41–50 of 92 posts
I answer and ask to be put on their do not call list (or if it's a scam bot, I press the remove button). People say this just confirms you are a real person, but I'm pretty sure they haven't tried it successfully for months the way I have. I still get calls of course, but it's a couple a week and not from the same parties over and over and over.
>I press the remove button what is that?
I'm fairly convinced that the only way this gets fixed is if enough people complain loudly to the phone companies & cancel accounts. Verizon / AT&T / T-mobile / etc. absolutely have the power to fix this, and they're choosing instead to largely ignore it, and productize the solutions for anyone who cares enough - let the spammers pay to create the problem, and let the consumers pay for the remedy. Telcos win on both…
>If it's someone who needs me, they'll leave a voicemail Then the next step is for spammers to leave voicemails
Answer the phone when they call and conference in the Jolly Roger telephone bot http://www.jollyrogertelco.com The bot will waste the telemarketers time, which is the most expensive thing that these companies are paying for. Do this enough times and the calls drop off rapidly.
There's no way I'd pay money for that. I've tried wasting telemarketer calls for years under the theory that it costs them. It's not working anymore, their strategy has changed. They are being trained to detect and hangup, and call back again and again later. Even the ones that have options to hit '2' and add yourself to the do not call list are not only not adding you to any do not call list, they are confirming the…
I used to waste their time when I could, but now I just have to let it go to voicemail.
The best call I had was when they called at 9:30pm... saying I won a trip, and I just needed to give them my cc so they can verify I was 18+.
I talked to them like I was interested, and when they asked for my cc I told them i had to go find it quick.
I put the phone down and watched an episode of South Park and forgot they were on the line yet.
I get back and pick up the phone and tell them I just found the card. I start reading the information off of it, but using the wrong name, and numbers, etc.
He was so excited about it that he kept telling me about all the fun I was going to have. Then he got a sad tone and said the card was rejected. I acted surprised and asked him to read back to me what he had since I had no idea what I gave him.
It got rejected another time, so he suggests we call the number on the back to do a three way call with my cc company to figure out what is going on.
I give him an 800 number that my cousin and I found by accident when we were like 12. I read him a phone sex number. He started to dial it and all of a sudden I heard a recording of some lady moaning. He immediately hung up and never called again.
I basically protect my phone number like I would my social security number. I was getting 5+ spam calls a day. Ended up changing provider and phone number to get away from them. I haven't added my new number to the Do Not Call list (none of these calls were legitimate businesses; just scammers with spoofed caller IDs) and have resisted giving my new number to anyone. Pretty much just my bank and a few friends have my…
I find that 99% of spam calls (at least for now) can be eliminated by simply not answering any numbers that match the first six digits of my own telephone number. I don't know why telemarketers decided this would be a good strategy to increase conversions, but it certainly makes things easier for me.
That's my biggest source of callspam right now. So close to writing an iOS call blocker that just blocks those except a whitelist (though I think they automatically whitelist contacts with that API).
I could tell instantly, without picking up the phone, if I knew that person.
Wish my current phone had that.
I decide as I were giving a junk email or my real email out. Google voice is great because it looks real, it can do SMS codes and I can stop using it when I want to.
This is, admittedly, extreme but I already have an aversion to using the phone and can manage just fine (99% of the time) with email.
For me, an unwanted call isn't just inconvenient for the duration of the call but for quite a long period afterwards because my train of thought has been interrupted and I can't just pick up where I left off.
Most spam calls that I get are using local number spoofing. I have an area code from where I grew up, but live in a completely different state now. I can recognize the spam numbers immediately: if it's from the area code where I grew up, and it's not in my contacts, it's spam. Everything else I let through.