Nearly all phone calls these days to my cell are various spam or scam calls. I usually just ignore my phone, but sometimes I need it to stop vibrating, or go back to another app, etc. If I touch “reject call” does the caller have any way to know? Am I inadvertently signaling that there’s a live person at that number?
Is this like the early days of email in its infancy, when we all collectively, eventually, learned that clicking “unsubscribe” just let them know they had a good email address, that could be sold for a premium to other spammers?
If you reject it, it’ll go to voicemail.
My WAG is that the only way for them to not know it’s live is for you to answer and hangup and hope their system doesn’t pick up on it fast enough.
But honestly, until changes at the telcom level happen, I don’t think there’s anything you can do. Even if you convince the caller right now that the number isn’t live, you’re going to get 30 more calls this week.
I have found that ignoring calls completely does eventually work in some situations, but if you are tricked into picking up once your number is probably sold to other telemarketers. How do you avoid making that mistake? Simply don’t answer your phone unless it’s someone in your address book. If it’s a legit call they will leave a message and you can call them back. If it’s a robo-call they won’t leave a message but will try again later. Alternately you can change your number and that will give you a few months of peace and quiet… but that can really be a pain.
More like the government level. If someone running for POTUS were to make it part of their platform to come down hard on these spammers they would get my vote. Have congress pass a law, enforce it (with technology and hefty fines) and stop taking campaign contributions from people that are associated with this behavior needs to be done. To challenge such a law in court would mean that they would have to reveal who they are. Only then would they stop.
One way to tell there’s an election is when we start getting robocalls from candidates or their campaigns. I note that when the Do Not Call Registry (and why the hell does that no longer seem to decrease the number of such calls?) was put into law, political parties and candidates were exempt.
Here’s my totally-impractical-but still-I-like-it solution: Every time a call is answered (whether by a person or voicemail) the party placing the call is charged $.11. One cent goes to the entity that administers the system, ten cents goes to the party receiving the call.
Yes, it will cost you 11 cents every time you call your mom. But assuming Mom calls you as often as you do her, it works out to costing you an extra penny. Surely your mother is worth that much to you.
Robocalls are popular to scammers because it costs them so little. Add even eleven cents to their cost per call, and I suspect a lot of them will find it cheaper to better target their calls.
Senior citizens on tight budget will find it pretty easy to pick up an extra $20 or so during Medicare open enrollment. Even that small sum will be appreciated.
IME, maybe 25% of the robo-callers I get leave messages. Either (what I assume is) a real person leaving a message or it’ll be a recording, but in either case, it’s almost as much of a hassle because then I have to go into the voicemail and listen to it to make sure it is actually junk and then delete it.
The problem would be that the telecom lobbyists may very well fight it. Keeping in mind that they are, I assume, receiving money for all the calls, I could see how they wouldn’t want to lose that income while at the same time spending money to keep the calls at bay.
I mean…if they disliked them as much as we, the consumers, dislike them, why not just put a stop to them without now? Why wait for the government to tell them?
In either case, what I meant was, nothing is going to happen until the telephone companies stop the calls. Whether they do it on their own are are forced to under government regulations. There’s very little the consumer can do.
What I could see happening is people start finding ways around having a phone. I’m not totally sure how that would work, but if consumers started getting rid of their cell phone (or at least the voice part) and blaming the junk calls for it, that could be an incentive for the telecoms to make some changes.