For the last couple of weeks I’m getting blasted by spam phone calls on my Verizon cell phone. I’ve received a dozen today alone. There’s never any message left. Some are identified with names and local addresses and others just as unknown wireless callers. I signed up for Verizon’s call blocker a few weeks ago and dutifully block and report the calls but they keep on coming. Most of them have the same exchange as my cell phone but today there was one from Jamaica! Has anyone experienced this? What did you do about it? How and why is it happening? It’s gone beyond being a petty annoyance at this point.
Sadly, it means your number has gotten “out there” and is probably labelled as “this one’s a LIVE one!!”.
The “local” ones are certainly spoofed even if they show with a name.
You can look into something like Nomorobo (though I don’t think that’s free for cell phones). You can certainly make a point of not answering any calls that are not in your address book. If it’s a legitimate caller, they will leave a message.
I have created some contacts named “Telemarketer”, “Telemarketer1” and so on, and I add the callers to one of those contacts afterward, and blocked calls from all those contacts.
I stopped answering my phone except to people in my contacts long ago, and set it to ignore (not ring) in that case as well. Legit callers will leave a message (so will spammers, but you can peruse messages at your leisure).
I have my phone set up to send any call that’s not from my contact list straight to voicemail. Works for me.
Thanks for your feedback, both of you. I don’t know how my number became a “live one.” I’ve had it for more than 15 years and never answer any calls I don’t recognize, so I’ve never given anyone an opening, but strange things happen I guess. I have set my phone to “not ring” any callers not on my contact list. At least that will stop the persistent calls from interrupting me every hour.
I personally have taken the tactic of being as rude and verbally abusive as possible to spammers. If it’s a robo call, I try to press whatever buttons or say whatever I need to say to actually speak to a real person, so that I can then insult them as much as possible before they hang up.
It seems to work. I get very few spam calls these days.
Since I have the time(and it’s entertainment), I’ll keep 'em on the line as long as possible.
Other than the Marriott/Hilton travel scams, I get vanishingly few of the others.
May or may not help but suggested by a coworker and have been doing it myself.
If a call comes in and you don’t recognize the number answer it but don’t say anything, be absolutely quiet including any background noise. They will hang up within a few seconds and won’t call again.
Theory is it is a “live” number but doesn’t connect to a person. It comes across as an unused business/office number, old fax number, etc… A live but dead number as far as reaching a person.
I like to see how long I can keep them on the phone until they hang up on me. But lately I haven’t had the time. So now I have Dancing Queen by ABBA queued up ready to play at a moments notice. Interestingly enough, most of the time, they don’t hang up right away and listen to the music for several minutes.
On our land line phone (yes, we still have one!) we use the answering machine (still have one of those too!) to screen calls. Anyone that really wants to reach us will leave a message. These days it’s usually doctor appointments…everyone else hangs up.
So now I have Dancing Queen by ABBA queued up ready to play at a moments notice. <
Ever since the GDPR became law around two years ago, the number of spam calls in Europe has dropped considerably. I had considered setting up a system to play The laughing policeman to entertain such callers. Even better, a loop of the even more obnoxious laughing part. But that would be cruel and unusual punishment.
I’ve been fortunate in that my Verizon number hasn’t changed in 20 years and most of the spam calls I get are around election time. A lot of those are texts now. I usually don’t pick up callers not in my contacts and most do not leave a message. Occasionally I get a voice mail in Chinese, almost certainly a scam directed at the many Chinese speaker who live in the CA Bay Area. And for a while, robo-calls from the Marriott (wasn’t really the Marriott, was a scam). However, now I have a health issue and must pick up for various doctor office calls. At one point I put my name on a national do not call list. Not sure how much good that did.
A lot of spam calls now aren’t from a person, they’re from some auto-dialer system. Can’t torture the telemarketers (who are not the real villains anyhow).
I would like for phone companies to offer a screening service. Everyone who calls me for any reason is prompted for a password, which I must provide to them. It must match the number they’re calling from. That will stop spam for a few years until the spam technology catches up. By that point, I hope to have my Spammer Death-Ray Exploding Head Laser ready to go.
ANY robocall that you haven’t previously given permission to receive is illegal. Torture them all you want.
I haven’t tried THAT (though once or twice I’ve said in my frequently-mistaken-for-male voice :“what are you wearing?”) - but the two times I’ve burst into sobs and told the caller that Tom (or Lesley) was dead, I have not gotten repeat calls from those specific spammers.
Not sure what to do with the Chinese language spammers though.
I do this also on my cell, and it works pretty well.
Most of the calls on my landline get blocked by NoMoRobo, but the ones that get through - before they get identified - almost always hang up when it hears the beep of the answering machine.
I’ve started a new tactic. After picking up the phone and making some type of ‘noise’ (ie blowing in the receiver or something) just to get the live person, I’ll cut them off and say “Milwaukee County 911, where’s your emergency’, which is usually followed by 'I’m sorry, I’m trying to reach Joey…” "Milwaukee county 911, where’s your emergency?’ Continuously saying that along with other ‘911 type’ things like ‘sir, what’s the nature of your emergency’ or ‘I’m sending officers out to your location, can you stay on the line with me until they get there?’ The majority of the time, they eventually acknowledge that they dialed the wrong number and say (I know, I know) that they’ll remove it from their database.
For some reason, the recent influx of car warranty spam calls are the worst. No matter how many of those lines I try, they’ll just keep telling me they’re calling about a warranty on my car and will actually interrupt ME, a ‘911 dispatcher’ to ask for the make and model of my car.
I think I might start adding ‘sir, it’s a felony to misuse or prank the 911 system, do you understand that. I need you to give me your full name and a good call back number’.
I just have my phone set up to silence all unknown callers and send them directly to voicemail. I also use WideProtect to block whole series of numbers if I notice spammers calling from similar numbers, like 310-555-4800, 310-555-4802. WideProtect can block all numbers in the 310-555-48xx range.
Reviving this because my Dad is visiting, and wow, the number of spam calls he gets is astounding. One day before noon he already had 10. I looked through my phone logs, and I had four in the last two months.
All of them that I was around for when he answered were related to medicare or some kind of death insurance. They seemed to have a live human on the other end, but it could have been a very good robot. When I used to get them more frequently, the robots were understandable, but lacked the pauses and fillers that human use; plus the audio was identical on multiple calls. These had pauses, fillers, were different on different calls, and had non-American accents.
I installed the AT&T Security app, which is blocking them. I have it set so he gets a notification a call was blocked, but at least the phone doesn’t ring. Because they are being blocked, he’s had things like the same number calling every minute for 5 minutes.
Those Medicare callers are just relentless. It should be outlawed.
It’s not like a person turning an age doesn’t know what age they are.
I’m not that age but because my husband is. I get the calls too. Husband has his Medicare and advantage type stuff all set. But they gonna call anyway. Assholes!
It doesn’t matter that he’s set, though. It matters that these are scam calls.