Random Voicemails

What is Random Voicemails?

As one of my many silly, but functional, side projects. Behind the scenes is very simple. I maintain several telecommunications softswitches, physical switches, tandems, and most importantly, an absolutely massive inventory of telephone numbers (DIDs), ranging from all around the United States (a minimum of 100 per area code), and some international numbers as well. Only about 74% is in use by active telecommunications customers of mine, while the rest, which equals out to about 47,840 numbers, are not assigned to any customers and are in my hands as the telco. Pretty crazy that I have over 184,000 telephone numbers, right? I digress. With the aforementioned numbers that are not in use, I used to point them at my intercept, letting the caller know that the number was no longer in service.

One night as I was doing my weekly audit, I noticed that there are a good handful of calls that go to these unassigned numbers. The way I run my network and manage my numbers puts me pretty low in the spam risk area, so this good handful of calls also wasn't any sort of bots leaving voicemails, although sometimes one or two slip through. Thus, I decided to take out my intercept and replace it with a generic voicemail greeting. When a voicemail is left, a custom script exports/sends the voicemail across several servers until it makes its way to my web ingest server, getting processed, and ultimately ending up here.

I have now added a manual review, meaning that voicemails are no longer automatically added to the website. Why, you may ask? Well, some people just leave way too much sensitive information in voicemails, so I'd like the chance to review messages such as those and remove them from my pending list before they go public on the website. My goal for this website is to provide a laugh, not for people to have to worry about sensitive voicemails ending up online. With this being said, if you would like to request a takedown of a specific voicemail, please click here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Question: Can I submit/send in voicemails?
Answer: No, absolutely not.

Question: What carrier do you use?
Answer: As forementioned, I am the carrier. I am the sole operator of a massive tier 2 carrier, with many ties to tier 1 carriers and their resources.

Question: Can you provide me telecommunications service?
Answer: Due to the top quality of my carrier and its service offerings, I work on an invite only basis. Essentially meaning I choose my clients. So the answer is most likely going to be no, but give it a shot, try your luck.

Question: Why is the call quality on some voicemails poor?
Answer: Most of the time, this is out of my control. Not every calling party has fancy high end equipment and abilities to use HD voice codecs or beyond. Telemarketers often have the worst quality. I will also mention that I do have some trunks that are wireline (mix of Analog/T1/E1, and Hybrid), PRI, ISDN BRI, and Wireless. While most of the trunks that are used for the inbound that the random voicemails are left over are VoIP, due to the forementioned other types of trunks, calls may also enter via those, thus, reducing the call quality.

Question: What types of numbers do you have? Why don't you post the CIDs or DIDs calling or called?
Answer: My goal as I have previously said is not to cause an issue for the people leaving these voicemails. As a telecom and telephone number enthusiast, I acquire all sorts of numbers every day. With the abilities and connections, I have as a tier 2, most of the numbers I pull are from traditional carriers that offered mainly wireline services, such as Qwest Communications (formerly US West), Pacific Telesis (part of SBC), SBC, BellSouth, Verizon (formerly Bell Atlantic), and other RBOC's. While I do have a good amount of numbers from VoIP only carriers, like bandwidth.com for example, and many other providers similar to bandwidth, I’m not very interested in collecting their numbers, as they get hit so heavily with spam. The problem with those specific numbers is that they are not only hit so heavily with spam, but because they have all had so many owners of their lifetime, since it’s VoIP, and the turnover is much higher than a number from a RBOC, there’s just so muc h more spam. A number from a RBOC usually only has one or two owners. Back on track, this means that I have some very old numbers, so let's say when a local hardware store in your area, that has been around since forever, meaning they had service from a RBOC, goes out of business, I snatch up their numbers. So, people will still call in, and since there really is no real indication that the business or person, they are looking for no longer owning that number, they'll still leave messages thinking it's them. I am sure that you can now think of many examples on how very sensitive voicemails can be left, or just in general, and because of this, I will never post voicemails containing the calling number CID, or the called number DID.