atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Yet another phone scam

Nahh, that would take effort on my part besides telling the telemarketer that the number is viable. A better way would be to play a recording of SIT tones followed by "this number is no longer in service". I remember Sandman having a device to do that. Just connect it to your phone and push the button.

-Hal

A while back, the mongers got ahold of one of my numbers. The calls were incessant. I bought a 7 dollar answering machine on eBay and made the greeting the SIT tones followed by a generic "this number is no longer in service". After about two weeks the calls stopped cold and haven't returned.

I send them to an info mailbox that says your call is blacklisted if you feel you have reached this mailbox in error please send an e-mail to blacklisted at. Never seen an e-mail there but then again I rarely look.

This begs a question. With the advent of voip and cheap or free long distance, this has become a real problem. When I was younger and the phone company was the only provider of phone service, meaning LD was expensive, the telemarketing calls and spam calls were very far and few between. A call a week to maybe a few per month was annoying, but for the most part tolerable. Now that anyone can call anyone else for nothing and spoof caller ID at will, this is a serious problem. If your number gets in the hands of these creeps, it can be several calls a day, every day.

Does anyone know if there are any plans to deal with this growing problem? Are governments, telco's, the private sector, or anyone doing anything to combat this rapidly growing problem?

I'm not sure that much can be done on the government level. I would say that the majority of these telemarketer outfits are located overseas and are utilizing VoIP services to make their calls.

I read somewhere that US companies that contract call center operations to overseas firms are supposed to ensure that they comply with the law.

Outfits attempt to skirt the rules. Someone pitching solar power might conduct a survey before entering into the marketing portion of their presentation in an attempt to exploit the survey loophole in DNC rules.

If I don't recognize a telephone number, or, Caller ID shows what Hal mentioned earlier, I simply let the auto attendant or voice mail (calls to my cell phone) handle it. Annoying for sure, but, they won't be able to get any money out of me.

I Have Linksys ata voip adapter with caller id filtering built in so i can filter all the unwanted phantom callers and telemarketers etc. It also has the Hang up option , the out of service ,send to mailbox and more built in,, i also don't allow international calls turned on,,i can change my caller id if i want to remain hidden for a certain reason. Its great to have those options. It can be annoying getting those calls like when i am under my vehicle serving it.

Hi dexman, is it possible for you to share those incidents? Perhaps with an article or discussion here at this forum?

Don, can you be more specific about the incidents in question?

If you mean where someone pitching solar power disguises their call as a survey, that comes from my returning non toll-free calls (while hiding my number with the *67 prefix), noting the greeting played and cross-reference the telephone numbers on sites such as 800notes.com and/or whocallsme.com.

On these sites, people who do answer these calls log their experiences.

What I can do is review my posts on both sites and, somehow, provide links/details about the entries.