Couple’s phone rings off the hook

An elderly Timaru couple have been getting hundreds of confused calls from the victims of a perplexing international telephone scam.

Alvan and Margaret Jones’ phone has barely stopped ringing since they arrived home from a day out on Saturday to find 54 voice messages left on their messaging service.

Since then, hundreds more calls have been received, all from people who said they were returning calls from the Jones’ number.

‘‘We were away all Saturday and there were all these blimmin’ calls on the phone,’’ Alvan said yesterday, during a rare pause in the calls.

‘‘It’s a shocker... it’s blimmin’ annoying. Someone is using our number and ringing all over the blimmin’ country.’’

They disconnected their phone on Saturday and Sunday nights but the calls started ‘‘within seconds’’ of the phone being plugged back in each morning, he said.

Daughter Karen Mcmillan contacted Spark to detail the ‘‘unnecessary stress’’ caused by the seemingly never-ending calls.

Spark communications partner Sam Durbin said it had received a number of complaints about calls from the Jones’ number.

The complainants said there was no-one on the other end of the line when they answered the calls. That meant it was difficult to know why the scam had been mounted.

Durbin said it appeared the Jones’ number was caught up in an international scam in which a number has been masked to appear as though calls are from New Zealand.

‘‘We have raised this with the two providers [involved] to get them to block the calls coming in,’’ he said.

A wireless caller ID device had also been sent to the couple so they could monitor the calls.

Spark recommended they either change their number or set up an answering service that said their number had been scammed.

Durbin said Spark could not stop other people in New Zealand calling the Jones’ number. However, the calls should dwindle once the overseas telco blocked the incoming overseas number. Victims should contact Spark’s investigation team.

The last widely publicised spike in phone scams was in December, when there was a leap in the number of calls from people pretending to be from Microsoft and asking for personal information.