I've had NoMoRoBo for years. Recently it has been allowing 2 rings before it hangs up on the caller. One ring & hang up is MUCH better than 2. I emailed them about it and got a useless answer. My guess is that their server is overloaded and doesn't get around to my call as quickly.
I have observed that the dalek dialers expect to get a human on the other end of the line and drop the call if they think it is a fax machine or something other than a human that says "hello".
I have taken to answering calls with questionable CLID with dead air which confuses the hell out of the srcipt droid if it does connect.
The Windows support conmen I go off to get Fred who does our IT and keep them on the line for as long as possible until he comes. This is done as a service to keep them from mithering people who might fall for it. Eventually they clear down realising they have been had.
I used to hand them over to our "IT specialist", i.e. my 2 year old daughter at the time.
Some of them do have a habit of swearing so I don't do that now she's a bit older.
Once I allowed one of them to lead me through the script, they get you to install a logmein type remote control program (genuine and innocuous in itself). Then they poke about in the windows event log and try to convince you that the inevitable occasional windows warnings are virus activity. Then try to sell you a subscription to some purported AV product. All this was on a virtualbox VM snapshot of course so I could reset it back afterwards.
YMMV, there must be more than one variant of the scam.
I put in a VOIP phone system at home, although I have a cable-VOIP to copper line and a real TELCO copper line (2 lines). The VOIP system provides extensions, answering service, caller ID on the cable line, intercom, etc. So, on my business line, I have FAX detection and then if I don't pick up, it goes to voice mail. On the home line, I took off the FAX detection, as it causes an additional delay of 2 rings to listen for the FAX tones.
The interesting thing is it got rid of 90+% of the junk calls! What seems to be happening is the VOIP system listens for caller ID on the first 2 rings, then there is a click when it answers the line and it sends synthetic ring to the caller while waiting for somebody to pick up the phone. This click and switching to a different ring tone fools the robo caller systems into thinking it has gotten an answering machine, and they hang up! WOW, a great unintended side effect!
The ability to provide a false caller ID # seems to be a huge mistake. I guess it makes some sense for certain offices that make calls on behalf of other people like combined medical offices or something, but it also allows a lot of fraudulent behavior.
How about a sliding scale? 100 outgoing emails/day is covered on your ISP plan. 100 - 1000 emails a day is $0.01 each. 1000 - 10000 is $1 each.
10,000 - 100,000 is $10 each. 100,001 or more and they terminate your ISP plan for a year, no matter where you turn up, and they also turn you over to federal authorities.
If only all countries would do this, together, and it would solve the problem.
Whatever happened to net neutrality? Be careful what you wish for!
Problem with that is that there are legitimate listservers with subscription numbers well into four figures. eg. Microsoft service notifications must go to upwards of 10^6 people worldwide.
We (a small company) do email marketing, I'm not sure how big the list is but 1,000 wouldn't surprise me. (They all signed up for the emails/ news letters.) Paying $1000 for one newsletter mailing would be too much, $10 would hardly matter.
I did that. It was Time Life Music. Kept them on the phone for about an hou r looking for Hank Williams "Thirty Pieces Of Silver" which I think is unre leased. Then I said"Shit, my dog just ran away" and hug up.
Anyway, is anyone here familiar with SIT tones ? Three tones are layed when a number is no longer in service. Preface your outgoing message with that and it will cut it down quite a bit and maybe even take your number off cer tain lists. I downloaded a file called sittones.wav which is those toes. I could make it available though i am not liking Dropbox anymore. Is there a similar service ? i don't like the rigamaroll they got to view a file these days.
I was on the no call list but found that you have to renew that every so of ten.
Or you could call a dead number and record the tones. I wouldn't like those tones playing in my ear if I called someone, though.
I've been just answering and not saying anything until the caller talks. That seems to work fairly well, though I received a call the other day from an unrecognized number (from Florida - I know no one in Florida who would be calling). It's a good thing I answered it. It was a fairly important call from a medical testing service.
Why bother? They're not supposed to be calling cell phones anyway. If they call cell phones, the DNC list is no impediment.
You do not have to renew your status on the Do Not Call List. You can go to the FCC web site and verify that you are on the list.
But I agree why bother. I am on the list and get as many as three calls in one day to apply for lower credit card interest rates. If they really monitored my credit cards for 90 days, they would know I have no credit card debt.
If you use your cards at all, you have credit card debt and the reporting agencies will report it as such. Not that they're looking anyway. That would cost money. Robo-Dialers are cheap.
I suppose you are right. I have it set up so that my credit card is payed automatically. So I should have said I pay my credit purchases in full every month. Certainly do not owe thousands on my credit cards.
I pay mine every month, too, but often have a couple of thousand "high balance" for the month and always at least $500 on each. That's way less than 20% of the card max, so it's not a big deal.
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