our phone system. The only common denominator in all of this is that the origin is always internet adverts. We've also managed to find out that another local business is having the same issue because a number that was diverting to us on one day, was diverting to them the next.
The only thing I can think of is that internet scammers have found a way to monetise the phone call made from an online advert. This would make sense because they could autogenerate adverts relevant to searches people made online and then capture a fee for the phone call you make to enquire about it. But to do so, they need the call answered - so divert these calls to unwitting businesses who will likely always answer the phone. The caller and the business are inconvenienced but not out of pocket and the owner of the phone line makes money. Could this be it? Has anybody else had anything similar happen to them?
 

DullGreyGuy

They would be calling for the forwarding unless it's conveniently with a voip to voip free arrangement but you say they are using a geographic area code? In which case they are going to be getting next to nothing for the inwards calls and certainly not enough to offset the outwards divert even if they are getting thousands of calls a day. 

Never used gumtree so dont know how it works, would more thing its a fake advert and they expect most to buy/sign up without calling but have a number to make it seem more legitimate. They may be cycling telephone numbers so that someone searching the number won't find all the connected adverts. Why they forward to your number rather than just put a random number? Maybe they think people will just ring to check it's real and hangup before someone answers? 

Certainly a weird one 

clarecooney

It is totally weird. It's not always been gumtree - for a while they were coming from an obviously spurious property site that was scraping web listings from other sites for rentals and sales and never taking them down so they seemed to have masses of stuff in every region. All the calls were coming from there. My guess is that it might be happening thousands of times if the ad content is just being mashed up by a bit of code that responds to what people search. It is baffling. It must be benefitting somebody or they wouldn't be doing it but I am stumped. 

DullGreyGuy

clarecooney said:
It is baffling. It must be benefitting somebody or they wouldn't be doing it but I am stumped. 

Presumably it is, or at least they hope it will. Not all things go to plan, are well thought out etc... 

A former colleague tried to run a scam just after joining the company by changing the teleconference number to his own 0870 which then forwarded it to the standard one thinking most will just blindly dial it without considering the cost. Unfortunately he didnt consider that with out choice of software most people joined via their PC by clicking a link and so he lost money but then couldn't remember how he'd changed the meeting invites to include his number so was stuck with it (didnt want to confess to IT what he'd been doing) for the very rare person that did join by phone. 

clarecooney

Yeah - not all criminals are masterminds..... 

If what I imagine is happening, is actually happening, then each individual transaction is probably costing and earning fractions of a penny - but if it's happening all over the world, on voip lines, all hours of the day then it could be happening thousands upon thousands of times which would obviously mount up. And because the people at each end of the scam aren't out of pocket, they're merely left confused and nobody reports a wrong number. This is why I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing anything similar. As I said, we know one local business at least is having something similar happen because our phone company has identified that with them - but we don't know who they are and don't have details on the scale of it.