Report a number

Reporting a number on our network

If a call or text has come from a number for which Unbundled Networks is the carrier of record, you can report it to us. We are a wholesale carrier: the number was assigned to a customer of one of our partners, not to a customer of ours. That does not make it none of our business. Our acceptable use rules apply to every number on our network, and we act on them.

Send your report to abuse@unbundlednetworks.com. There is no form yet; a plain email is fine, and one is read by a person.

If someone is in immediate danger, call 911. If you are being threatened or believe a crime is being committed, contact your local police as well as us — we can act on our own network, but we are not law enforcement.

What to include

A report we can act on contains, at a minimum, the first four of these:

• The number that called or texted you, in full. Ten digits for a US or Canadian number, or the international number with its country code.
• The number that was called or texted — yours, or the line that received it.
• The date and time, and the time zone you are quoting (or say “Eastern”, “Pacific” and so on). Several reports about the same number are much more useful to us when we can line them up on a clock.
• What happened, in your own words. What was said or claimed, what the caller asked for, whether it was a recording or a live person, whether it has happened repeatedly, and anything they claimed to be.
• Screenshots of a text message, if that is what you received. Attach them as images.
• A recording or voicemail, if you have one. Attach it, or say that you have one and we will tell you how to send it. Please only send recordings you made or received lawfully.
• How to reach you, if you are willing to be contacted. We may need a detail clarified. A report without contact information is still worth sending; a report with it is easier to work.

Reports that give us a number but no date, no receiving number and no description are usually not actionable, because there is nothing for us to find in the records. We would rather have one detailed report than five bare ones.

What happens after you report

We check whether the number is in fact carried by us. If it is not, we will tell you so, and you should take the report to the provider that does carry it or to the regulators listed below.

If it is ours, the report goes into our abuse process. Depending on what we find, that can mean asking the responsible partner to investigate and answer for the traffic, requiring the partner to act on the customer, blocking or reclaiming the number, or removing the traffic — or the partner — from our network. Complaints also feed the robocall mitigation work described on our compliance page, where a pattern across several reports matters more than any single one.

We do not commit to a turnaround time, and we would not believe a page that did. We will say that a well-documented report about an active, ongoing campaign gets attention quickly.

What we cannot tell you

We cannot discuss the outcome. We will not tell you who held the number, which provider they bought service from, what we found, or what we did about it. Customer information is protected, and disclosing it to a member of the public is not something we are free to do — nor would you want a carrier that treats its records that loosely. This is genuinely a constraint we operate under and not a way of brushing you off.

We also cannot get you your money back, remove your number from a caller’s list, identify a spoofed caller with certainty, or tell you whether anyone else has reported the same number.

If the caller spoofed the number

Caller ID can be forged, and a number shown on your phone is not proof of who called. If the number you are reporting turns out to belong to somebody who was not involved — sometimes the owner of a spoofed number finds out because strangers start calling them back — say so, and we will treat it as spoofing rather than as a complaint against that line.

Other places to complain

Reporting a number to us affects our network. These affect the wider problem, and it is worth doing both:

• The Federal Communications Commission, at consumercomplaints.fcc.gov, for unwanted calls and caller ID spoofing.
• The Federal Trade Commission, at reportfraud.ftc.gov, for scams and fraud.
• The National Do Not Call Registry, at donotcall.gov, where you can register your number and report telemarketing calls. Note that it generally covers residential lines rather than business ones.

What does not belong here

• A billing or service problem with your own phone service — that is your provider’s, not ours. See support.
• Legal process. Subpoenas, court orders, warrants and preservation requests go to law enforcement and traceback, not to the abuse address. Sending them here only delays them.
• A single wrong number, or a call you simply did not want to take. Block it. We are looking for fraud, scams, harassment and campaigns, not for isolated annoyances.