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Phone Weirdness

I was chatting with my Mum earlier this evening and a woman's voice briefly broke in to our conversation, talking about plumbing. It was just a few words. I also heard some clicks and other 'extraneous' noises while we were chatting. Have heard these clicks and other weird noises before.
My Mum didn't hear a thing.

We're both using landlines. It could be crosstalk between lines, or it could be someone who is tapping me or her. I've heard voices on the line before when talking to her, but not when talking to my friends. So, I think maybe my Mum's phone isn't very secure.
Can anyone recommend a high-security digital phone, please? It's making me paranoid and worried about my Mum.

I shouldn't have thought the phone had anything to do with it, it's the landline that's the issue. Not sure how you can revise that, if at all.
 
I shouldn't have thought the phone had anything to do with it, it's the landline that's the issue. Not sure how you can revise that, if at all.
Yes. Well, I was thinking 'high security digital phone at either end' might see the phone hackers off.
 
I shouldn't have thought the phone had anything to do with it, it's the landline that's the issue. Not sure how you can revise that, if at all.
In the old days you could have a phone in your house on a “Party Line”, it reduced the cost but you were on a loop with others and the lines often got crossed and you could hear other people’s conversations. I believe these were phased out in the eighties.
My Dad wouldn’t have a party line in the house in case people could eavesdrop when he was up to no good, but when my older brothers and sisters started to”abuse“ the phone, and the costs went through the roof my Mum replaced the usual handset with a pay phone.
 
Over here, (in the USA, land of Murder Wasps, Exploding Ducks, and who knows what else,) there are now many landlines that are part of bundled deals that include cable television and home wifi. It is glitchy. I don't know how, but could data on different lines can bleed into each other? Cell phone conversations used to interfere with the audio of televisions, but that was in the 1990s. Maybe you and your mother just experienced the latest version of telecommunications weirdness?
I don't know if that even makes any sense technologically speaking, because have no idea how any of it works, so I'll shut up now. :dunno:
 
Over here, (in the USA, land of Murder Wasps, Exploding Ducks, and who knows what else,) there are now many landlines that are part of bundled deals that include cable television and home wifi. It is glitchy. I don't know how, but could data on different lines can bleed into each other? Cell phone conversations used to interfere with the audio of televisions, but that was in the 1990s. Maybe you and your mother just experienced the latest version of telecommunications weirdness?
I don't know if that even makes any sense technologically speaking, because have no idea how any of it works, so I'll shut up now. :dunno:
I would like to hope it's that simple and innocent.
 
Both are wireless handsets attached to a landline.

In that case, the most likely juncture at which interference / crosstalk would occur is within the wireless transmissions on both ends, not the landline connection between them.
 
In that case, the most likely juncture at which interference / crosstalk would occur is within the wireless transmissions on both ends, not the landline connection between them.
Yes, that's why I was asking about high-security handsets. I don't seem to be finding much out there on the market, it's a bit frustrating.
 
I don't know about the UK market space, so I can only comment based on what I know of the US market space.

Most all recent wireless handsets use one or another form of spread spectrum (frequency-hopping) protocol. There have been multiple generations of such protocols, with later generations hopping faster / wider / whatever during a given time period. This requires precise clocking, and the clocking standards have sometimes changed as newer protocols get rolled out.

In the US market space all this has been built into home wireless / cordless telephone units for a long time. I recall reading (years ago) about occasional operational mis-synchronization between phones using older versus newer protocols, which might explain the clicking or rapid transient dropouts.

Generally speaking, almost no one short of a well-equipped signals hacker is likely to be able to eavesdrop on home handsets using a spread spectrum protocol. It might be worthwhile to research the specs on both your and your mother's phone units to see if they accommodate the same / same generation protocols. However ...

You mentioned picking up a snippet of someone else's conversation - a snippet you heard but your mother didn't. This sounds more like outright radio frequency interference / crosstalk on your end alone.
 
You mentioned picking up a snippet of someone else's conversation - a snippet you heard but your mother didn't. This sounds more like outright radio frequency interference / crosstalk on your end alone.
Yep, it's possible. My creepy neighbours might be listening in, either covertly or inadvertently. Not that I talk about much that's interesting.
 
In the old days you could have a phone in your house on a “Party Line”, it reduced the cost but you were on a loop with others and the lines often got crossed and you could hear other people’s conversations. I believe these were phased out in the eighties.
My Dad wouldn’t have a party line in the house in case people could eavesdrop when he was up to no good, but when my older brothers and sisters started to”abuse“ the phone, and the costs went through the roof my Mum replaced the usual handset with a pay phone.
When i was living at home , BT had to relace /repair some underground telephone cables but they managed to make a hash of it .They connected the cables to the wrong phone lines and left a lot of people with telephones that could't ring out or receive calls and that were party lines by mistake .
I think we had to put up with the situation for about a week and a half before they rectified the situation
 
No surprise to anyone these days, I keep getting phone calls from numbers I don't know, but numbers similar to mine. I always do a search for them online to see what might motivate the call. Some look like legitimate wrong numbers, but others!!!
The last call came a few minutes ago. Here's what I found out about it on google:
phone weirdness.jpg


Ah! If only I had an equestrian style wig!
 
