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Telemarketers on the cell phone
Jasconius
sword criminalmad onlineRegistered User regular
sword criminalmad onlineRegistered User regular
Sometime in the last year my phone number seems to have made it into some sort of mass telemarketing list and now multiple times weekly I get what check out to be telemarketer calls
Here's the prob though, when I answer they don't actually say anything on the other end. It's usually just static and then hangup. (not fax machine static mind you, just robo-call sounding dead air)
So I can't just tell them to fuck off. All I can do is keep answering (or ignoring).
Any ideas on what to do about this?
Here's the prob though, when I answer they don't actually say anything on the other end. It's usually just static and then hangup. (not fax machine static mind you, just robo-call sounding dead air)
So I can't just tell them to fuck off. All I can do is keep answering (or ignoring).
Any ideas on what to do about this?
Jasconius on
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Also, I have my bank's anti-fraud number listed in my phone, because I ignored a call from them once thinking it was a telemarketer. Whoops.
There's a half decent chance that it's not telemarketers, that it's instead a fraud scam. There are a bunch that came through locally that I know of; the actual messages may potentially vary somewhat from area to area. Those sorts of fraud calls use the same techniques as a telemarketer, in that they have an outbound dialer that tries to call people to make a connection, and then it tries to hand you off to the next available agent. This link explains a little bit more about how outbound dialers work.
If it's fraud, then if they ever do manage to make a connection you may get a message like "Congratulations! You've been randomly selected for a free trip to the Bahamas! Press 1 to claim your prize!" or "Hello, this is the credit department calling, with an important message about your card." If they don't provide a company name in their greeting, you can almost always assume that it's fraud - one of the oldest and most common tricks that fraud sources have is to let the mark fill in the blanks for them.
If it's not fraud, it could be anything from problems with the dialer at the other end, your phone trying to put them through to voice mail and the dialer picking up on that, errors on their end, the agent on the other end of the line having a shitty day and just hanging up on people as soon as the connection opens, etc.
and yeah all the google searches sound more along the lines of fraud than telemarketing "free cruises" and whatnot
so nothing to do but block em one at a time? damn
That's the really annoying thing about fraudsters.
The fuckers never play by the rules.
Fuck those guys.
Another problem with this is that, chances are, the number is probably spoofed anyway, basically the phone equivalent of getting an email from your grandmother trying to sell you viagra. You're probably just blocking random people who aren't actually calling you while the fucks calling you just merrily change the number in their spoofer device/app every few days to make sure you can't block them.
Considering how many of these numbers are local, but how few of the callers I'm connected to seem to be, I'm pretty sure they just use numbers off their calling list for this. Probably makes people less likely to ignore it.
Don't know if you could add that to the beginning of your voicemail for a few weeks or not. Probably not really a centralized list of "Scam these numbers", so I guess it matters if it's one group or a bunch of different people doing it.
What's the name of it? I want to try it
I'm on android, didn't mention that. If you are on an Iphone, there are probably similar apps but I cant recommend a specific one. Anything with a good blacklist should work in theory, but this app did actually keep my phone from ringing, which was impressive and convenient.
register your number there.
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This is good to do, but I've still been getting unsolicited calls, and when I ask to be put on the caller's do not call list, they hang up on me. So it may not be a fix for fraud/scam calls.
I started doing that and learned something scary, I would call back, and get just random families houses, completely unaware their phone was being ghosted by telemarketers, we've actually got a decent list going and our phone company is finally going, oh shit , about it.
The call was static \silence, followed by what sounded like a tv before a guy with an accent said, "Hello... This is United States grant department..." At which point I hung up.
For fraud calls they're ideal outcome involves them breaking the law so the do not call isn't gonna do much to them.
Yea, caller ID isn't secure. It's always been ridiculously easy to fake.
It's also legal to fake except in a handful of cases, so the stuff to do it is really easy to get. If you do it while committing fraud, it's an add-on charge (usually something prosecutors drop in a plea deal), and if you're a debt collector, you can only spoof it to another number that dials back to your office (I know of a few various offices like doctors and lawyers that do this on their fax line, so they can use it to make calls in a pinch but call backs will still go to the front desk). Pretty much everyone else can do it all they want.
Outbound dialers used for legitimate or illegitimate purposes will almost always just be churning through number blocks. For example, 205-206-0000 to 205-206-9999 are Seattle, Washington numbers in the vicinity of Pike Place Market. If you're in that block, and someone decides to target that block, it doesn't matter if you have your number unlisted and have never posted it anywhere and have never getting out - the brute force "call everyone" method will result in you getting a call. And obviously, you can replace the numbers in there with whatever numbers you like - for example, the 508-203 number block is in Foxboro.
Keeping your number from being associated with your name can be difficult, but it's somewhat possible. Avoid brute-force dialing, especially by people who already don't care about the law? Not possible in the slightest. They won't know who you are, but they do know you have a number in that specific area. Smarter fraudsters will do things like find gas stations along major routes in the area that the number block belongs to and claim that you won your prize by filling up there.