We’re on the do-not-call list but still get occasional spam, such as this morning as we were trying to sleep. Later, I Googled the number shown on Caller ID and it’s from a known spam site (some credit card).
Why doesn’t the phone company provide spam filtering for phone calls, the same way they do for email?
I tried finding such a service or device. I did find some Windows software but that requires that your computer be on all the time and connected to your phone.
I cannot find a device that just attaches between your phone and the wall jack, and cannot find a service that will filter the phone spam before it comes into the house. (This is a regular phone, not a cell phone.)
Does anyone know of such a thing? If there isn’t such a thing, why not?
p.s. – I also found a device that forces the caller to press “4” to continue to your actual phone, but I don’t want that, either. I jsut want them filtered out altogether.
Yes, it’s called Privacy Manager (at least, that’s what AT&T calls it) and the caller is required to announce their name which you review before accepting the call.
Also, you can pay for a service where your phone will only allow incoming calls from unblocked caller IDs. This doesn’t help with spoofed IDs, or those that send their ANI, but it’s another line of defense.
This call wasn’t blocked, it was just spam. And I have Verizon. But thanks for the info! I was just checking out Google Voice but spam blocking only works if they call a Google phone number. I want to use my regular phone number.
p.s. – I see Verizon offers “anonymous call rejection” but also that is not what I want. This call did show the number in Caller ID and the name was just “Caller.” Plus the service costs $4.50 per month which I think is highway robbery.
Wow, looks like Verizon sucks! Closest product I can find is call intercept, but that appears only to work for callers with no valid caller ID. If they spoof their Caller ID or ANI then it will ring through.
In theory I could buy a really really cheap computer, install spam filtering software (phonespamfilter.com), and use the PC only for phone filtering. But I don’t think such a cheap and reliable computer exists. And like I said, I don’t want to use my regular PC for security reasons (it’s usually powered down).
p.s. – By cheap I mean under $100 for PC and monitor.
How would such a device differentiate between a “spam” call and a legitimate caller? You could add numbers to a database as they came in and you tag them as telemarketers, but I don’t think there is any way for a device to know in advance for every call whether it is a telemarketer or a call you want to receive.
They could match up against a database of known spammers. Have you ever googled for a number you’ve gotten on Caller ID but didn’t know who it was from? There aer lots of web sites that will match the number to known spammers. I presume that’s how email filtering works too.
If they’re calling you from the same number, here’s something you can do:
Some of the VoIP phone services like Lingo give you the ability to filter calls based on individual phone number. I used to get collection calls for someone who had my phone number in the past. No matter how many times I told the bill collector that “I’m not that dude”, they’d keep calling. This went on for years. I then got Lingo, and set all calls from this collection agency to automatically forward back to the agency’s own receptionist.
This supposes you’re willing to switch from a POTS line to VoIP of course. You can take your existing phone number with you if you do.
Those are all valid ideas, but it’s not just from one number and I have a regular phone number (not a Google phone number) and I’d rather not switch to VoIP. But keep the ideas coming!
Scroll halfway down and there’s a script for linking to the whocalledus database (it links to this). And there are tons of patents for devices that would handle this. But nobody sells them!
Correct - this won’t stop the “Credit Card Services” spam calls, as they use spoofed numbers.
It was the only way for us to stop some nuisance calls a few years back: every day at 1 PM a call from a blocked number would call, we’d pick up, hear an American accent saying “Sorry, wrong number”, and hang up. The phone company basically threw up their hands and suggested we change our number. I said “what about this anonymous call rejection service, would that work?”. The person from the phone company said “… Oh. Yeah, that would work”.
I still get calls from Heather from Account Services, however.
We have an answering machine attached to our phone, and if Caller ID shows a name like “Unknown Caller” or one of its variants we just let the call go to the answering machine. The same thing goes for caller names that we don’t recognize (one of the spammers uses the name “warranty service”). If it’s really an important call, they’ll leave a message.
Our only problem is that one charity that we regularly donate items like old clothes and books to insists on blocking their name so that “private caller” shows up on our caller ID. They do leave a message on the answering machine, though, so we can follow up on their calls later.