RoadClosed, thanks for your posts with ARRL and AT&T links. This already is or would be a criminal case of aggravated harassment except that my local precinct just isn't doing the job. They claim they never received the phone traces from my phone company (Not AT&T), which by law cannot come directly to me. In other words, they claim incompetence. I believe my phone company sent the traces. This is a Brooklyn precinct where kids steal patrol cars from the parking lot, so they have bigger worries than me.

I became suspicious that this person was connected to AT&T when I began receiving an unusual volume of solicition calls to switch to AT&T, sometimes twice in the same day or on consecutive days. It dawned on me that these were not real solicitation calls but just another form of harassment by this one obsessed, determined individual - my number was being continually fed into their call list by this individual or a friend or accomplice. Those calls stopped abruptly in May. Someone might have said, "X, this is just too risky." I have since listed my number with the national do not call registry, so if these calls pick up again after Oct. I can collect up to $11,000 a pop.

It might be worth a try to contact the AT&T fraud unit except I don't have this person's last name. She is now of retirement age and may never have worked for them but might have a friend or accomplice who does - not real good info for anyone to go on.

The key is to get the phone traces and aggressively investigate those numbers. They may appear as autodialer numbers, but someone is behind them. You don't get one ring solicitation calls at 3 AM. You just don't. The problem is the way the law is written. You can't investigate the traces if you don't know the perpetrator's last name and phone number, and you can't find out who is doing this unless you can attach a name to these traced calls. So I'm stuck with Catch 22.

My outstanding technical questions are: A - what kind of device can make sounds through the phone line in my apartment even when the handset is disconnected and out of the room as I described earlier? Some kind of radio equipment? I'm tempted to offer a reward for this information, but I'm afraid the moderator of this board might not go for that. If I can get that golden nugget of info then I can better work out a counter strategy to stop these calls. Will voice mail stop or shunt a one ring call? These are the calls that wake me up at odd hours of the morning and cost me sleep.

And B - Are cell phone numbers unobtainable given that there is no national registry of them? Could someone with this person' s level of knowledge ferret a cell number out? Can the police get them? I'm told that the penalty for phone harassment, even without necessarily going to court, is loss of phone service including cell for 10 years. This suggests to me that there are ways of tracing the purchase of a cell phone, possibly through credit card transactions. If that is the ONLY way to get cell numbers, then the trick becomes a payment issue - to make your montly payment by check or cash. Would this work?

And now to get some sleep.