telemarketing

nsisman

Active Member
Just curious what people are doing with eliminating telemarketing and other junk calls.

My ducts, my lawn, my windows, my clothes, my carpets ,the circus, my roof, a foghorn and my non-existant fax machine are seemingly making me a prime target.

I am getting 5 to 10 calls a day now - this is crazy !

An "explode the caller's equipment now "device isn't available yet (as far as I know) but I am interested in solutions either pc or non-pc based ?

Ideally I don't even want the phone to ring unless they are pre-approved but I don't mind pushing a button either !

I do have the call display service.

Any comments or personal experience ?

Neil
 
I just signed up for this service -- http://grandcentral.com -- which purports to block "spam" phone calls as one of the features. I don't know how well that part works yet but the rest of the features are pretty cool.
 
The Do Not Call List has made a *huge* difference here.

For other, exempt calls (non-profits, surveys, politicians) we've got HAL Deluxe software & modem to screen calls. Like the TeleZapper, it, too, can play the "this number has been disconnected" tones, but after that it also offers to take a message in case a legit human caller gets screened by accident.

(That feature is built into all tiers of HAL, from Basic to Pro.)

Tom
 
I use a combination of way2call and Homeseer to block calls.

Also if you talk to the telemarketers and ask to take you off the list it will help.
 
I also vote for the Do Not Call registry. It does help alot. And then you have the 'power' to ask people to take you off their list if you get a stray, or you have something to back it with.
 
The "Disconnected tones" work VERY good as well! I was getting TM calls like crazy. I use Home Seer Phone, and would have so many hang-ups on the machine each day. I put the "Disconnected tones" at the beginning of my outgoing message, and the calls all but stopped within a few weeks.

This combined with the do not call registry, and I get maybe 1-2 calls at the most in a week now.

I did have a couple of persistent numbers that I could not seem to shake. I put the numbers in Home Seer Phone's list, and when that number calls, I have the disconnected tones, and the full "We're sorry, the number you have dialed is not in service, please check the number and dial again, or call your operator to help you". (Can't believe I know that by heart! hahaha) Within a week of so those numbers finally stopped calling as well.
 
I registered for the Do Not Call list a long time ago, and still got calls from political parties and local telemarketers who didn't know or didn't care.

Then it got a lot worse. I started getting calls from phone numbers which were spoofed. Seems some telemarkters and spammers now resort to slimeball tactics like spoofing their Caller ID #, and often times I'd get a call, sometimes no one would be on the line, or it would be some recorded Spanish message. Many times I'd call the # back, and find out that it was a disconnected / non-working number, which meant the caller ID was spoofed (very easy to do with VOIP).

See this website for many more examples.

All of this meant I had to crack down hard and fight back.

For my home land line, I now use my telephone provider's "white list" technology. I can place up to 30 phone numbers that I want to ring through to my house. All other numbers get a recording that I'm not accepting any calls.

It has been WONDERFUL since I started using that service. It was included in my telephone bundle so I didn't have to pay anything extra.

Now silence is truly silence. My wife and I still have cellphones but those get far less to no telemarketing calls, and our primary communication channel for people to reach us is through cellphone.

I also looked at another option from Privacy Corps which does the same thing, but I own the equipment to make Selective Call acceptance work.

The drawbacks of the Privacy Corps product are:
1. I'd have to pay a couple hundred dollars up front to own it
2. You have to have a Caller ID Manager Remote for every extension (up to 4) for all phones to be blocked
3. I'm not sure if it works 100% with VOIP or not - I don't see why it wouldn't, but it's not mentioned anywhere

The reviews are very impressive and I would not hesitate to buy if I didn't have the same features from my telephone company.

Since I have started using a White List, I will never ever go back to an "unprotected state" and be vulnerable to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that dials my #.

The best part of this is, my home phone # is listed, saving me $2 or $3 per month from having to unlist it. I no longer worry if potential robbers can call my house and see if I'm home or not. Now if some stranger calls my house, they get the automated "not accepting calls" message and have no way to tell if I'm home or not that way.
 
That device from Privacy Corps is also sold by HelloDirect.

It doesn't fix the problem of call-waiting. Telemarketers calling while we're on a call.

I spent some time on this one persistent telemarketer. The Caller ID # is spoofed. I called around AT&T (my not beloved provider now since SBC was acquired by the new monopoly). I showed them how Google on that phone number shows people all around the US are being inundated. I said if that number falls in a block allocated to AT&T then they have a legal basis for action. I think, though, that the number is assigned to a VoIP company named Excel. The concensus on the internet is that the telemarketer is AMR Home Loans of Santa Ana, CA.

So AT&T's supervisor "promised" to report this to their security department - when they saw how widespread this is.

As to why AT&T in CA does not offer *60 or white lists or black lists, the answer was a lame "executives decided not to purchase that feature from their switch supplier". Cheap scumbags.
 
I used to use SIT tones, it works WELL.

After a couple of years of doing it I get 0 marketing calls per week.



I also use some software call faxtalk messenger pro, it encodes voicemails to wav and emails them to you. It also encodes faxes to PDF and emails them as well.
 
CollinR said:
I used to use SIT tones, it works WELL.

After a couple of years of doing it I get 0 marketing calls per week.



I also use some software call faxtalk messenger pro, it encodes voicemails to wav and emails them to you. It also encodes faxes to PDF and emails them as well.
I recorded SIT tones on my answering machine but it didn't work too well for me. Plus you still get annoyed with the telephone ringing, waking the family up if we're taking a nap.

Do you list your # or is it unlisted? That seems to make a difference but you'll still get random calls.
 
technerd said:
CollinR said:
I used to use SIT tones, it works WELL.

After a couple of years of doing it I get 0 marketing calls per week.



I also use some software call faxtalk messenger pro, it encodes voicemails to wav and emails them to you. It also encodes faxes to PDF and emails them as well.
I recorded SIT tones on my answering machine but it didn't work too well for me. Plus you still get annoyed with the telephone ringing, waking the family up if we're taking a nap.

Do you list your # or is it unlisted? That seems to make a difference but you'll still get random calls.
I can't remember how I captured the SIT tones but I'm pretty sure I just googled SIT.wav and transcoded the one I liked best. Voice modems are somewhat picky on what they can reproduce.


I don't answer it anymore and it spends a fair time with the ringer off. Faxtalk does a pretty stellar job of the phone so I'm happy. Now if only I could get US Cellular to forward my mobile voicemails to my email too. If you have 2 lines I'm pretty sure faxtalk can puke the voicemail messages to the mobile, less then ideal for sure.

It will fill a mailbox so make sure your hosting knows you might have some serious email attachments on their server.
 
I have a Symbian S60 as one of my mobile phones. I use Blacklist and SmartAnswer for all calls.

Blacklist will give you either an option to add an unknown number, whether withheld by the caller, or by the exchange. Particularly useful for telemarketers. It simply rings once and cuts them off. You can also block by number, name or group. If you create a group (I've created one called RSoles) then every call you add to the group will be blocked. Even if it crashes (happened once or twice) the ringtone is a simple beep.
You also get a whitelist facility, so only preapproved numbers will get through.

SmartAnswer lets you customise your voicemail. You can have different responses to different people. Ideal if you use your phone for business and personal use. If a number pops up that I don't recognise, I simply screen the calls as you can manually interrupt the call after it's gone to voicemail.

Don't know if this helps anyone, but it's worth having as a reference.
 
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