Posted on 01/21/2023 5:30:06 AM PST by owainG31
Yesterday I broke the current household record for war dialer phone scammer calls at 61, the previous record was Thanksgiving Day 2022 with 60. All of these calls are using forged caller IDs and basically unblockable because the numbers change every call. While I originally just ignored them, I went through the usual Lenny Bruce phases of coping, from talking to the callers (almost exclusively from India but with names like George, Ralph, Gladys and Candi) to pretending I myself was Indian or Chinese, to telling them I was going to give their call history to IBI. All that happened is they've recycled my number over and over again to the point I had to install a call sentry system and turn off all my ringers.
But now the game is different. I want to know why the phone companies aren't puting in a callerID validation system to stop all calls coming from a forged number. I could care less about phone-based advertisers starving. The insurance brokers who hired these ass clowns to sell upgrades to Medicare should be arrested for telecommunications fraud and castrated.
All the phone companies have to do is this: set up a verification process which blocks the incoming call until an encrypted cookie is sent back to the source number and returned to the destination number. The whole process takes maybe one nanosecond. Numbers which don't return the cookie are deemd to be fraudulent and the call is dropped.
But apparently the phone companies don't care what their account holders are being subjected to, and meanwhile the little monkeys running these operations, which have called me anywhere from 6am to 1030pm with repeated calls if I dare answer, are just happy as clams. They're even claiming their from the US Government.
My strongest possible suggestion is this: pass the law barring forged caller IDs, make the phone companies take action, and hunt down these insurance brokers and throw them in jail for perpetrating a denial fo service attack on telecomm infrastructure. I spend about $700 a month on combined services, cell, home and internet access, and now it's become more of an annoyance than an inconvenience.
We have a winner.
Ummm that would require all landlines to be upgraded, so they can send cookies. And the cellphones would need an upgrade though that’s much easier. And honestly it still wouldn’t work. Once you’re running a call center you have computers attached to your phone lines, calls come into the computer, the computer could do whatever, so long as they’re “reporting” a number they rent, they’ll verify.
Meanwhile the federal Do Not Call list actually does work pretty well. I get maybe 3 or 4 sales calls a week. Doesn’t stop the outright scammers, cause they don’t care about federal law, but the “legit” sleazebags do.
That must be a terrible inconvenience.
But first, I’d like to talk to you about your car’s warranty...
Regardless of how we deal with them it's still an uninvited intrusion into ones home.
They are also using ‘borrowed’ phone numbers so you think you know the caller.
Why don’t you have “calls from contacts only” switched to on?
And you answer these crank calls too???
Of course you get lots of them, you’re asking for it.
I sometimes just say garbled senseless phrases even I cannot understand! LOLOL
Thank you. It looks like that would require a land line, which I would love to have again. Maybe this would be a good justification.
Knock wood; I rarely get those calls. But when I do I try to have some fun with them.
I called our cell phone service provider and had them enable a scam call block. We haven’t had any scam calls since.
Not answering will eventually help stop the calls because your number will be considered inactive. I wish. The rate of calls hasn't dropped in over a year.
I have a land line tied to my cable account. I never use it. It is infrequently answered. For fourteen months it has been in place and it now gets about a dozen calls a day — all junk. It is answered about once every third day just because my wife wants to see what the current scam caller is about.
The call frequency is not decreasing —perhaps increasing.
This has been a problem for at least 40 years, people started screening out sales calls with their answering machines.
Forty years means it is like junk mail, the business is good for everyone but you, and they don’t want to fix it.
My cell provider told me the way they get phone numbers is from people having entered their number for the purposes of purchasing something online. Lists of numbers get sold/passed around that way. If it’s optional, don’t enter a number. If not optional, enter a bogus number?
Somewhere I read or heard that if you press asterisk or pound three times (can’t recall which) during that pause before the caller starts to speak, it crashes their system and they have to reboot their whole system. Sweet revenge of a sort, if true.
Also, there is this https://www.technipages.com/get-removed-from-auto-dialer-lists
> I sometimes just say garbled senseless phrases even I cannot understand! LOLOL <
Ha! I have a relative who talks to them in Hawaiian. Except that she doesn’t know Hawaiian. She just babbles along in what she thinks Hawaiian might sound like.
Was having this problem on my iPhone. (Apple haters go ahead and hate.)
I found I could program it so it would ring only if the incoming number was in my contacts list e.g. address book. With unknown numbers, no ring and sent straight to voicemail. Most spammers don’t leave a voicemail but a few do. But regardless, I don’t go running to the phone only to find it’s a spam call.
If a “real” call came in from an unknown number they can leave a voicemail which I check when I feel like it. Finding a “real” voicemail, I add the number to my contacts to enable them to ring for future calls. Then I call them back - at my convenience.
Other phones, don’t know, YMMV. But this “one simple trick” saved me from wanting to take a hammer to my phone.
You have landline phones with ringers turned on? whahahahaha
EQAndyBuzz wrote: “Has Rachel from Card Member Services called you yet?”
If she did, she didn’t leave her name in voicemail.
I’ve also received a smattering of Messages that my credit card with XYZ will be blocked if I don’t call immediately. So far, I’ve yet to receive that claim on any credit card I actually have.
“…But apparently the phone companies don’t care what their account holders are being subjected to..”
Of course not!
It’s the same reason that the Post Office fills your mailbox with so much junk mail every day.
-It’s their #1 source of revenue; and THAT’S all that matters.
We joined the nomorobo program which filters out a lot of scammers, but some still get through. Our cable company has a feature that ,etc us see who is calling, and if we don’t recognize the name or number, we don’t answer it. If it is someone legit, they will leave a message o. The recoder.
If someone truly needs to speak with us, they will leave a message- otherwise we just figure it wasn’t all that important if they didn’t, leave a message
Those two,things have cut down on robo calls pretty dramatically. lout the only time we get tricked now is when we are expecting a call from say a hospital or health center or whatever, znd a scammer with similar area code calls.
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