Numbers coming in incorreclty - showing as foreign countries

We are a university that needs to interact directly with our students via phone calls. Some of our students state they will not answer a call because our incoming call is formatted as  an incoming call from China.
(We have a toll-free 866 number and 86 is the country code for China).

We have found that this is only occurring with students that have a combination of an iPhone and T-Mobile as their carrier.

It is not occurring with any other combinations of phones or carriers.

What is the recommended course for these students to resolve their issue with T-Mobile? To open a ticket and/or work with a T-Mobile Support Representative? Something else?

(I am not interested in forcing our students to update their contact directory with our numbers.  Additionally, many are in the Pre-Admissions process and are not yet students. )

Saludos cordiales.

-Emerson

It is interesting I just ran into this post.

A few weeks ago, I started noticing that when most landlines call me, T-Mobile is sending the caller ID as +XXXYYYYYYY (where XXX is area code, YYYYYYY is phone number) - this format is incorrect.

But when another cell phone calls me, T-Mobile is sending me the caller ID as +1XXXYYYYYYY (which is the correct format).

So, since 611 has a very long wait time, I decided to chat with T-Mobile on Facebook (have had luck with that in the past) - after hours of trying to explain the issue, they finally agreed to escalate the issue as a ticket to their engineering team (that was on April 7, 2020).

Before they escalated, I put another T-Mobile SIM card in my phone (I used a Samsung Galaxy S10, by the way, with the latest software upgrades). Let's call my SIM card SIM1, and this other SIM card SIM2. With SIM2, everything is correct! (all incoming numbers show as +1XXXYYYYYYY. With SIM1, however, when another cell phone calls me it correctly shows as +1XXXYYYYYYY, but when a landline calls me, caller ID comes in as +XXXYYYYYYY (which is incorrect).

Today, April 9, 2020, T-Mobile gets back to me insisting (as they did on April 7, 2020) that it's a device problem, not a T-Mobile problem.

It obviously is not a device problem, since when I use another SIM card (T-Mobile or not), the problem goes away. So it must be a problem with my own T-Mobile number, or my own SIM card (SIM1).

It baffles me that for the first time, a problem is escalated within T-Mobile with no positive resolution to this problem. Maybe it's due to the COVID-19 lockdown, their engineers may be under a lot of pressure and avoiding issues like this that they do not consider (I assume) high priority? A lot of the language they used suggests that if the call is coming through and connects, then it should be okay.

In the meantime, many landlines from around the US, when they call my T-Mobile number, are showing up as foreign callers. Maybe it's time to switch to a different carrier (after 13 years)?

It's really interesting - a few minutes after T-Mobile's response, I post my previous message, and then I restart my phone (I restart my phone every 3-5 days, on average), and the problem goes away. T-Mobile did not acknowledge they had a problem nor that they fixed it, but it seems to be okay now. Same device and my own SIM card. Maybe they sent a SIM refresh of some sort?

Having this issue as well! We switched from sprint to T-Mobile last week and numbers are showing other countries. My kids schools came up as South Africa, but only some of their calls do. I got back to back calls, one is normal the other is listed as South Africa. Have no clue why? I'm afraid to turn on spam blocker because I may miss important calls. ¿Tienes alguna idea?

Still having this problem! 🤬

dlap378 wrote:

I was having the same problem for months and just fixed it using what @jorfanakos wrote and it worked:

 

If you check under 'phone' in setting (iPhone users), the 'My Number' probably has a + in front of your phone number. I tried removing the + by re-entering my phone number and it would not accept the change.

 

So I looked further down where it say 'Show my caller ID" and clicked on it. What I did was turn it OFF, wait 2 seconds and then turn it ON again.

Then you return to the phone page and you should see the + is gone from you phone number when looking at the 'My Number'.

 

Et Voila! 😊

 

Hope this helps!

This definitely worked for me.

My issue was different, as my contacts when searching for a name in my text messenger app would add +52 Mexico Country Code to the front of all of them. Annoying to look at but didn't seem to effect anything.

But to reiterate, goto phone, the 3 dots, settings, supplementary services turn off caller ID wait a few seconds then turn on.

Thanks dlap!

Same problem! Both I and my correspondent are on Samsung S20 phones. When he texts me, his number shows as a wrong country code (e.g. +49 or +52) followed by his normal 10-digit US number. Clearly something wrong on the T-Mo end!

w053lxl wrote:

Whenever I receive a call from a number that is not saved in my contacts, the Caller ID shows it incorrectly. It appears as if it's adding a country code that is not correct, or just breaking the number apart incorrectly and showing it coming in from a different country all together. This has only been going on for about a week. The numbers below are in fact US numbers, if you look at the one labeled peru, it should be (513)-393-2193 - I dont know where the extra 6 is coming from.  The Argentina number, is actually 877 -698-3261. Again, no idea where the +54 is coming from and the Croatia number is 385 428 1000 - no extra numbers there, it just formatted it incorrectly.

Is anyone else having this problem? I've hard reset the phone numerous times, no fix

 

 

 

 

 

andrewfamily wrote:

I just purchased an Apple iPhone one week ago and it is now having this issue after using it for five days. I am not sure what is going on. It is really frustrating when loved ones are calling in and it is recognizing the phone number from a foreign country. Please let me know what can be done and how I can get this fixed.

I have a Samsung s20 ultra with the same problem my number is showing up as +40 4 Romania. Rather then 404 Atlanta. So no one is answering my calls. It just started happening 2 weeks again. Ayuda. 

I have a Samsung s20 ultra with the same problem my number is showing up as +40 4 Romania. Rather then 404 Atlanta. So no one is answering my calls. It just started happening 2 weeks again. Ayuda. 

I went to Europe over the holidays, ran an iOS update, came back to the US. Same stupid provoke with local numbers being converted to random countries even though there are not enough digits for it to be plausible. Hope there is a fix.