CakeBlast

My family has had the same phone number for four years. The previous owner of my phone number was a man named Jimmy Galloway, who owned Galloways Window Cleaning until his business went bankrupt for reasons I do not know. For the first year after getting our current phone number, we received numerous calls for the Galloways, which was understandable since they had a half-page display ad in the yellow pages.

We chose to keep our phone number, because we knew that eventually old phone books with outdated information would be thrown away. What we did not count on, was that the out of work Galloway would continue to give our phone number to everyone from creditors to pharmacies. What makes this worse is that he apparently defaulted on numerous loans, and has tons of prescriptions.

Jimmy Galloway accidentally called our house last year and my wife told him firmly to stop using our phone number. When confronted, he suggested that if we don’t like it, we should change our phone number. We kept our number, but he quit… for a while. Lately, he has resumed claiming our phone number is his.

Now we are back to receiving robotic messages at 8:30 in the morning, telling us to call another phone number. Luckily my wife wrote Galloway’s number down when he called last year. We found it and gave it to the pharmacy that started calling (another robot) to tell Galloway that his prescriptions were ready. Unfortunately, the new creditors and banks are as harder to shake since they are paid to harass people, and have an army of robots to do it with.

This morning I received a call from LLC First Advantage. The BOOMING voice of the robot did not even say what LLC wanted. They just gave me a long distance number to call for very important information. I did not have a pen and paper handy so I couldn’t get the phone number written in time.

I will have to wait until tomorrow morning to answer the annoying phone call, with the unlisted number on our caller ID. And to jot down the number that LLC’s earsplitting robot yells into my ear. I know they will call because they also called yesterday, and I have been through this sort of situation before. Is this kind of third-party phone harassment illegal? Does anyone know what I can do about this besides changing my number?