Why does my landline phone dial by itself?

As sent to Vodafone New Zealand today. Anyone know what might be going on?

Hi there:

Not really a complaint but since you don’t give any options other than compliment and complaint, the latter will have to do!
   Since moving to Tawa, my landline phone has been calling numbers that no one has called. It does this by itself, usually around 3 p.m. each day.
   I enquired with Vodafone on Twitter about this but we never found a resolution, and Custhelp doesn’t appear to exist any more on your website. As to Tobi, the sooner that vanishes, the better!
   As you read on you’ll see why it’s not really easy to explain on either Twitter or on the phone, and Tobi has no option for landlines at all.
   I suspected there was something wrong with the landline set-up here that causes the phone to dial by itself.
   We don’t exactly have a high-tech landline phone. These are basic Vtech units from Warehouse Stationery. I have never entered any “programming” into them, nor do I know how. Even the outgoing answerphone message is what it came with.
   These are the same phones we had at my old place in Rongotai where they most certainly did not dial by themselves every day at 3 p.m. We moved, I unplugged them, and plugged them into the house here.
   It’s been going on for most of the two years we have been here, if I recall correctly.
   Today we had a power outage, so instead of 3 p.m., the phone kept calling well into the evening after the power returned.
   I went into My Vodafone’s landline section for the first time. If you go in there, you’ll see the phone kept dialling 04 569 3555 and 04 569 3566 very, very regularly. Since 3.07 p.m. and now (11.18 p.m.) it has made 130 of these calls.
   On occasion, I catch the phone doing this and stay on the line. When it connects, it sounds like a fax machine on the other end. My phone then enters some sort of identity code. No human has ever answered these calls.
   It will sometimes do this while I am on the phone to someone else, which is very distracting.
   Today, I filmed a video on my cellphone to prove that the phone does this by itself with no human agency. You can watch this at:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CQDd45HAkkJ/

   Please note that no one at this house is making these calls and the phone is doing it by itself.
   I would like to know why this is happening, how a phone even knows how to do this, and just who is behind this.
   Thank goodness these are local calls that do not bear a charge but this smells of a scam to me.

   Here’s an embed of that Instagram video:

   Hopefully from the above they’ll be able to see that the phone is not even sophisticated enough to be programmed to do this. Yet the frequency of the calls (130 today alone) suggests they are automated. I haven’t found anything online about this. This link is the closest I’ve found to my experience, but Vodafone so far does not know.

On a related note, after I published this post, Wordpress created an extra tag that I never fed in, called F4F4F4. Why does it do this?

PS.: This seems extremely plausible, from a friendly Tweeter.

Based on what I was told:

   Who knows? Maybe it is all connected properly. I’ve sent a note to the folks who installed the security system here.

P.PS.: From the security company: ‘If your phone was calling these numbers, it would not be related to the alarm.
   ‘These numbers are not recorded anywhere on the alarm.’


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