The Last Word On Nothing

It started with a voice mail.

I figured it was a wrong number, and didn’t think anything more of it, until I got another call from a guy asking me if this was Orkin Pest Control. I told him it wasn’t and by the way, how did you get this number? “It was the second thing that came up on Yelp when I searched for ‘pest control in Greeley, Colorado,’” he said.

The idea that my unlisted number was now featured on Yelp as the place to call when you’re looking for an exterminator made me want to bury my phone in a deep hole. But when I went to Yelp and did the search the guy had described, my number was nowhere to be found. In fact, it was nowhere on Yelp. It wasn’t coming up on google searches either. Good news, but also puzzling. How was he getting my number from Yelp if my number wasn’t listed on Yelp?

And then I got another call. This time, I asked the caller to explain the exact process by which she’d ended up calling me. She told me that she’d used her smart phone to search for “pest control” in Greeley, Colorado, and then she’d clicked on the result for Orkin Pest Control to call that number. 

When I got off the phone with her, I did exactly what she had done. And when I tapped on the icon to call Orkin, my phone beeped to indicate that I was receiving a call. From myself. 

I asked a few friends to try it. My sister in Denver got me on the line when she tapped to call Orkin, and so did a friend in Boston. What the hell was happening?

The really weird thing was that the number that displayed when you clicked on the Orkin result was not my number. Except for the area code, it wasn’t anything close to my number. And yet, if you dialed that number, either by tapping the call icon displayed next to the result or by dialing the number directly, the call went to my phone.

Soon, I was getting more calls and a lot of hangups. So I started doing some reporting. The first thing I tried to figure out is whether I could talk to someone at the real Orkin in Greeley, which is how I figured out that there is no Orkin in Greeley. However, there is a business called Greeley Pest Control LTD that listed the same phone number that was routing to my phone. (I have redacted it from the photos because I still don’t know what the hell and I don’t want to invite more trouble.) It even had a clip art-style logo. 

For a moment I thought maybe some part of this made sense. Perhaps a startup exterminator (it had no ratings on Yelp yet) was posing as a brand name exterminator in order to get business. But that still didn’t explain why the number was ringing my phone. If this was a scam to get business, surely the phone number needed to go to the entity collecting the money. 

I took a closer look at the address associated with the business to see if I could find another phone number associated with it. If this was just a mixup regarding where the phone calls were going, surely the business owner would want to know why they weren’t getting any calls. 

But it turned out that the listed address isn’t a business, but a federally subsidized senior low income housing apartment complex. I learned this when I called the building’s office, which is also how I also learned that there is no unit or suite 1401. Greeley Pest Control does not seem to exist.

I called my phone company to ask for help. But it turned out that the only thing that they could do for me is find the carrier for the phone number that was forwarding to mine: a company called Bandwidth.

Calling Bandwidth sent me into one of those phone menus that never seems to lead to an actual human being. After a couple of tries, I navigated to the message line for the company’s fraud mitigation team (the fact that it has one did not make me feel very hopeful). A little more than 24 hours later I received an email from Courtney with the Fraud Mitigation Team telling me that the number in question had been provided by one of its business customers “in a wholesale manner, offering services of their own together with a Bandwidth telephone number to their end users.” Because of this, Bandwidth had no information about the end user of the phone number.

In case I thought it couldn’t get more absurd, her email also advised me that, “your concern may be a matter for law enforcement and we encourage you to work with your local law enforcement as may be appropriate.” I tried to imagine the look on my small town cop’s face if I came to him with my problem. Needless to say, I didn’t. 

I did call Orkin though. It occurred to me that they were the one other party here that had an interest in sorting this out since someone appeared to be impersonating them. If there was a breakthrough in this saga, this was it. The Orkin team was on it. Within a day, search engines were no longer returning a result for Orkin in Greeley, Colorado and the phone number in question was no longer being associated with Orkin in results. 

Good for Orkin, but my problem wasn’t entirely solved. Greeley Pest Control was still coming up in searches with the phone number that was still ringing to my phone.

About a day after the first email from Bandwidth, I received another note. “Thank you for the information. We have disconnected this number.” 

Problem solved! But the mystery remains: what the hell was this all about? It looks like some kind of scam, but what? And how? What was the purpose of the listing for this (seemingly) nonexistent business? How did my phone number get caught up in this? I have yet to find any answers.