With caller ID, if I don't recognize the name I don't answer. Call just came in from Hartman, C; one of my wife's friends. I answered expecting to tell her that wifey is at the gym, call back in an hour. It's a robo call hawking some new service!
Are they going through my records now? WTF!
They have been spoofing numbers for years.
In reply to 914Driver :
I've had my landline ring with my cellphone number.
My uncle has had his landline show his own landlines number is calling.
Records searches, luck of the random number draw, combination of both I'm not real sure. I just hate that I need to be answering numbers I don't know for the foreseeable future
Im sure they are just after your best interest. I've had a nice lady call me a few times a week about my car's warranty about to expire.
I had some berkeleyers eom India harassing my Grandma about her cloud being compromised on her Apple iPhone. Uh...she doesnt have a cell phone, of any kind. They kept calling and calling. I finally played along with them saying that they are calling a land line, and could they try calling "her cell phone?"
I gave them the number for the local FBI bureau. The calls stopped.
We get 4-5 a day. Sometimes they spoof our number. I've told the wife that it's time to get rid of the landline but she wants it in case our cell phones go down. The reality is that we get our service through the cable company and if cell service goes down the landline will probably go down too.
They spam our cell phones too. I just don't pick up the phone unless the number is in my contact list.
I once managed to get a robocall to hang up by trying to whistle the three note tone you get before the "This number has been disconnected or not in service" message. I'm a bit surprised it worked.
Another time I went through to get a human and the conversation went about like this:
Me: May I please have your company's full name and mailing address?
Scammer: Why do you need that?
Me: So I can tell where to send a subpoena.
Scammer: What for?
Me: Using an illegal robodialer, intentionally calling a number on the do not call list, and any other violations my lawyer can think of.
Scammer: <Click.>
That particular one didn't call me again.
My favorite story - I wish I knew where to find it - was a poorly set up robodialing scheme that had the misfortune of dialing an avid phone phreaker. He recognized it as a common commercial voicemail system, and tried what would happen if he entered an access code. The system then asked him for a password. The scammers had been lazy and left it on the default "1234" - big mistake. They ended up with their password changed, all the messages left from potential victims erased, and their outbound greeting changed to "This is a scam! Hang up right now!"
I have tried two of the phone spam block apps on the cell and they don;t work or screen out everything. I get 5+ of these stupid calls a day.
I'm of the opinion that the service providers absolutely have the ability to fix this and are likely the only ones who can. They simply have no incentive to do it, if anything they drive business ala calls and thus incentivize them to allow it. Maybe if the FCC/Consumer Protection Bureau ever steps up it gets regulated away.
For landlines many service providers have a cool feature that makes you press a number manually before they'll connect the call. It worked miracles at my Dad's landline.
Placemotorsports said:Im sure they are just after your best interest. I've had a nice lady call me a few times a week about my car's warranty about to expire.
She calls me regularly as well. I didn't even know I had a warrantee on my 34 year old car.
I don't get it? They go to all that effort to spoof my number so I can hang up on them? I never buy anything from telemarketers and I always hang up before they give their sales pitch if I bother to pick up the phone at all. Are they that desperate or do other people actually listen to them.
I think it is automated and cheap that it's worthwhile even if it's only 1% effective.
84FSP said:I'm of the opinion that the service providers absolutely have the ability to fix this and are likely the only ones who can. They simply have no incentive to do it, if anything they drive business ala calls and thus incentivize them to allow it. Maybe if the FCC/Consumer Protection Bureau ever steps up it gets regulated away.
My understanding is that the ability to spoof numbers is a technical loophole that could easily be closed (effectively something like a window in the call placement workflow where a substutute "from" number can just be inserted). For now, it appears that the telcos make more money off of servicing spam calls than they lose from the diminished utility for individuals and businesses who generally more or less have to use the phone anyway.
I don't see a non-legislative solution because very few people and fewer businesses can just walk away from having a phone, and changing carriers doesn't help. Well, perhaps some telco comes out with a premium model and contracts with other telcos to not allow spoofing for calls to that block. *shudder* For just an extra $100/mo, we'll patch the simple loophole that renders the basic service nearly more trouble than it's worth!
