Fed Up With Robocalls and Telemarketers? (choose your weapon)

RE: Robocalls. Been a reader for some time and truly appreciate the info shared with us. In reading this post and how to stop these calls there is one very important point needs to be made. Most of the robocalls generated in the U.S. have stopped.

However, the most prevalent calls are for car warranty and Visa card interest reduction along with scams for medical alert items and knee braces that are generated overseas and using spoofed numbers! On average, receive about 2 per day and always the recorded messages and of course, not being discriminatory, always answered by very heavily accented Indian or other Far Eastern person and even once in a while a female and yes, same accent!

Point is, even with spam blocking, these "crooks" use spoofed numbers, so the call always comes through and if not answered, leaves voice mail. Many of these calls show from hospitals and/or major banks, e.g. so there is no way to ascertain if they should be answered. We are helpless to stop these unless the major carriers, AT&T, Verizon, etc. use trace-back calling to stop these calls before they reach us at home. Seems that for some reason, carriers are not in a hurry to implement these systems and I assume that is because it is a major source of income! Your thoughts, please and thanks. Mike K

It's been a few days since I got a robo call. What I do is answer, and then set the phone down and let them run through their spiel. Before long they realize I'm not on the phone and hang up. I think, but of course don't know, that the robo call industry tags my number as a, "don't bother with him, you'll be wasting your time."

Same thing with political surveys in the mail. Give them the answers they don't want and eventually they quit wasting time and money surveying me.

Nomorobo is a lifesaver. Set it up at Nomorobo.com. It works on landlines and cells.

You say: "
The FCC rules change also gave consumers the right to sue in federal court;

But then say to sue on small claims.

Two rules 1. Never answer a call not on your contact list.
2. Any biz gets text *** *** **** and leave name and number
I never get calls from someone I don't know.

" The following restrictions apply only to “for-profit” calls."

And yet political calls are excepted? With all the calls I've gotten this election season, one can hardly consider them as 'non-profit' organizations.

I don't feel I can just answer calls from my contact list. I get calls from my Medicare supplemental insurance carrier and my doctors with important information. However most often, they don't have their business name appear. I find this frustrating. Why is this so hard for them to do? Why can't they be forced to do it?

If I'm in the mood - and have time - I engage them for as long as possible. Once every avenue has been explored, I begin to sound less and less capable of making a decision. I have various ridiculous avenues I can lead them down. Towards the end I tell them that I'm not allowed to sign anything, and they should talk to my guardian ad-litem, and that he'll be sure to buy their extended car warranty or whatever. And I give them a fake number and name. Call frequency goes down, but after a couple months resumes again.It's amazing how long some telemarketers will persist if they think you might be a sucker for their great deal.

I think the situation has changed, making much of the above advice (about getting back at telemarketers) more and more obsolete. Almost every unwanted call I get now, whether on landline or cell, has a spoofed number, usually a local one. Sometimes you can tell its a VOIP number from the very long and cryptic name showing on the Call-ID. It's obvious that these calls are not even from responsible companies that you could possibly identify and sue. The fake numbers simply mimic real ones that belong to hapless people who have no idea their numbers appear as the Call-ID of robocalls received by others (unless maybe they get an angry return call from one of them, as I did once). The idea that you can get any malevolent callers to identify themselves these days is laughable. If you press to speak to a live person, they respond to any probing question about their identity by just hanging up on you.

While some people may feel that hanging up (whether by you or the spammer) is a satisfactory way of dealing with these calls, you need to realize that the primary problem is not that you sometimes find yourself listening to (or speaking with) the increasingly rare legitimate sales caller. It's not even that you hear people trying to pull a scam or to get your personal information. The real problem is that your daily activities (or your periods of rest) keep getting interrupted, often at very inconvenient times, just by you hearing the ring of these unwanted calls and looking at the Call ID or listening to the voicemails they left. So I have found that the "whitelist" approach, using certain cellphone apps or landline call-ID screeners, is the only way to achieve peace. But then I need to manage that technique carefully to insure that callers I do want to hear from are not screened out because I neglected to keep my "OK" list up-to-date. Thankfully, any legit caller who gets screened out by mistake will leave a voicemail (which most spammers don't anymore) so I am still able to respond promptly to any important calls I missed.

