Thursday, December 20, 2007

No Comprende

Does anyone else out there occasionally get these random phone calls on their cell phones (always from a different phone number), only to answer it and hear a strange recorded message chattering on in Spanish?

Well, let me re-phrase. I know this is happening to other people, because when I attempted to Google up an answer for "what the hell are these calls?" (using various combinations of "phone call," "cell phone," "Spanish," "recording," and so forth), I found lots of hits describing the same thing. But what I failed to find was an explanation for just what these calls are all about. Even trusty old Snopes, that usually has an answer for every urban legend-like phenomenon, came up empty on this "Spanish recorded crank cell phone caller."

If anyone reading this has an answer, I would love to hear it. Failing a real answer, made up theories could be entertaining too.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

being "that one guy left who doesn't have a cell phone" I don't really know how often this happens, but a friend of mine told me about it and he called and yelled at his phone company for wasting his battery or minutes or whatever.

he was told that those are automated translation messages that are randomly intercepted by incorrect phones due to the way those signals are broadcast. something about bouncing the signal back to the source phone, he wasn't really paying attention to the technobabble explanation.

basically some Spanish-speaking customer calls a service to translate a spam call, and that service sends the message back to their phone in such a way that it can be incorrectly transmitted to another phone.

that was a pretty long explanation for a made-up answer but it was kinda fun writing it :)

the mole

Anonymous said...

Whoah. Talk about timing.
This happened to me for the very first time yesterday. I thought it was probably just a hiccup in the system... but apparently it's a whole consipiracy! How exciting.
Or something.

FKL

Roland Deschain said...

Man.

I can't even get my crank calls to speak English. :P

Unknown said...

¿Por qué no hablará usted conmigo? ¿Pensé que fuimos amigos?

www.freetranslation.com

Roland Deschain said...

No, Snarky Smurf - I don't think we could be friends...and now I'm DEFINITELY not talking to you. ;)

Smartass...lol