This Guy Found a Way to Block Robocalls When Phone Companies Wouldn’t
wired.com
wired.com
I'm at the stage where I automatically reject all phonecalls where I don't recognise the number, and then Google that number. 99% of the time I then end up adding the number to my Contacts with the name 'Spam'. Why isn't anyone fixing this?
Bonus anecdote: I used to never use my work phone, but our work phones were recently replaced with Microsoft Lync phones - now I get spam phonecalls at work.
That leaves the you've won a free cruise/insurance/alarm scam companies, but they mostly don't call over and over again.
The point is not to argue with them about whether they should be calling you etc., it is to advertise yourself as a dead lead.
I was receiving the same robo-call regarding my "innactive Google+ page" that they wanted to build for me for weeks from a different number each day meaning that blocking a number was pointless. Eventually I took the call, and stayed on the line till I got a person who I was able to fish enough information about the business to file a complaint. Filed one with the Better Business Bureau and also contacted the company CEO directly using info I found in an old Whois record that hadn't been cleaned up (their public one had since been masked). I cold called their office till I got ahold of him, and told him about the claim I'd filed regarding their business calling a number on the do-not-call list.
This is what it took to stop this one instance. I've received others. Sometimes I block, but when it's a recurring call from different numbers, the Better Business Bureau is the way to go. Particularly if you can get the name and number of the company that the lead-generation firm hands you off to. It catches their sales guy off-guard everytime.
This all takes time ... but I recently was receiving a lot of calls from people I needed to speak with, but knew I didn't already have their numbers in my phone, so I had no choice but to answer. The ones I've taken-on have been effective and the BBB complaints have been answered and addressed quickly.
For the other stuff, I've found it to be very effective to learn a few German phrases and reply loudly with them. You get marked as a bad lead.
I don't think I'm suggesting something that wastes part of your life. What I suggest directly restores usefulness to the phone, and it likely forces the call center companies to report unsuccessful calls instead of no answers to their customers (and if done in large numbers it should have an impact).
That is thankless work, the people on the phones are mostly not scum, but the number of people that answer the phone and treat them as such makes me feel for them so I'm happy to look the other way at some minor bad behavior like being short with a person or hanging up, when every third person they talk to is some jerk who only knows how to yell "IM ON THE DO-NOT-CALL LIST I JUST TALKED TO YOU LAST WEEK I ALREADY TOLD YOU NOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING IS ILLEGAL GIVE ME YOUR MANAGER RIGHT NAO!!1one" Just because you talked to _some_ call center somewhere, it does not follow that every call center in the fleet automatically knows you are not to be contacted.
We have do-not-call lists, and the best way to make sure you get that treatment is to ask for it. You don't have to ruin your day and someone else's by getting mad about it. Five magic words can liberate you: "do not call me again".
Second best way: when you sign up for services, don't give them your phone number! They can't give it to us if they don't have it to begin with. If hearing the phone ring makes you so mad, seriously just don't give it out to any companies that could just as easily deal with you by post.
The other side of it is that being polite or neutral probably costs you less time and energy than embracing your rage.
You're right that it'd save me some effort being less rage-y about this, but if you're going to be distracting me and wasting my time, I'm going to give you some form of payback.
For the record, I subscribe to the George Carlin definition of A Phone Call, "The brief exchange of a few vital pieces of information." I am with you, I honestly don't want to get phone calls from anyone for pretty much any reason.
Most surprising to me was to find out that when you ask a bill collector to stop calling, they actually do stop calling. If they don't, they could be liable for up to $1000 per infraction plus damages by the FDCPA!
All I get is illegitimate calls and have therefore resorted to calling my friends and colleagues: "I do not answer phone calls. Period. Ever. If you need me, arrange a Skype/Hangout/Facetime or even voice call in advance."
My suggestion will stop the companies and charities. I don't think anything will stop the political groups. 3 bad calls a week isn't perfect, but it makes the phone useful (this is about what I get here). If you want to argue about what legitimate means and pay for a useless phone, that's your prerogative.