In the last month or so I have gotten several spam/robocalls and when I answer I get someone speaking in (I believe) Chinese. They come from the NY or NYC Area Code. What is with that??? I can't fight back if I don't understand the language.

Kevins post sums up the real problems very well.
It's nigh impossible to obtain a legit phone contact or address or even company name. Any probing questions meet with an abrupt hang up.
The unwanted calls often come at really inconvenient times & I'd guess I get more bogus calls than genuine calls, often the phone rings & nobody is there.
The "Do Not Call List" is a joke, most calls, here in Australia at least, originate from Asia & they have never even heard of such lists.

Here in France we don't have the protection that y'all enjoy against persistent callers. We are fighting back by wasting the callers' time (we are retired) and having fun by declaring "I'm in the john at the moment" and following up with some extravagant lavatorial sounds. My partner uses a different technique, she lets the caller ramble on about the solar heating or whatever they are selling, then accuses the woman of being the devious little minx with designs on her husband and trying to break up their marriage, with lots of pretend anger and threatening to go round her house and beat her up.
Doesn't stop the calls, but gives us some fun.

Both landline and cell phones are equipped with blocking all calls except those on my list. The problem is I can't use it because I have several friends and family who block their number from showing on caller-ID. So if they tried calling me they would be blocked from my phones. So I have to suffer through the robocalls and block the individual caller ID numbers. Checking my cell phone there appear to be hundreds if not thousands of blocked numbers. And yes, I received a robocall from my own number and complaining calls asking me to stop calling them.

Nomorobo is fantastic! It is FREE for use on VOIP landlines; it is NOT available for POTS copper landlines. It also works on cell phones (Android and IOS) but for that you must pay $1.99 per month. We have it on our landline but not on our cell phones since we don't receive near as many spam calls on them.

What do you do when they "spoof" local numbers ? It looks like a local call but it's a car warranty call. If you call the number back, it's a little old lady that never called you. Saturday, I had 5 calls from 5 different numbers, all from the same company selling a car warranty.

Fred: As you point out, certain friends and family who block their numbers would get treated the same as spam callers if you were to use the "whitelist" method of screening calls. But since it's only a finite number of people doing that, and they are known to you, why not advise them to make a habit of pressing *82 just before dialing your number. This will unblock their caller ID for that one call they make to you. Of course, they may not remember to do that each time, but most people dial from a contact list anyway (or via a landline dialer). So your number in their contact list can simply be reprogrammed by them to automatically dial *82 ahead of your number anytime they call you.

This is a one-time programming step on their part that will let you to re-establish the phone privacy you need. So go ahead and restore the blocking of non-contact callers after letting these few friends know what to do. If they are not considerate enough to help help you out in this easy way, then they will simply have to reach you by leaving voicemail. But if you really want them to appreciate your position, consider programming your phone to not just block all the actual spam calls you receive but to also forward those calls to these so-called friends of yours.

The DO NOT CALL REGISTRY does not work. Been on it for years and I still get calls daily. ITS A JOKE

I've been getting 3 calls a day, each from different numbers and I'm getting so tired of it!
My phone provider alerts me of potential Fraud or Scam calls, so I never answer the call. Then I block the number.
This has been going on for most of July and August. I block each and every number and report most of them (I'm too lazy to write a note for each one...).
So, recently, I've been answering 'some' of the calls and answering with the following message.
Hi! You've reached Janice from the Vernon RCMP Fraud Department. How may I help you?
No one responds and they always hang up.
But the calls never stop. They just keep on coming in from a new number.
Ugh :(

"Oh, let me get my debit card". Then go take a nap.

I sell insurance via the phone. We do not cold call people, someone has to take an overt action for us to call them. It never ceases to amaze me how people think they are on the DNC list. If you put yourself on the DNC list and then fill out ANY form ANYWHERE looking for information, you are now no longer on the DNC list.