Jan 26, 2013
Honestly, this looks like a hacker technique called War Dialing. I googled this number after it called my cell and hung up when I said "Hello." When I saw how many people in so many different places had been called by this number and were hung up on/presented a prerecorded message when they answered, War Dialing then seems the only logical conclusion I can think of. I mean if they were telemarketers, someone would talk back to try to sell you something, right? Or the recording would lead you somewhere that tries to sell you something.
What is War Dialing? War Dialing is a technique used by computer hackers. Hackers set up a modem or modems to methodically dial phone numbers one-by-one in a given area in the hopes that they will connect with another modem. For those that forget the olden days of dial-up, this is how most residential consumers connected to the internet in the mid-90's. This was done over the old regular phone lines (aka the Publicly Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Data which is digital, was moved this way, over an analog system which was never designed to handle it. Modems translate digital computer data into analog phone signals to send, and then retranslate the analog back to digital on the receiving end. Nowadays, everyone has high speed Internet via fiber optic lines, so the old way of the PSTN is rarely used.
However, a lot of system administrators of computer networks (e.g. a corporate net) still keep a modem/PSTN access to those networks in order to have a backdoor/redundancy to gain access their system/network in case their normal high-speed internet pathway is down, since the PSTN is on a seperate infrastructure from our modern internet access. Most of the time these backdoor modems provide easy access to any hacker that happens to dialnthe right number to access it. So they engage in an activity called War Dialing, where they have a modem methodically dial out phone numbers in sequence in hopes that it will connect with another modem which may result in a backdoor access to a normally highly secure computer network.
Also, watch the super awsome '80s movie "War Games" for an example of War Dialing.