[VoiceOps] Call term misrouting?

[Nathan Anderson]

Mike Johnston wrote:

> I serve a rural area.  I do the technical "make it work" stuff.  I'm 
> generally only involved in the business dealings insofar as determining 
> technical incompatibilities (draw 7 red lines, all perpendicular, some 
> with green ink and some with transparent).  That said, please forgive 
> any errors in what I say, and feel free to correct me.

This was all super interesting and helpful; thanks!

> I try to find numbers that go to IVRs, fax numbers, automated airport 
> weather numbers, etc.  Anything that doesn't involve bothering a human 
> over and over.  It has to be with the same OCN though, and generally 
> needs to be in the same NPA-NXX too.

Yes; correct.  In this particular instance, a county library system that we service a lot of branches for was having trouble calling a particular branch that lies outside of our service area.  I knew that branch's operating hours, and they have an answering machine, so I would run my tests while they were closed.

> These are generally fake voicemails.  Just a recording of some voicemail 
> intro, to make you think you hit a voicemail box.  The call hasn't 
> actually been mis-routed.  It hasn't been "routed" anywhere, other than 
> to an audio file.

I suspected it was either this, or it was hitting a genuine voicemail system that was perhaps misconfigured and accepting calls for any RDNIS / voicemail boxes it received.  Though I guess if I'd thought about it for 2 seconds, if it had actually been AT&T's voicemail system, then it would have told me that the destination mailbox in question had not yet been initialized / set up.

> Are you sure it actually rang a line at some business?  Or maybe it was, 
> again, just an audio file?  Some wav file on a server at Bob's Shady 
> Long Distance Shack?

[...]

> I would argue it is fraud.  But again, prove to me they are actually 
> "routing" to any number, and not some audio file.

Fair point.  I don't actually know.

-- Nathan