If it's somewhat important, they can email me later and schedule a call.
If it's important, they'll usually leave a message or send an e-mail.
You can also whitelist just your contacts list, block area codes with wildcards, or block private numbers.
http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/07/31/cyanogenmod-10-2-to-...
For stock Android I recall being able to add the numbers to a contact and make them go to voicemail, but that was an annoyingly unusable workaround. There may be better options these days.
My experience with implementing this is most spammers are pretty dumb or aiming at dumb targets, so a VOIP asterisk rule will get hit hundreds of time over the years by the same company.
You can also register them as spam numbers, so any unsolicited SMS messages go into a spam folder. Not sure how much of a problem this is in the US, but here in the UK I almost daily get texts from PPI claim companies, dodgy law firms and the like.
In fact, late last week, the CTIA wrote the FCC to tell it that the kind of blacklist approach taken by Foss’s company wouldn’t work. According to the lobbying group, it raises privacy concerns—and causes other problems too.
“Even assuming an accurate database of blacklisted and whitelisted numbers can be compiled and maintained, the ease with which modern equipment and software can allow a caller to spoof a caller ID would present significant challenge,” the group says.
I thought the phone companies had access to more information than caller ID for the calls they handle. Surely you can't fake caller ID details to dodge your phone bill? I'd love it if they'd give out a star code we could all dial after a call we didn't want to receive that would, if enough people did it, disallow future calls from that entity from reaching any phone line for which a customer has requested the blocking of calls reported as bothersome. No exemptions for charities or politicians either.
Firstly CLI blocking is easy to get around. Faking CLI is very easy. There is a field within SIP that is refereed to as P-assert. The idea is that this field always contains the billable number.
However I know of at least 3 sip carriers you could sign up today with, have numbers within 10 minutes and they allow you to put ANY CLI and P-assert. Then you can bridge in to the TDM and almost untraceable.
CLI faking is very common. There is a requirement in the UK that no calls gets in to the network without a p-assert but the network is to complex these days, there is always a way to get a call in with what ever information you want
We have been working on a blacklisting service as well. we have 2 types, the personalized white and black list (so a parent can have a white list for their kids phone): i think i agree with the FCC that global block lists are a bad idea (too easy to get someones number blocked for lulz). The second looks up the CLI and checks a number of those "who is calling me sites" if the number is know for spam it does not get to the phone and starts reading the comments back to them about their number (cli will get round this). Both ways have issues. The reason I bring this up is because we become an MVNO and in turn run our own sim cards. This meant that we could have had the blacklist/whitelist without messing with the call flow to much. This also allowed you to dial 9 to block the last number that called you was sexy but meh too much work to run an MVNO and just no money in it.
We will see. Lots of changes will be happening in telecoms in the next 5-10 years. webRTC could flip the existing telecoms models on their heads, if only someone could get some traction.
Ramble Ramble, i rare have anything to say :/
In all my years I have only had 1 customer still using a rotary
Bad actors are always going to act bad. Especially now that anybody, anywhere in the world can get cheap calls to the US.
Real life problems you will see and have to deal with: - blocking of valid calls from legitimate voice broadcasts (i.e. schools / municipalites) - managing trouble tickets from other phone companies opening tickets constantly for "blocking the call" - managing trouble tickets from customers about not getting calls they should have - how to deal with call attempts that do not provide proper signaling information (i.e. "anonymous" as the actual caller ID and not using RPID, PAI, or SS7 appropriately)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
was created to stop email spam but is equally valid for phone calls. It /could/ be fully implemented by your phone carrier.
Interestingly, with phone service, the recipient doesn't need anything (other than to tell their phone provider to turn it on if it's provided as an option.)
Of course, this doesn't completely answer your question but it does mean that the decision and implementation of the technology needed to provide this kind of wall is in the hands of phone companies rather than the unruly mass of ignorant individuals who use email.
But then, the phone companies who could implement such a scheme probably don't have a financial incentive to do so.