Why do we allow pay-per-minute phone services to even exist? There's no point to them in this day and age. If someone wants one of those services, there are plenty of ways to make it pay-per-minute without the phone company acting as a broker. Just end support for it, immediately.
'One Ring' Phone Scam
281–290 of 367 posts
Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam
#282I can’t imagine why anyone ever answers the phone. I get at least ten robocalls every weekday. I don’t ever look at my voicemail and I haven’t answered a call in ages. Edit: I know I’m not alone because CNN just released a poll with no responses from people under the age of fifty, because they couldn’t reach enough of them by phone.
I don't understand why young (I'm making an assumption here) people don't like making or receiving voice calls. I'd far rather talk to someone than text them. Texting requires far more effort and takes far more time.
I'd rather talk to people, too. I'm not even young, I'm 43 years old and I grew up running into the kitchen to answer every phone call before anyone else could grab it. These days the phone is so useless that I only get to talk to people face to face. Part of the problem is the spam and part of the problem is the voice quality. If you are my age you remember when phone calls actually sounded OK and phone companies competed on call quality ("you can hear a pin drop"). Now every phone call is a battle between your ears, some horrible vocoder, and 99% packet loss. Not enjoyable at all.
Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam
#283From the website: How to avoid this scam: Don't answer or return any calls from numbers you don't recognize. If the FCC is recommending we don't pick up our phones, isn't something really wrong with the system?
Absolutely. The phone system is totally broken. A few years ago I disabled the incoming call part of my phone to everyone except a few family members and my wife. So far it's been great. Everyone who needs me emails me. I've yet to run into a situation where someone I needed to hear from would only call me.
I use a variation of your system with two phones. One is like yours and I always hawe it with me, turned on. The second is for everyone else - delivery people, banks etc. I have it muted except if I expect a call. Every couple of days I check it only to find that there were no important calls. Once a year someone leaves a message and I call them back. This system works great, I don't remember when was the last time I had to deal with scammers and other people wasting my time.
Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never heard of this before. Unfortunately after checking it out, it looks like my carrier only offers it for iphones. This does look like a handy feature though.
Google Voice will transcribe any VMs and send them as a text. The transcription is good enough to know if it's someone you need to call back or add their number to your block list.
this is also done automatically in iOS through the phone app
Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam
#285I'm from europe (the Netherlands). Everytime I see these american robocall threads it blows my mind. What about your system is so bad that allows this to go on? It's not a problem here at all.
>What about your system is so bad that allows this to go on? It's not a problem here at all.
Someone is making money. Anyone who wants a law or regulation that stops someone from making money is a socialist and socialism is bad /s
Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. The phone system is totally broken. A few years ago I disabled the incoming call part of my phone to everyone except a few family members and my wife. So far it's been great. Everyone who needs me emails me. I've yet to run into a situation where someone I needed to hear from would only call me.
There was an article on here a few months ago about how the organ donor system works. If you are on the list to receive an organ you get a phonecall and if you miss this call the organ goes to the next person on the list who picks up the phone.
Given the time constraints around organ donation and transplantation, this seems reasonable. If you only have a couple of hours before the organ is no longer viable you can't reasonably sit around hoping someone will return your call.
Ideally, you should be alerted that your position on the waitlist is approaching so that you know to answer any incoming calls in case it's "the one". I have no idea if this reflects reality however.
Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam
#287One pattern I noticed but haven’t tried to circumvent yet is that I noticed robocalls identify on the caller ID as having the same area code as my normal phone number and my Google Voice number. If we were to acquire a phone number from say, some small town somewhere you have no business with, then could we block all caller ID with that area code and avoid all such robocalls?
> identify on the caller ID as having the same area code as my normal phone number and my Google Voice number.
Most of my spam calls copy my area code and the first 3 digits of my phone number. In fact, I installed an android app called Calls Blacklist solely to make any call that began with the same 6 digits as me to not even ring - and now I get about 1 spam call per month.
YMMV.
Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is usually a setting to allow unknown numbers through if they call again within a short amount of time. That may help with the emergency case. Unfortunately the 2FA calls for my corporate login seem to come from different numbers each time..
I have that setting enabled, though I think it may be Android-only. Do we know if people actually try twice in rapid succession often enough during emergencies, without special training to develop that habit? I don't know the data on this, but I'd like to.
I would think the more likely scenario in this case would be to work through the list of emergency contact numbers (ie. cell phone, work phone, home phone) in succession rather than calling the same number twice.
Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why there is not an on-phone IVR which can solicit a brief intro. Google has that, but I'm not sure if it's on-phone. I'd wager someone could write an app to do this. I would probably pay $50 for an on-phone version of Lenny; basically a voice-based chat-bot that keeps spammers occupied, without having to conference another number in. ( https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3b7na/the-story-of-lenny... )
heard a review of this app a few days ago that reminded me of Lenny https://www.robokiller.com/ - apparently the conversations it spews out are pretty hilarious also. Annoyingly I can't figure out what the subscription rate is, but can try it for a week for free
I've been using this for the last 3 weeks and it works really well. It has blocked 21 spam calls up to now. After the free week they charge $30 yearly or $4 monthly.
You can set the spam calls to be answered with selected funny time-wasting recordings, but since that would be embarrassing if I get a call from a professional contact, I set them to be answered with a plain fax tone.
Now I am back to being able to pick up all calls that ring.
Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam
#290Funny thing is, I got hit by a flood of these calls on Saturday. Funny seeing it here right after it happened.
Unfortunately, I called one of them back before I realized it was an international number (Android's dialer, for some reason, seems to record everything as an unbroken string of numbers before updating them several minutes after the missed call, so I just thought it was a US number with area code 232. It wasn't until after the callback that it resolved to a Sierra Leone number, so I asked about it on Facebook, and I got a link to an article on the scam.
I immediately felt like a heel, and then I blocked the number, just in case I forget to never call it back. When my statement comes in at the end of the month, I think I'm going to try to contact my carrier and dispute the charge. Though I'm not holding my breath: I'm on Fi, and Google's customer support is notorious for being virtually nonexistent.