No surprise to anyone these days, I keep getting phone calls from numbers I don't know, but numbers similar to mine. I always do a search for them online to see what might motivate the call. Some look like legitimate wrong numbers, but others!!!
The last call came a few minutes ago. Here's what I found out about it on google:
View attachment 27740

Ah! If only I had an equestrian style wig!

Impressive hammer pump module in rat sounds... painful?
 
When i was living at home , BT had to relace /repair some underground telephone cables but they managed to make a hash of it .They connected the cables to the wrong phone lines and left a lot of people with telephones that could't ring out or receive calls and that were party lines by mistake .
I think we had to put up with the situation for about a week and a half before they rectified the situation

Something like this happened a few years ago in my mother in law's area. It could have been serious if Ma in Law'd needed to call the Wardens or ring us for help.
 
Weird phone call today.
It was an automated message which said that I'd been charged a load of money by Amazon and an iPhone would be delivered.
I hung up immediately.
Checked my Amazon and card accounts - nada.
I suspect the message would end with 'press 1 to talk to a sales adviser', but I didn't hang on for long enough.
 
Weird phone call today.
It was an automated message which said that I'd been charged a load of money by Amazon and an iPhone would be delivered.
I hung up immediately.
Checked my Amazon and card accounts - nada.
I suspect the message would end with 'press 1 to talk to a sales adviser', but I didn't hang on for long enough.
I've had a lot of those automated fake Amazon calls to our landline, that is the scam they're up to. The usually start by saying we're owed money by them. I just put the phone down.
 
So do I Swifty. I don't even have an Amazon account.
 
You can do a 1471 and look up the number on WhoCallsMe. Our house phone stores the last 5 numbers even if they're foreign or withheld.
 
You can do a 1471 and look up the number on WhoCallsMe. Our house phone stores the last 5 numbers even if they're foreign or withheld.
You can report phone numbers but it is useless as when you make the report, they send all of your personal details to the pests who are calling you in the first place. This is supposedly to allow them to remove you from their call list but seems really to be to shut you up and stop you complaining.
 
You can report phone numbers but it is useless as when you make the report, they send all of your personal details to the pests who are calling you in the first place. This is supposedly to allow them to remove you from their call list but seems really to be to shut you up and stop you complaining.
What? That sounds like they're assisting the fraudsters.
 
Talking of assisting fraudsters. On my way in to work yesterday I found a debit card in the street. No shops there and no obvious place to pop in. Took it into work and phoned the number on the back. Using the automated system it understood I had found a card and said it would transfer me, another automated system which said I had to put my customer number in, which would start with my date of birth. Not my bank, no such number. After repeatedly just entering nothing I was eventually transferred to a human. Ten minutes had gone by now. After explaining what’s had happened and there was no shop or obvious place to take it to I was just told to destroy it. So the onus is on me to be a public citizen and destroy this card (which I did by cutting into incredibly tiny bits). But what gets me is at no point did they ask the name or account number on the card. If I had lost my card and reported it to my bank I would take some solace in hearing that the card had been found and destroyed.
 
So do I Swifty. I don't even have an Amazon account.
Have you been getting emails 'you might have won blah blah' stuff from them as well? (I don't have an Amazon account either)
 
This might be one for Snopes .. in the 80's, if you were trying to fight back against nuisance calls? .. blow a whistle as hard as you can down your phone's mouthpiece to burst the eardrum of the caller. Back then, this was advice given to victims of heavy breather pervert callers. Has anyone else here heard of that one?.
 
This might be one for Snopes .. in the 80's, if you were trying to fight back against nuisance calls? .. blow a whistle as hard as you can down your phone's mouthpiece to burst the eardrum of the caller. Back then, this was advice given to victims of heavy breather pervert callers. Has anyone else here heard of that one?.
My mother used to play along and waste their time and then blow up at them at the end. It used to be you could take a quiet walk and come back and play your answering machine cassette and listen to messages. Better days.
 
This might be one for Snopes .. in the 80's, if you were trying to fight back against nuisance calls? .. blow a whistle as hard as you can down your phone's mouthpiece to burst the eardrum of the caller. Back then, this was advice given to victims of heavy breather pervert callers. Has anyone else here heard of that one?.
Yes I heard that.
 
Yes I heard that about blowing a whistle but also that they were plagued by calls in the middle of the night after that.
Any emails saying I've won something go to phishing scams.
 
This might be one for Snopes .. in the 80's, if you were trying to fight back against nuisance calls? .. blow a whistle as hard as you can down your phone's mouthpiece to burst the eardrum of the caller. Back then, this was advice given to victims of heavy breather pervert callers. Has anyone else here heard of that one?.

Using a loud sound on unwelcome callers dates back farther than the 1980s. Besides the whistle it was also popular to use one of those handheld compressed air blaring horns. This approach wasn't as tough on the responder's own ears as a whistle, because you could hold it and the phone handset at arm's length.

NOTE: If you wish to try the whistle tactic, do it right ... Obtain an Acme Thunderer - ask for it by name ...

https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/whistles-ill-be-blowed-theyre-the-best.64940/
 
You can report phone numbers but it is useless as when you make the report, they send all of your personal details to the pests who are calling you in the first place. This is supposedly to allow them to remove you from their call list but seems really to be to shut you up and stop you complaining.

I don't report them, I just look them up on the WhoCalledMe website and post about it on there. It's anonymous. You can see what other people say about the number.
 
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