Americans obsessed with preventing Cold Callers?
Ostracus:
Amen to it all. And the nice thing for a change is that technology empowers the consumer to fight back against such abuses. It empowers them, why not us?
pc44:
Quote from: mrjoe on September 20, 2012, 02:54:29 pm
In the UK it is usual to receive a call 3-4 times a month in the worst scenario. [emphasis added]
Okay, well that helps explain things. I know people who received between 12 to 20 telemarketing calls on a *daily* basis. Granted, they had one telephone line that they used for both their home and their business, but that is still highly annoying!
In a moment, the rest of the story...
...and now, the rest of the story.
If you have a decent size family --and-- run your own business, you tend to be a busy person. When you are a very busy person, you have days filled with important things to do and important phone calls to make or receive. When you are a person in these situations, "annoying calls" are now causing you significant business and personal down time. It can go a long way in hampering business efficiency/productivity.
We used to received probably 8 to 12 telemarketing calls on an average weekday. Many times, these callers would call during the evenings when the chance of a person being at home was higher. *Many* times, these calls came in during dinnertime. Having to leave your meal only to be greeted by someone telling you about some great new sales product is not so nice on a repeating basis. Now with more modern approaches, such as GV, the OBi, and others, this is not as much a problem. Our daily telemarketing calls plummeted when we the U.S. released its Do Not Call Registry. After that law was passed, signing up on that national Do Not Call Registry made a *huge* difference.
Bottom line... if you are a truly busy person, anywhere from 8 to 20 daily spammers can cause significant loss of time and business productivity.
pc44, Good day! :)
mrjoe:
Yes, we'll uh, I see it is quite a serious issue in the US.
I would imagine the only way an individual could fight this is by using Google Voice to work together to block nuisance callers.
Gmail's pooling system is highly affective in battling Spam email.
I offer my utmost sympathies to those affected by this, It is extremely annoying.
JoeSchmoe007:
I've never used Google voice - I use Anveo. They offer a lot of ways to set up your worklfow to help with this. If someone has it really bad you can use "Contact Check" control. You can set up Contact Groups and everyone in "Family" and "Friends" groups can be considered whitelisted and transferred to SIP device and then to voice mail. Same control can reject anonymous calls and anyone in "Black List" group. Everybody else can be forwarded directly to a voicemail or to a message "Please press 1 to connect your call, press 2 to leave a message". Robocalls will never get past a message and most likely will hangup on voicemail. In addition to this there is "Business hours" control that allows different logic during different days or time of the day.
Lavarock7:
Let me add my 2 cents worth.
I bought a house which was rented previously. I believe the renter did not pay some of her debts. When collection agencies noticed the phone number was no longer valid, they did a criss-cross check and found another number at that same address. MY NEW NUMBER. They started calling me and asking for this woman. Although I told them I did not know her, they continued to call. They said that this number was the one she had given out. I told them they were lying as this was a new prefix which the phone company had just enabled in our area.
Then our little street got a name and my home address changed. The calls still came and the collection agencies now see this new number associated with a new address and say she gave them this address years ago, which didn't happen because the street name was never used before (we had t ocheck before naming it).
These collection agencies have been calling this number sometimes daily but at least every month for 12 years!
Telemarketers have called and I have reported them to the DO NOT CALL list of which I was registered thbe day it started. The number is in Hawaii but I get calls at all ties of the day and night. SOme use profanity and refuse to stop calling. When you look up their number in Google you see that hundreds of people have the same issues with these companies and they will not honor the DNC list or stop calling.
I get robo calls and because I listed that number on my internet domain registration, I get calls from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) scammers and people impersonating Google and Microsoft and so on.
! I finally dropped that phone number last week.
I changed all of my domain registrations to a Google number which goes directly to a recording that states "Due to the hurricane in the area you are calling, we are unable to complete your call as dialed". The call then goes to voicemail and I get a transcription of any message left via email.
I am unable to port numbers in Hawaii to Google (to go blacklisting) because Google does not support the 808 area code. My previous provide did not offer an easy way to block large numbers of phone numbers.
I am contemplating adding a "company name" to the publically visable domain registration so their mailings also state "I am junk mail". Then I can just throw that junk mail out.
So for those who wonder why some of us are so adament about blocking telemarketers and collection agencies and so on, I wouuld be happy t otell you the complete story. This was only the short version!
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