question

Hello,

I get calls at all hours on my RC IP. Legitimate calls are logged on my desktop Soft Phone > sent and email notification and then FWD live to my cell.

The Ghost calls from legitimate looking numbers,  logged on my desktop Soft Phone > sent and email notification ( Sometimes a blank msg or none) and ARE NOT FWD to my cell. I have my RC settings to ignore msg shorter than a few seconds. 

I have been with RC for 4 years, I just assumed it was spammers retrieving my 1.887 number off my website. However if there is a solution I would be more than happy to know. 

Calls from different New York area codes/phone numbers are driving me crazy! All hours of the day and never anyone there.

It does no good to block because the same number never calls more than once - and it seems to me that the more numbers I block, the longer it takes for the calls to actually be forwarded to me. (Guess that makes sense if it has to check through 1000's of blocked numbers before connecting the calls).

I have tried blocking entire area codes, but since I receive business calls from all states, and could very well be blocking out a portion of my business - plus I certainly don't wish to block the whole state of NY.

Can anything be done about this?

Scam

Several users have hinted at the possibility of filling a class action lawsuit against RC. When a company with a demonstrable pattern of bad business practices is discovered, trust my experience as a fraud investigator that it isn't an accident. I've only lost several months of subscription fees, but the bigger issue is that RC attempts to trap users into subscriptions that are essentially only cancellable at RC's discretion. That's fraud. Nevermind the terms and conditions stating that users consent to not joining a suit against RC. Such clauses are unenforceable under cases of misrepresentation, fraud, etc. I'm not an attorney, but I intend to see this through. If you want to join the eventual suit, you need to provide contact info so the lawfirm can follow up. Name, state of residence, email, type of RC service, when you enrolled, etc. E-mail: aa.wg09@gmail.com

New Topic. Archiving old thread. Please reference the new conversation here: Why am I receiving calls from no one? Is RingCentral doing this to use my minutes...

See the official post above from one of our engineers. You issue sounds like it maybe related. You'll probably want to give us a call if this is still happening. 

Have you ever called tech support Mike? They barely speak English.

Hi Diane,  Sorry if you've had a bad experience with the phone support. If you prefer, you can  Open a Case  online. 

No, I am good, but I'll keep my eyes opened, if this is happening to a lot of people and you are charging us for calls that are not legit, your company could have a real problem because you charge by the minute. A dollar a month is no big deal to one person, but if it is happening to lets say 100K a month, at 1.00 a piece, that would be a problem.

Workaround solution: Set default message "hello thanks for calling, press X to speak to someone...", and set up extension X as the receptionist. After dealing with this issue for a few months I've realized this is the only way to avoid these mysterious fake calls. I'll need our messages professionally re-recorded first, which I've found oDesk or voices.com great for. I see someone else also recommended this below.

It sounds like there are at least 2 different scenarios involved here. My scenario has been worked around now, with RingCentral's assistance - thanks, John Rodriguez! The calls are still coming into my system. However, we enabled the initial Automated Attendant feature, which says "If you know your party's extension, please enter it now, or press 0 for the operator". I recorded my own version, saying "Thank you for calling, please press 0 to continue." It's a slight pain for my callers to have to press 0, but those phantom calls we were getting _never_ press 0. At least, not so far. I have received dozens of "Missed Call" emails, but they're all cases where the caller failed to press 0. I do still think there is an issue within RingCentral, where these calls are a symptom of a system issue, but this solution filters them out for me. Note that the "Call Screening" section that prompts for the caller to say his name and press # does NOT actually screen - the caller does NOT have to press # to continue, it continues to process the call after 5 seconds if the caller doesn't say a name. I would prefer to REQUIRE the caller to press # - and prompt multiple times if needed - but this workaround has been saving me from calls in the middle of the night, and that's what I really care about. Note: I am quite confident that RingCentral is NOT simply doing this to ring up more charges. There aren't enough calls to change what I'm being billed. If it's a nefarious plot, it's poorly done. But I still worry that the calls are being mis-routed - perhaps there are calls coming in to someone else's toll-free number, it's being incorrectly mapped to our number for the ring of the call, but the actual connection isn't being completed. Until/unless one of my customers reports that he called in and no one answered, whose call does not show in my log, I won't worry too much about this. But I wonder whether anyone is reporting that THEIR callers aren't being CONNECTED to them properly...

I just checked my Call Log, Randall. I'm not being billed at all for the calls that the automated attendant is screening. They all show that they were connected for less than a minute, with $0.00 billed for the call. About half the calls I've received since making this change have been blocked. So far, 1 of my customers has commented on the change in needing to press 0, so it hasn't been terribly impactful on them, but it's helped me a lot. It has blocked calls at 2AM, 3AM, 5AM, 6AM, 7PM... blocking those calls helped me maintain my tenuous grip on sanity. ;^)

I'm suddenly getting them too. I've been a RC customer for two years. From October to December of 2014 I would receive maybe one ghost call a week. The frequency began picking up in January of 2015 and now (March) I receive 3-4 ghost calls per day - more than one in the middle of the night. 

