Even worse!! I pay my Mobile Carrier $120.00 a month & then my
personal cell # gets sold as a lead!! OUT RIGHT INSULTING!!! Then the same list of leads is resold over & over just great.......
FML
I received a call from this number on my business line just after 2:30 pm CDT on Apr. 30, 2014. Calls to this line are immediately forwarded to an IVR script I have set up. The script announces who I am and what my profession is, and then places the call into a call queue to wait up to two minutes or until I am able to answer personally. None of my lines ring until the caller listens to that short announcement. However, once the IVR picks up the phone, the call is timed.
The caller was on the line a total of 3 seconds after the IVR picked up the line. During those three seconds, my phone didn't ring, nor did my voice mail get anything. Evidently, whoever it is who is calling from this number might be afraid of people in my profession, as well they might be.
As to where they got my number, I'm pretty sure it was called at random. Only a few people have my work number. It is advertised on a couple of web sites and publicly available via professional registrations in government listings, but always in contexts that would probably scare away scammers. And it is very easy to dial a lot of different numbers randomly with the aid of a computer.
But another explanation could be that my contact information was stolen from someone else's computer. I know at least one other person who receives my emails on a Windows XP-based computer, all of which are very vulnerable to hackers. Also, anyone using just about any version of Internet Explorer these days is, according to a government/Microsoft warning, at risk for "drive-by" attacks where someone could execute arbitrary code on your computer. And two-thirds of the Internet was shown to be vulnerable to the Heartbleed coding error.
So don't be so quick to blame yourself or certain particular "others" for "selling your number." I'm sure you wanted lots of features on your phone and on your computer, and cheap phone calls over the Internet and over cell phones. It's probable, however, that you never considered the risks to your privacy that would result.