I got your number on the wall

As if last week wasn't already upsetting enough, on Thursday morning I started getting creepy text messages on my cell phone from some guy named Jamie. First he called and left some incoherent voicemail around 2AM. Then he sent a couple of texts.

I was being a nice, naive person and assumed maybe he got some girl's number in a bar and was drunk-dialing or had a couple of digits wrong. So I called the number and left a message on Jamie's voicemail indicating that he had the wrong number.

I'm not trying that again, although I doubt it would have made any difference. He already knew I was female from listening to my voicemail, which he probably knew he would get if he called at 2:36AM.

So then there were a couple more texts. And a couple more texts after that. The messages were general enough that I knew he didn't know me and was probably some kind of annoying individual spammer, but it was still unsettling to get increasingly lewd messages wanting to know if I was feeling sexy. Where could he have gotten my number to begin with? Now I was both freaked out and annoyed; not only was this creepy and weird, but it was costing me money.

DH is in charge of our cell plan so he called our service provider to see if we could put a block on incoming calls and texts from Jamie's number. We were told that they could block it, but we would need to pay extra for them to do that. Gee, thanks, guys. Also, if he really was obsessed with me from afar, he could conceivably start contacting my number from a different phone.

Option Number Two was to ignore the harassment and hope he'd get bored and move on to other victims, but he could theoretically continue texting ad infinitem, which we'd then need to pay for. Mmmm, not so good.

We ended up going with Option Number Three: I get a new cell phone number.

While I'm relieved that these unwanted contacts have now stopped, I'm also pretty annoyed at this cretin. For all I know, he is randomly calling cell phone numbers all over the country, determining which numbers belong to females by calling overnight and listening to their voicemail, and if so, bombarding them with lewd text messages and racking up their monthly bills. Due to Jamie's obnoxious behavior, I now need to tell dozens of people (including my kids' schools, my security alarm company, doctors, coworkers, service people, companies I do business with) that I have a new phone number, and it's not even in my original area code.

I don't know of any way to bust this sicko, but I wish I did. I could file a police report, but it's probably not worth the time - not to mention, where would one do this? He's not from this region. In an attempt to be my own case detective, I went to one of those websites where you can look up phone numbers and the number is assigned to someone in Collinsville, IL, just east of St. Louis, MO. I wasn't willing to pay for the more specific information these sites claim to have; Jamie has cost me enough already. What would I do with this information anyway? Fly out there and surprise him when he gets home? Enroll him in the Turd-of-the-Month Club? Sue him with what little is left of my 401k?

While this is not even a blip on the radar of true crime, I still feel harassed. And I worry that this kind of activity could quietly increase as an insidious and potentially unstoppable form of spam. Under current legal definitions, this is not advertising and thus not spam, but it's definitely unsolicited and unwanted contact from an unknown person, and causes the victim both money and hassle. I don't know of any law that would bar this, nor whom one would contact to report this type of intrusion.


UPDATE:
A friend of mine googled Jamie's phone number and turned up a Craiglist posting he made. So we now know his name and hometown. I'm mulling over filing a report with his local police department. Just wish I'd made better documentation of what he did before we switched over my phone number. Maybe my phone company can help....