I happen to have several phone systems - both land and VOIP - and so far the RC system is the only one with this problem. It could be a coincidence - I'm actually a big RC fan - but this is getting annoying.

Hi Herb,   If you didn't see the official response at the top of this page take a look at it.  You are welcome to call us or open a support case if you need to. 

Scott, I can confirm that for us, it's only happening with our RC line and not with our other line providers. Luckily I can switch our #s away from RC with minimal disruption. In other ways I prefer RC so I hope to return soon.

Hi Mike the RingCentral customer, I'm an end user like yourself. I agree, it was useless to try blocking the numbers. They're almost random - not the same number each time, though I believe I did see the same number for 2 separate calls. You _might_ try opening a case and asking to have it escalated to John Rodriguez - he's the guy who I was able to get _my_ case escalated to, and he ultimately helped me configure my system to use the automated attendant, requiring callers to press 0 to continue. That seems to have worked around the problem for me. Which implies that these are auto-dialers that are calling from some list of numbers, and there's never someone who can hear the message to press 0 to continue. It does seem like the call should have hung up rather than being routed to us, so I think there's a bug in the RingCentral call routing process in any case. I think there's a way you can screen out the calls, which is the most important goal. At least for me. I think RingCentral overall has an opportunity to make significant improvements in the way it provides support for its customers. I'm a Support professional myself, and I think they need to provide some way for unhappy customers to escalate issues within their system. As currently designed, you have to work _around_ the system to get help from their "Executive Response Team". And, even then, I think the problem just bounces around the Support team, when what they really need is to engage Engineering to investigate the system and find the root cause of the problem. I read other postings on this thread, and I see people who are clearly getting a completely different kind of problem, with invalid phone numbers for the people who are calling them. ALL the numbers I'm seeing look like valid numbers. I also think it would be important for RingCentral to collect data on this kind of problem. Perhaps add a Report Invalid Call button, so they could see how widespread this issue is. If it hadn't been waking me up in the middle of the night repeatedly, I wouldn't have messed with it. So there could be thousands of these invalid calls per day, and they just write it off as "telemarkets - complain to the FCC". Pretty much the definition of ignoring the problem. Or, if there were a way of getting real-time assistance while the call was connected, and trace it to the source. I really think they could solve this if they a) accepted that there could actually be a problem with their system, and b) invested engineering time to solve it. Until they do a), they won't do b), and we just will continue to have this garbage. But it's had only a very minor impact since I worked around it. Regards, Scott

Hello Mike,  Sorry about the issue you are having. It sounds like this is a slightly different problem, but we'll be happy to look into this for you. If you could please use this link to  Open a Case and provide us with the phone number this is happening to and the times/dates of any examples of this it will help. 

Regarding the 2nd log in for this Community site, we realize this is an inconvenience. This is due to the Community platform being hosted by a 3rd party. We are actually working toward providing a single-sign-on feature, but there are some rather complicated log-in issues that we are addressing and must make sure it's secure for all the users. I'm confident we'll have this later this year but no ETA yet. 

Mike 

It was useless to open a case.  The support person only suggests that I block the number which doesn't help since the numbers are spoofed and different each time.  Then I get daily requests to close the case even though it has not been solved.  I don't understand why the calls are silent.  If they hang up before I answer then it shouldn't still ring me and use 5 minutes of my time PER CALL.

Scott,  thanks for this post. There are some very good ideas in here. I've copied some of your comments over to a new Idea topic so that this gets separate attention from our Product Team.  

This person is experiencing the exact same problem that I am, and he too was told to open a support case to no avail, of course. Yet nobody including Mike has an explanation for what is happening. Mike dismisses this inexplicable phenomenon as "spammers". Right.

Apparently all of us are supposed to believe a spammer sits in their basement 24 hours a day calling toll-free numbers registered to RingCentral customers and spoofing their caller ID for no purpose whatsoever just because they can.

Hi Mike,

NoMoRobo does a nice-job dealing with the spam/telemarketing calls.  They specifically say that Ringcentral is not supported.  However, they support all other companies that support a simulring feature.

Do you know why RC is not supported?

Hi Mike,  I'm not sure about this but I'll look into it and see if it's an option. Thanks for sharing. 

Mike, could you ask the team that wrote the above whitepaper, which SIP settings they recommend changing in response?  Some of us have manually provisioned devices. 

Mike Bruns ,    I don't believe this changes anything on the phone, but I can double check.  Or, are you referring to the settings on page 5-6?  

Hi Mike, thanks!

I am talking about changes to the phone.  Here are the current settings on my Ringcentral Linksys ATA, but all endpoints will have similar SIP options.

 

1)   To take advantage of TCP, I assume I just need to set the SIP Transport to TCP rather than UDP.   Are there any other changes?

2)  The Restrict Source IP is set to no.  Per Dave Herron's note, setting this to "Yes" could help to eliminate ghost-calls, as the ATA would only respond to ringcentral servers. If this is not set by default for all endpoints, maybe it should be. 

3)  I'm not sure if my ATA supports Secure Voice.  If it does, I need to know the settings to talk to the RC servers over a secure TLS connection.