I run a service company and am rarely in my office. I have an answering machine that takes the incoming calls. When it receives a message it calls me on my cell phone.
For the past 6 months or so I have been getting 2 robo calls a day from a company trying to scam businesses by charging a fee to update their Google listings. It leaves the same message each time.
The half dozen times I’ve been in the office and received this call I’ve selected the automated option to ‘be removed from our calling list’. The other three times I’ve spoken with various levels of management asking them to stop calling me.
The calls still continue.
My phone company is Verizon. I’ve asked them if there is anyway to block the number and was told no.
The number calling me does not take incoming calls. They do not leave a company name. I have found no means to contact them. I suppose I could sit around iny office waiting for their call, but it’s not like explicitly telling them not to call my number has worked.
I made a complaint with the National Do Not call database.
If I had a mailing address I’d have my attorney contact them. I’m unreasonably frustrated with it at this point and would be willing to pay for nuisance lawsuits to waste this companies time as they have mine
I have no idea if such things are available in the USA, but I just bought a phone that does exactly that. I have stored all my contacts in the memory and now, when anyone calls who is not so stored, the phone asks them for their name. If they give one, the phone rings and tells me - I can choose to accept, refuse or permanently block the number. I have had it three days now and no nuisance calls have got through - previously I was getting two or three a day.
PhoneTray call blocking software. You will need a computer that is on all day, with a modem capable of reading Caller ID information. This will block calls from numbers on the PhoneTray spam database, as well as any numbers you add to your own blacklist. When it gets a call from a number on either list, the phone will ring once, then it hangs up.
If your phone service is VOIP-based, look at Nomorobo.
Your phone service provider may also offer blocking of specific numbers. My home numbers are on Uverse, and I can enter something like 20 numbers to block, as well as blocking calls with blocked/anonymous Caller ID.
For some reason I got tasked with dealing with robocalls from “Dorothy from the mortgage company” a few years back. They’d hit all of our numbers sequentially repeatedly, tying up the reception desk, annoying the hell out of everyone in the office, etc (I work at a large law firm with about a thousand employees in this location).
Phone company couldn’t/wouldn’t do anything and we had no technological solution.
So I noted down the number(s) that they called from and looked up which Telco owned that block (this was a 5 second google search, it’s nothing complicated).
Turned out to be a telephone company down in southern California. I called their office, said that my firm was being inundated with unwanted, unsolicited calls from one of their customers and could I speak to someone in charge. I was connected to, amusingly enough, their in-house lawyer. I gave him the details (I’m sure it didn’t hurt when I dropped our firm’s name, it’s a prominent law firm) and asked him to see what he could do.
He called me back the next day and said that “Dorothy” had violated their terms of service and so their contract was cancelled.
We have had zero calls from “Dorothy” ever since.
The other month I had to repeat this for some telemarketer who has been robocalling my cell phone and so far, so good, no callbacks. Cut 'em off at the kneecaps
I’m sure it’s not a permanent fix (telemarketer can just sign up for service with another provider) but if enough people complain about it this way the offenders may find themselves effectively blacklisted from getting phone service.
Telemarketers have wised up. They now use spoofed numbers that are either disconnected, constantly busy, or worse, belong to innocent bystanders who are now inundated with complaints.
My son has some kind of phone that has a blacklist and a whitelist. The latter are put through, the former get a busy signal and the remainder are invited to leave a message. I think this is provided by his phone company. He lives in Seattle. A friend of his had this service at least 15 years ago, so it is not new.
