512-336-9113

Fascinating. I've been getting calls on my cell phone from (512) 336-9113, usually at odd hours. I finally got one this morning that I could answer, and there was a fellow speaking in stilted English asking about my RCI merchant account. I told him he had the wrong number and hung up.

On a whim I typed the number into Google, and found this LiveJournal post. A fellow named David McNett used to have that number back in 2003, and someone tracked it back to him to complain about unwanted faxes. But he wasn't sending them.

As subsequent comments revealed, the phone number has shown up on Caller ID for all manner of nuisance calls, from domain name scams to "prescription drug" merchants to users of calling cards. Even more interestingly, most of the recipients chiming in are from Hawaii, like me.

So someone, somewhere, has been using some kind of system to target folks in Hawaii... but it's not poor David, nor is it neccessarily even anyone in Texas, or the U.S. for that matter. But I figure I'd blog this just to help anyone else — probably local — who's similarly getting calls from this largely untrackable phone number. If Hawaiian Telcom doesn't have a file on this, they probably will very shortly.