Snowdoggie said:I don't get it? They go to all that effort to spoof my number so I can hang up on them? I never buy anything from telemarketers and I always hang up before they give their sales pitch if I bother to pick up the phone at all. Are they that desperate or do other people actually listen to them.
From my days working for AT&T/dish network, I'd make somewhere between 400 and 600 calls on an 8 hour shift, and maybe land 5 sales.
That was legal, above the board, calling customers. Multiply that out to the 50 people on a shift, and is still a rather low percentage.
AMVETS was far worse, which surprised me at the time.
But how the scammers manage to do anything profitable even from places with no minimum wage laws is mind blowing to me.
Had a lady call me last weekend who was rather upset, insisting that I stop calling her. I have not been calling her, and tried to explain to her what number spoofing was. She called me a liar. I tried to help her block my number, but she couldn't figure it out and hung up. I tried. This is not the first time this chain of events has happened to me either. No idea why I am so lucky.
In reply to RevRico :
So they are paying people to sit there and make 5 sales a day? I don't see how they could afford that. Isn't there a better way to sell overpriced TV service than that? Wow.
In reply to Snowdoggie :
We were the highest profiting call center for AT&T in the country. They threw us a pizza party then moved the operations to the Philippines, so they found a cheaper way.
Snowdoggie said:In reply to RevRico :
So they are paying people to sit there and make 5 sales a day? I don't see how they could afford that. Isn't there a better way to sell overpriced TV service than that? Wow.
If one or two of those 5 sales let you turn around and use the credit card number to run up a lot of bogus charges, it probably works out pretty well.
Land lines?
Haven't had one of those in ~17 years. And Google does a pretty good job of blocking them on my cell phone, so it's not really an issue anymore.
stuart in mn said:Placemotorsports said:Im sure they are just after your best interest. I've had a nice lady call me a few times a week about my car's warranty about to expire.
She calls me regularly as well. I didn't even know I had a warrantee on my 34 year old car.
They also regularly tell me that I need to extend the warranty on my car that I sold in 2015...
An easy fix for this is calling them back. You'll get some chooch from India. Pretend to be interested. Take them all the way to the point they ask you for info. Then you have them. Now, just start feeding entirely false info. It has to be slightly believable, but not so real that you could get sued for inadvertently giving them someone's info. "Rusty Shackleford" is a great alias. At anytime you want to get them real pissed, just let them know the jig is up and you intentionally wasted their time to protect others from the scourge they are.
guess what? Haven't had a robot call in years.
I re-signed up the the DNC list is about as effective as his Covid policy. (I know, no politics)
I think there are key words to start the robo call ,
I am sure Hi and Hello have to be triggers ,
I usually ask if they are from Amazon , or the Pizza place ,
its a pain if the phone is at the other side of the shop , but I really need to answer calls as no one leaves messages anymore......
BoxheadTim (Forum Supporter) said:stuart in mn said:Placemotorsports said:Im sure they are just after your best interest. I've had a nice lady call me a few times a week about my car's warranty about to expire.
She calls me regularly as well. I didn't even know I had a warrantee on my 34 year old car.
They also regularly tell me that I need to extend the warranty on my car that I sold in 2015...
I want a warranty on my 40 year old motorhome that covers everything including appliances and plumbing. 
I'd suggest not answering nor calling back. Most if not all of those calls are just trying to verify if there is a real person who will answer.
if you answer or call back your number gets put on the active list that is either used to keep calling or sold or both.
At least this is my understanding.
I don't answer and won't even send straight to voice mail as that, too, could trigger a "legit phone number" cue to the caller.
T-Mobile flags calls as "Scam Likely" if they seem sketchy. The end result is that I now hold the phone waiting for "Scam Likely" to pop up on the screen and if it does, I don't answer, and if it doesn't then I don't answer because I'm frozen by indecision. And I'm frequently worried that I've missed a legit call of importance because maybe it was a false positive on the scam meter.
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