is there a way to

Which is why I am starting to receive spam on whatsapp and SMS

Re: Re: is there a way to By: A. Dumas to A. Dumas on Fri Sep 09 2022 06:14 pm

Spam is killing telephones faster than email. I have not found much issue experimenting with small email services (though I admit that any independent server which is itself not extremely small has a high chance of making it to a blacklist). However, phones have reached a point in which if you phone some grandpa to tell him to show up at the Doctor's office asap because of some urgent issue, the grandpa won't pick the phone up because he will believe you to be a Mexican spammer selling car insurance of Internet subscriptions.

This is where call display is worth its weight in gold. If we don't recognize the caller - or it's one that can't possibly be good (e.g. area code 800, 888, etc. or "BLOCKED"), we ignore it. It's quite effective, since few telemarketers will leave a message.

In the case of your grandpa, he'll see your name and phone number on the display and know it's safe to pick up. (Yes, there are some lowlifes who are spoofing caller IDs, but that's rare.)

It might be a chargeable feature in your area, but IMHO it's well worth a few bucks a month to be able to filter out spammers.

All the phone spam I get has spoofed caller IDs, it's very easy to do. When I was using the phone enough to need a VOIP account I spoofed the caller ID to my landline number. I had to ask for the feature to be enabled and was told that if there were complaints of abuse it would be turned off.

Really a chargeable feature - that's absurd in this day and age.

I was beginning to suspect that. :-(

s/absurd/profitable/

That is a problem. However, a legitimate caller will leave a callback number and often have a recognizable voice or mannerisms. Spammers seldom go to that effort (but never say never...).

Re: Re: is there a way to By: alister to Richard Falken on Wed Sep 14 2022 06:43 pm

Because so many people does not have voicemail enabled or cares to check it out if they do have it. Meaning you may call and leave a message and still make no difference.

So why would a legitimate caller not then leave a message (assuming heline has some kind of answering machine)

It is impossible to make any system foolproof because fools are too ingenious.

if you let a call go to VM because you don't recognise the number it does not make sense to not check the message afterwards. if this is the case then this solution is not for you.

Re: Re: is there a way to By: alister to Joe Beanfish on Thu Sep 15 2022 07:29 pm

It is easy to know if a call is coming from a call center as soon as you pick it up. I usually just hang up as soon as I realize it is a robocall. Legitimate callers calling from a call center will think the connection was cut due to bad coverage and redial. Spammers just move on to their next victim.

'The clinic' or 'the bank' may not leave messages by policy due to 'data protection'.

(specifically they have no way to verify that the person who picks up the message is the person they wish to speak to, and the mere fact that somebody is being contacted may be sensitive - 'the abortion clinic' as a topical example)

Theo

The point is that people have already been trained to not leave vm because it's usually ignored anyhow. And often times, they get stage fright or just don't want to be bothered to explain why they called and figure on calling again some other time.

It is odd isn't it that in the days when only some people had tape based answering machines they tended to get used but now that everyone has a voice mail service it's almost completely unused. Familiarity breeds contempt I suppose.

if it is a professional calling with a legitimate reason then they will leave a message.

if you are not happy to accept this then answer the call & live with the fact that many are going to be fraudsters (personally I like to waste their time & see how long I can keep them going)

Not necessarily, if the subject of the call is confidential (medical, legal or business) then they probably shouldn't.

Try typing "scamming the scammers" into YouTube. You'll find some hilarious accounts by people who are masters at wasting telemarketers' time. The really good ones turn the tables on the callers who pretend be security personnel trying to frighten you into giving them control of your machine by claiming it has a virus.

A good tipoff is that delay before an agent comes on the line. Many call centers use a dialer which they feed a list of numbers; it works down the list and when a prospective victim picks up it transfers the call to the next available agent. This takes several seconds, during which the called party hears dead air. I realized how reliable this is when I noticed that whenever my wife picks up the phone and says hello twice, her next words are an angry demand to be left alone.

My policy now is that if I do pick up and say hello, the party at the other end has two seconds to say something or I hang up.

Some of them wait until they hear a voice before transferring the call, if you pick up the phone and stay silent they hang up in a few seconds.

Yep, that's what I do and they almost always hang up on me. The delay varies a lot though, sometimes it's long enough that a real human waiting for an answer is likely to become confused. I do still wait that long, but people who call me hate it. Some have keyed into the fact that I deliberately pick up during a ring so that it's obvious when they should announce themselves, but that seems to take people a while to learn.

My guess is that the system waits until all the available workers have been assigned a call. Hence sometimes it hangs up before I'd even have a chance to say something if I wanted to.

FWIW, I took an old computer, installed a $80 telephone interface card in it (a TDM410P clone with a single FXO and 3 FXS ports), and loaded it with Asterisk

With call display, the Asterisk server can determine the caller's phone number, and filter out the calls I do not want to take. It also grades the calls on how familiar I am with the caller, and blocks or allows callers based on their grade, and an associated schedule. Thus, some special personal callers can call at any time, while most personal callers get shunted to voicemail between

While the number of spam calls that I get hasn't dropped all that much, most don't even last long enough to ring my home phones.