General > General Technical Chat

UPDATED: Well... looks like I've l̶o̶s̶t̶ won the battle against scam callers

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VK3DRB:
I got rid of most of the Indian scammers by getting rid of my landline number. Now, only rarely do they call me on my mobile, and when they do I stir them if I have time for some entertainment.

On one occasion, the scammer wanted to speak to my wife. I told him he can't because I murdered her ten years ago, after I caught her on the phone trying to scam money from my aunt, and I only got out of prison recently. After that the number of calls noticeable decreased.

The Microsoft help desk is a good one. Tell them "I am using the very latest version genuine, and I mean GENUINE, copy of Microsoft DOS. Now, what do you want me to do?" The imbeciles get totally confused because don't know what DOS is, but still try to help you find the start button.

Once I preached the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to the scammer and he came clean with a full confession, admitting he was a scammer and a thief and will go and read the this book called the Bible he heard about.

As for spoofed calls, I get them occasionally. I think the laws around the world have to come heavy on scammers. And I mean heavy, like life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, with 10 hours per day installing Windows 95 diskette version on an old PC continuously in return for food :-DD.

Dundarave:
I subscribe to a free TELUS phone landline service (in Canada) called “Call Control”, which forces any calls that are not in your “permit” list to have to push a random number between 1 and 9 before it will allow the call to ring the phone.  The system advises callers that they first have to press a certain digit in order for the call to go through.  Since most crap calls use auto-diallers and only connect when they hear a voice that is saying “hello?… hello?…” they never hear the instructions, or the selected digit they have to press, and have no clue what to do, so they just hang up.  My phone never even rings. It’s an excellent solution, and works great.

It has permanently cut our crap calls to zero.  And it’s free, and easily managed via the TELUS consumer app. 

Halcyon:

--- Quote from: Stray Electron on March 25, 2023, 02:28:45 pm ---
--- Quote from: Halcyon on March 25, 2023, 05:31:58 am ---

I'm honestly at the stage where I don't care if I'm completely unreachable via phone.


--- End quote ---

    X2.  This is where I'm at too.  My family and friend's know how to find me.  Everyone else can FO. It's not worth being interrupted 10 to 20 times PER DAY to get one legitimate call.

    Thanks to the telemarketers, pollsters, political calls, charity hoaxs and other SCAMMERS and the inaction of the phone companies, the days of the "Telephone" as a useful tool are over with IMO.   In my younger years I didn't have a phone and I'm ready to go back to not having one.

--- End quote ---

I've had my phone diverted to voicemail 99% of the time. I undiverted it for 4 hours today (as I was expecting another call), only to have a recruiter call me out of the blue.

Over the last few months, it's been peaceful. No interruptions. No one has contacted me to say "I can't call you", which means no one important has tried to call me.

I'm keeping it like this. As far as I'm concerned, "analog" calls to my phone number are obsolete. Telcos need to step up and start treating phone numbers like any other method of communication. The owner of the number should be able to blacklist/whitelist numbers as they see fit at the network level (not via some app on their phone).

gnuarm:

--- Quote from: Halcyon on August 03, 2023, 06:02:09 am ---
--- Quote from: Stray Electron on March 25, 2023, 02:28:45 pm ---
--- Quote from: Halcyon on March 25, 2023, 05:31:58 am ---

I'm honestly at the stage where I don't care if I'm completely unreachable via phone.


--- End quote ---

    X2.  This is where I'm at too.  My family and friend's know how to find me.  Everyone else can FO. It's not worth being interrupted 10 to 20 times PER DAY to get one legitimate call.

    Thanks to the telemarketers, pollsters, political calls, charity hoaxs and other SCAMMERS and the inaction of the phone companies, the days of the "Telephone" as a useful tool are over with IMO.   In my younger years I didn't have a phone and I'm ready to go back to not having one.

--- End quote ---

I've had my phone diverted to voicemail 99% of the time. I undiverted it for 4 hours today (as I was expecting another call), only to have a recruiter call me out of the blue.

Over the last few months, it's been peaceful. No interruptions. No one has contacted me to say "I can't call you", which means no one important has tried to call me.

I'm keeping it like this. As far as I'm concerned, "analog" calls to my phone number are obsolete. Telcos need to step up and start treating phone numbers like any other method of communication. The owner of the number should be able to blacklist/whitelist numbers as they see fit at the network level (not via some app on their phone).

--- End quote ---

Blacklist/whitelist does little.  If you don't mind preventing all calls from new numbers, then a whitelist will let you limit calls to people you know. 

One thing that will work is a screening app that requires a user to press buttons.  But spammers can get around that by using voice recognition software.  They already do that now.  It's very, very seldom when I answer the phone that I'm talking to a human.  It's virtually always a bot that asks me some questions to make sure I'm not a recording.  Only then do I get a human. 

I know people who literally never answer their phones because of the huge number of spam calls.  Even people with land lines.  It also destroys the utility of voice mail.  I gave up using mine.  I probably have nearly a thousand voice mail since I quit scanning and deleting them.

tom66:
I think a simple way to stop spam callers would be every VOIP call that lasts under 1 minute costs ~$0.50 to place.  This could be enforced by telecoms companies charging VOIP firms this amount.  Dunno if I'm a hopeless optimist but I can recognise spam calls very quickly.  Would also handle irrelevant telemarketing nicely.

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