Are You Fed Up With Telemarketers? (here's the answer)

How about the good old answering machine?

I NEVER answer the phone; if they don't leave a message than it wasn't important.

Somehow telemarketers have hijacked local phone numbers. These phony numbers appear in Caller ID, so I pick up. I don't know what telemarketers get out of it except a pissed-off noncustomer.

Does anyone here know how a local number is taken over and then used as the calling one?

Howard

These calls are vexxing, but most of the calls I get are not from legitimate organizations who cannot be easily taken to small claims court. I mean, if they are spoofing their caller-id number, they are way to ephemeral for me to gather any info that would allow me to take them to court.

What needs to happen is the service providers must be held accountable. The technology exists to make this a non-problem. It just doesn't serve "Big Phona" to do so...yet. The company that actually routes the call to your phone should be liable if they route a call that has not been authenticated. Same with intermediary companies. The company accepting the original call should be held liable if they have not authenticated the call before passing it off. If you get a junk call and it has been authenticated all the way to your phone, you have the info you need to sue the pants off the originator.

Bob: Yes, the telemarketers are back calling and calling, especially cell numbers.Have you looked into or possibly have enough information to continue your writing about these people who are "skip-jacking" (I believe that is the correct term) where they have identified a one part line with call forwarding feature programmed. Then by calling that number and quickly flashing the switch hook on their end, they are able to engage the second telephone number and dial out of the central office.
The resident with the originating telephone number only hears two or three rings and then nothing on their end. The fraudster has seized the working line and completed a free long distance call and proceeds to ply their craft to unsuspecting elderly customers.

Go to www.nomorobo.com and get started blocking robocalls. We did it for our landline and most of the robocalls are intercepted. You just enter your phone number and what local phone company provides your service. Not all of them provide the blocking service but ours does. Once you follow the simple setup online, you're done. If it's a robocall our phone rings once and stops. That's all there is to it. The service is free!

Sorry Bob but this makes no sense at all.
A prior article here was on the same subject more or less.
Readers commented that probably the best solution overall would be to NEVER answer a call from someone you didn't know because that person would realize that you answered thus validating that your number was a good working number. They then sell your working number to a database of robo outfits multiplying the calls from robo monsters.
Folks...just don't answer. If you're not sure, let your answering machine do what it was invented for.

Because of the nuisance of hoax and marketing calls, I abandoned my landline over 10 years ago and now only use my mobile phone (Australia).

Before doing so, I used an answering system to answer every call and then chose the calls I wanted to delete or answer.

Now with the mobile phone, when I get the rare SMS message telling me I've won zillions, I simply block the number. That works for me.

All of this is if a company in the USA calls - how many are from the USA? I'll bet less than 1%.
You can't do any of this if they are in Bangladesh etc. which are 99.5% of the calls.
Lets make bank robbery Illegal, then nobody would rob a bank... Same philosophy

only problem is that all my calls come from overseas. Multiple times I have asked him where they are from and they always say Georgia. The only way to stop the calls is to block overseas calling. They've even figured out how to put a local phone number in. When you dial it, it doesn't go anywhere.

I have a friend who swears by this, and he claims it has cut his received robocalls to zero. He recorded an old AT&T out-of-service message off the internet that anyone of a certain age probably remembers hearing some years ago, on a misdial, where a recorded female voice says, following three obnoxious, loud tones: (bee-Bah_BAH) "I'm sorry, the number you have dialed, area code ###-###-#### is no longer in service...please check the number you are dialing, or ask an operator for assistance"

Supposedly, those three tones, preceding the spoken message are a signal to a robo machine that the call won't go through, and to not bother to leave a message. He was able to get recordings of all the spoken numbers from one through zero, and reedited the message using his own phone number, and placed it on his phone's answering device, instead of the one recorded from the internet, although any set of numbers would work, as the robo machine supposedly only understanding the three tones, and not any human speech following the tones. He tells family and friends who call to wait until the message has finished before leaving their own message, as his machine will really not reject their calls.

My landline phone shows caller ID, has an answering machine, and has the ability to allocate different ring tones to different numbers. Any number saved in its phone book has a certain ring, all unknown numbers have another. When the phone rings with the unknown ring tone, I do not even get up from my chair. I let the call go through to the answering machine. If the call was important, they will leave a message.

I have several Robo calls per day.
In Australia we have "Do Not Call" legislation which in practice turns out to be useless.
Almost all calls originate from the Phillipines or some other (generally Asian) country. you can ask for caller details but that just results in a hang up. No one seems to be accountable for these gross intrusions & I have no idea how you might attempt a case to sue for compensation. Many land lines now are based on broadband capability so traditional carriers do not need to do anything.

Brian B, tell me what landline phone does this.

I had to block my own phone number (and name) from incoming spoofed caller-id. THAT'S how nuts this has become.

Very disconcerting when I saw that I was apparently calling me with my own number 17 times within 30 minutes. The next day it was down to 11 times plus angry calls from others screaming at me to stop calling their number!

@ Cat. It's a feature of my cordless Uniden phone/answering machine. It worked on my old copper wire connection, and now also on a fibre optic connection.

Get the RoboKiller app! It's a TOTAL RIOT! I even recorded my own custom AnswerBot. I had one idiot caller have a conversation with my Answerbot for over 3 minutes. My AnswerBot even looped back and started over from the beginning and the idiot caller was still talking to my recording. ROFLM**O

I use the CPR CallBlocker and it has 1000's of known telemarketer numbers blocked builtin to it, especially overseas. You can block a obvious caller with a push of a big red button, poof they are gone - LOL. Also you can manually block out whole exchanges like 303-404-****, by entering "303404" or you can block all 303 numbers by entering "303". This is for a landline only.

You can get them on Amazon, or Ebay, it's well worth to see when they are automatically blocked and they also rotate many different numbers, I finally got this under control!

Also you carrier may have a system where the telemarketer has to enter a number to connect to your phone, and telemarketers don't have the ability to do this.

MagicJack also has this feature - so in effect I have a "phone firewall" - LOL

So I laugh at the morons who try to call me!

Suing these vultures may be satisfying. But so is blocking their call. NOMOROBO has been doing an excellent job for me using a VOIP phone.

I normally let calls I don't recognize go to voicemail. Sometimes, if I'm feeling especially annoyed with the calls, I answer the phone, "FBI, how may I help you? They always quickly hang up and I get a good laugh.

Getting a dozen robocalls daily for years now. My Sentry 10,000 number capacity one ring hangup analog landline call blocker device does a good job. But because these scammers just spoof a new number every time, my blocked number list simply keeps growing and growing and growing. I've repeatedly requested from Xfinity Comcast, an option to automatically reject all calls which originate from overseas. I have no reason to talk to anyone outside of the USA for any reason what so ever and due to the risk, I won't even sign up for anything from a company whom uses overseas call center services. There have been articles out that the same csr people in some countries like India, turn round around from that day job and then call you again from their other job and scam you out of data and dollars. This article is worthy and interesting, but I don't deal with live or legitimate companies, just years and years of never ending foreign scam artists, robocalls, and automatic hang ups. So much I don't even say hello anymore, since less than 1 in 20 calls is a live caller. I do not talk to robots and the most offensive call out there is not the human scammer, but rather a robotic interface pretending to be human. Thank you for reading.