31–40 of 79 posts
Track them down and sue them in small claims court. I’ve collected nearly $10,000 doing this. Short story: calling your cell phone with automated dialing equipment and automated messaging (“press 1 to talk to someone”) is illegal per the TCPA. I’m not a lawyer but it’s fun to be amateur attorney for a day. Definitely a time suck though...
Not sure if it works but I tried to waste as many minutes as I can. I pick up every number. If I know it's a robocall, I leave phone on my desk without saying anything until they hang up. Maybe they realize you're a dead end and stop calling.
Another way I look at it, is how can I develop my social skills? I might string them along, make up a story. Make them so angry or become friends. You can learn how you perform in these situations. :)
It depends on your situation, but it may be possible to turn lemons into sparkly lemonade!
Founder of Nomorobo here. We put a stop to all of those annoying robocalls, telemarketers, and spam/scam calls and texts. It's about the only thing that works nowadays. It's not your imagination - these types of calls are out of control. According to our data, 40% of all calls made in the US are illegal, unwanted spam/scam robocalls. And those "neighbor" spoofed calls (same area code and extension) are especially pre…
T-Mobile offers a spam blocking service that stops calls from reaching my phone, because of that there's no way for me to gauge just how many are being blocked. What is your take on network level spam filtering? You're blocking 1300 numbers a day. I assume the spammers rotate numbers, so if someone gets a recycled number that was on your list, what happens? These spammers get connected to the telephone system somehow…
You could just download the app directly
Founder of Nomorobo here. We put a stop to all of those annoying robocalls, telemarketers, and spam/scam calls and texts. It's about the only thing that works nowadays. It's not your imagination - these types of calls are out of control. According to our data, 40% of all calls made in the US are illegal, unwanted spam/scam robocalls. And those "neighbor" spoofed calls (same area code and extension) are especially pre…
T-Mobile offers a spam blocking service that stops calls from reaching my phone, because of that there's no way for me to gauge just how many are being blocked. What is your take on network level spam filtering? You're blocking 1300 numbers a day. I assume the spammers rotate numbers, so if someone gets a recycled number that was on your list, what happens? These spammers get connected to the telephone system somehow…
Founder of Nomorobo here. We put a stop to all of those annoying robocalls, telemarketers, and spam/scam calls and texts. It's about the only thing that works nowadays. It's not your imagination - these types of calls are out of control. According to our data, 40% of all calls made in the US are illegal, unwanted spam/scam robocalls. And those "neighbor" spoofed calls (same area code and extension) are especially pre…
There's a business called Pindrop that conduct an analysis of audio data to guess where a call is originating from. The idea being, if a call originates from somewhere like India it'll take roughly a certain route that will produce certain audible artifacts on the line.
They also score a bunch of other stuff. I'd recommend reading the patents their CEO filed if you're interested. It's interesting.
I wondered if you could share, roughly, what your algorithm is doing? Are you also analyzing audio data?
I had the same problem a few months ago before I set up an automated virtual assistant to pre-screen calls[1]. It works with my existing phone number by forwarding all inbound calls to a small Linode box which plays an audio prompt and listens for specific keywords. (Whitelisted numbers get patched through immediately.) Since I made that post, the system has filtered 100% of the spammers and 0% of my actual contacts.…
For example... A call from a garage to say your car is ready to be picked up, or perhaps some kind of emergency service? I imagine their calls would start with similar wording to sales calls. "Hello, can I speak to so and so?"
I don't know how to stop it, but I think someone should go to jail for doing this.
Founder of Nomorobo here. We put a stop to all of those annoying robocalls, telemarketers, and spam/scam calls and texts. It's about the only thing that works nowadays. It's not your imagination - these types of calls are out of control. According to our data, 40% of all calls made in the US are illegal, unwanted spam/scam robocalls. And those "neighbor" spoofed calls (same area code and extension) are especially pre…
Neat! There's a business called Pindrop that conduct an analysis of audio data to guess where a call is originating from. The idea being, if a call originates from somewhere like India it'll take roughly a certain route that will produce certain audible artifacts on the line. They also score a bunch of other stuff. I'd recommend reading the patents their CEO filed if you're interested. It's interesting. I wondered if…
In our case, we don't/can't analyze the audio stream of consumer calls. We can only work with the meta data of the call.
Our algo comes down pretty hard and fast on calls that come into our honeypot. These numbers have been out of service for years and no one should be calling them. Since these phone lines belong to us, we can do anything we want with them - there's no privacy concerns like there would be with consumer calls.
We answer, record, transcribe, analyze, and classify almost 10k calls per hour coming into our honeypot. Check out https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup. There's been a ton of health insurance scams running this week but the scam du jour changes every day.
When we analyze the call data coming into consumer lines, we have to be a little less aggressive so that we don't accidentally block schools, police, doctors, pharmacies.
The only thing left for humans is to help correct the decisions the algo makes. Sometimes it misses robocalls and sometimes it stops things it shouldn't. People just report them through our app and website.
For historic analysis, we also ingest the FTC & FCC robocall complaint data sources. But it's not really a great data source for the real-time detection algo - It's just too slow to be actionable.
You really have to be detecting robocalls at the moment they come in to have a successful blocking product.
I had the same problem a few months ago before I set up an automated virtual assistant to pre-screen calls[1]. It works with my existing phone number by forwarding all inbound calls to a small Linode box which plays an audio prompt and listens for specific keywords. (Whitelisted numbers get patched through immediately.) Since I made that post, the system has filtered 100% of the spammers and 0% of my actual contacts.…