A ghost call occurs when a phone rings but connects to dead air, a dial tone, or disconnects immediately upon answering. In traditional telephony, these are often caused by signaling glitches, misconfigured PBX systems, or abandoned calls from predictive dialers. In VoIP networks, they frequently result from automated port scanners probing SIP endpoints, causing the phone to ring without a legitimate call setup.
Heard on the job
The SIP scanner hit our public IP block again, so half the office is complaining about ghost calls this morning.
Insider tip
If a VoIP handset rings at exactly the same time every hour with a weird caller ID like 100 or 1000, it is almost certainly a SIP scanner hitting an exposed port, not a real caller.
Also heard as
- phantom call