So a very odd thing happened to me this afternoon. For reasons that aren’t worth explaining, I tried calling my phone on Skype from my PC. Instead of my phone ringing, what happened is some Taiwanese lady shouted at me (seemingly a recorded message) then it went to what seemed like a voicemail queue.
I tried this a couple of times with the same result. The number I put into Skype was correct, that is, +886 followed by my phone number, with or without the leading zero.
After googling this a bit I came across this thing called “simjacking” where somebody takes over one’s phone number, presumably for the purpose of intercepting OTP codes and the like. At this point I called Chunghwa, who said they didn’t see any issue with my account and nothing had been done recently to port the number to another SIM or whatever.
I called my number again while on the phone to Chunghwa and fortunately — because I was starting to doubt my sanity — the guy confirmed that he was hearing the same thing as me. He said the lady was speaking Taiwanese and saying something along the lines of “you’ve got the wrong number!”
Again, it was definitely my own number I was calling — I’ve checked this about 40 times now, and I read the number out to the Chunghwa guy. And it did sound like a recorded message, that then goes to voicemail. One time a guy seemed to answer instead of the shouting lady, but mostly it was her. I’m not even sure a simjacking scam would be technically possible, because my phone service is still working, the Chunghwa guy could see my number when I called, and I later still received SMS codes about other things to my own phone number (I checked by adding a new card to Line Pay, so using my phone number stored with the bank).
So… any ideas? I’m quite baffled. I have only tried it with Skype so far because I was at home by myself and don’t have a landline, but I’ll ask someone to call me from another Taiwanese mobile phone tomorrow to see if it’s the same result.
Good question! I’ve never used that feature that I remember (I don’t use Skype much these days anyway). I’ve also never had a Taiwanese number besides this one.
But I’ve just checked and my call forwarding is set to go to “voicemail” (whatever that means on Skype), with no number on the next screen:
So it shouldn’t be forwarding Skype calls to my phone. Even if it was doing that, that shouldn’t stop me calling my phone from Skype, should it? I would have thought that would only apply to calls made to Skype, not from.
I don’t remember setting this up, but what I do have apparently is my caller ID set to my number. I don’t see why this would cause the observed behavior of a lady shouting at me in Taiwanese then voicemail… but maybe that causes some kind of conflict?
Yes, I shouldn’t have been able to call myself from Skype when I was already on my phone to Chunghwa, but that didn’t seem to change what happened also…
But then you’d expect some more official-sounding automated message than some lady shouting “wrong number!” in Taiwanese…
Maybe I’ll try it again and post a recording of what happens. I think I’ll need to top up my Skype credit first, because I used most of what I had calling myself yesterday lol.
You say you did this for reasons not worth explaining, but then you still did it, and the issue it caused was then worth raising a topic about and calling Chunghwa.
So what’s your use case for calling yourself?
Based on the information provided, it’d be fair to conclude that although this is a weird issue, probably not worth fixing or finding a solution to, because what’s the use case for trying to call yourself in the first place?
Seems like one of those “it hurts when I pull my hair” scenarios?
No, you’ve misunderstood with the last bit. There’s no massively important use case. Let’s say I did it because I couldn’t find my phone.
It’s not something I need to do regularly, and my reason for calling Chunghwa and posting about the issue here wasn’t so I’d be able to chat with myself more often from Skype. The only reason is that after I’d found the issue I was (i) confused by it and (ii) slightly concerned that my phone calls/messages were being “intercepted” somehow (or otherwise going to the wrong place), which would be a security risk.
I tried it again just now and this is what happened. Let’s say my phone number is 0966 123456.
(1) Calling +886 0966 123456 from Skype
(i.e., including the leading zero, which IIUC should normally be omitted but Skype doesn’t seem to care about either way)
The call came through to my phone as would be expected, i.e., my phone rang. This isn’t what happened when I did the exact same thing six times on Friday.
(2) Calling +886 966 123456 from Skype
(i.e., omitting the leading zero, which IIUC is the preferred way)
Same result as on Friday, with the call going through to what seemed to be a short recording of someone else speaking then a voicemail/on hold queue. Today was a different person/recording than on Friday.
There’s a short recording of this below. These are two separate Skype calls to the same number (no zero), with the second call starting at around 00:30.
Telecoms have routing issues sometimes, just like ISPs. Good luck getting support from Skype on that though. You’ll want to confirm with other callers, but chances are pretty good it’s only affecting Skype users, and probably only a small subset of those, (e.g. connecting from Taiwan).
