473 "AREA CODE" WARNING --- DO ***NOT*** RETURN ONE-RING CALLS FROM 473 AREA CODE

I don't follow.

Just after Xmas, a "consumer watchdog" columnist in Fort Myers, Florida wrote up her warning about these entrapment calls, twice citing the spike in complaints on 800Notes. A local female victim's story tracks well with those comments:

    "Renna doesn’t hear that well and thought at first the voice was that of a little girl. And indeed it may have been, she said. But the other sound she heard was a man, making sounds like the two were engaged in a sexual act."

The columnist did a fair job of describing the scope and impact of the problem.

    "By late Thursday, 800notes.com had hundreds of complaints about calls beginning with the area code 473 and exchange 520, describing the same call. .... unlike the way U.S. 900 numbers work, callers aren’t informed of the rates nor are they given a chance to hang up before being charged."

The article slides behind a paywall this Friday.

Tell Mel: Missed a call? Don't call it back
http://www.news-press.com/proart/20131227/col ... agerestricted=1

As a previous call center survey  agent (only job I could get, sorry), if you say 'not interested' they will call you back.  If you say 'please put me on your do not call list' they are supposed to put you on that list and not call you back.  But it depends on the ethics of the company, the one I worked for followed those guidelines, as far as I knew.

Just heard about this number on the local (Salt Lake City, UT) news and a police department in northern Utah issuing a statewide alert/warning regarding this scam: a woman got the call, missed it, returned it and heard the moaning sounds as described in above posts, and later realized they'd been charged $25. So unless you know someone in Grenada, don't answer a 473 number!

Looks like we are seeing some showing up from Dominica like this also..  I've spotted two threads so far today with the same mo..

OK, Jamaica and Dominica also seem to be involved in this one ring in the middle of the night calls also..

We can now add Saint Lucia as well as Antiqua and Barbados & Montserrat..
Some folks are reporting 2 rings also..

They just called. I had one from Domicana a few weeks ago. I thought that was someone's first name. LOL! Anyway I just never answer calls from numbers I don't know and if they want to talk to me they can leave a message. Scammers never do. The do not call list does not prevent scammers from calling you. Don't sweat it. Just ignore.

The bad guys should get in trouble, not bash the people who don't know it's a scam.

Show me where in Resident47's post he was bashing people who did not know it was a scam-from what I see, he's trying to HELP people! Is your debt collection business messing up again Tara?

At the time I was commiserating with others who felt frustrated by people who walk eyes open into a scammer's trap. If you actually read those remarks instead of your own prejudice, the issue concerned someone who *knew or should have known* that a given caller was not to be trusted, yet dialed the stupid number anyway and presumably without a moment's research.

I'm not seeing the rule for this site which obligates me to feel sympathy for the willfully ignorant. Should I want to "bash" them -- and typically I don't -- you'll see a big difference, and a much longer word count, between that and what I dashed off a month ago.

Just FYI, the "ring" you hear from your phone is generated by whatever service you use. It has nothing to do with the number of rings the caller hears. Ring times are somewhat similar, so you're probably going to hear the same number of rings, but it's not guaranteed.

Cellphones, even more so. User selected tone length can be far in excess of a "ring."

I somehow got a call from this scammer twice in december. once on the 25th and then again on the 28th both while I was out of town visiting relatives and received around the time I called other relatives. the second call somehow lasted 14 minutes. I don't recall either of these and will be filing a police report and a report with my cell company.