So I got a call I didn’t recognize on my cell today, and when I answered a recorded voice said it was a call from the Huntsville-Madison County Jail. Intrigued, I listened further, and it told me that for a one-time charge of $9.99, I could speak for up to 20 minutes with…
…and I hung up. I absently assumed it was a wrong number, as there’s just insufficient commonality between the list of people I know who might be in jail at 1:30 on a Friday afternoon and the list of people who’d call me upon arriving there.
But then I got to thinking: why would a call from the Huntsville-Madison County Jail not be local? (This number was 866-847-1251.) I Googled that, and there’s not much. (Well, I guess there’s this now.) I did find someone named Mickey on a message board who sounded like he knew what he was talking about, saying it’s some third-party calling service that has semi-legitimate uses, but that also gets abused by prisoners calling random numbers, looking for…something exploitable, I suppose.
In any case, don’t answer a call from that number, and if you accidentally do and hear you’re being called from jail, just hang up.
(You know, I guess. On the extremely-small-but-nonzero chance that you called me from the slammer today, I apologize for hanging up on you. Hope you got everything worked out.)
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Ha! My daughter received a call from the identical number a few weeks back. Like you, she promptly hung up…
…and immediately called me to see if I was locked up!
Heh! You know, I started to make a phone call or two to family and friends, and said “NAAAAAAAHHHHHH…” 🙂