Cleared the phone voicemail today

wsuffa

Touchdown! Greaser!
Joined
Feb 22, 2005
Messages
23,615
Location
DC Suburbs
Display Name

Display name:
Bill S.
21 "messages", 5 were hang-ups, 10 were "since we haven't heard from you we are giving you one final chance to extend your car warranty" (so, 10 "final calls"), 3 were legit, and two were political robocalls including Donald Trump Jr. telling me that I needed to vote for his dad's re-election.
 
I get one every Tuesday from USSP Shipping that just wants to transfer me to their supervisor about a shipment I have coming. First time I answered it I thought it was at least a live person, but now everytime it goes to VM I realize its the same exact recording.
 
I should probably do this. Looked and there’s one in there from 6/30/2019.

Edit: It’s been listened to but still...
 
Once Sept. 5 comes and goes.... Maybe I need to actually accept one of the car warranty phone calls.... Ask them what the coverage is on Tesla Transmissions, or if they would cover replacing my alternator.

PS. 1 year anniversary coming up. Still no buyer's regrets. Frequent software updates keep making it better.
 
we are in progress to block each of them, so far the one number has 78 different numbers.

Barb has a new phone, the process starts over.
 
we are in progress to block each of them, so far the one number has 78 different numbers.

Barb has a new phone, the process starts over.

They can spoof any number as can I. Blocking by number is useless.

I’ve explained the tech details here before.

What number do you want me to call you from? It’s just a data field on the SIP call that I can change at will.
 
My last voicemail was from Billy at King Soopers pharmacy looking for someone to tell them their prescription was ready. They had called my Colorado Google Voice number which I don't really use any more. I called King Soopers back to say they had the wrong number. Didn't want someone to miss out on their prescription. I knew it was King Soopers because T-Mobile now provides automatic caller ID.
 
Didn't want someone to miss out on their prescription.

I've received a couple of voicemails from nurses at distant hospitals, calling me as a wrong number and addressing me by the name of a doctor, asking what to do about a certain patient. That really worried me, for the poor patient, so I phoned back and left a voicemail message that hopefully let the nurses know that they reached a wrong number.
 
I had gone a few months without a spam call and in the past 24 hours have had 6 social security scam ones. They're baaaaaack!
 
I had also gone quite a while, but yesterday I received a call from a spoofed number (my local exchange) saying they were from Apple and that my account had been compromised. In this case caller ID wasn't helpful because it showed someone's name. Even though I didn't know the person, I answered. If I had just seen the number I would have known it was spoofed.
 
Maybe caller ID is not such a good idea. Just now a received a call that showed up as 'Agilent Tech', a real company. It was a SS scam. Again, I probably wouldn't have answered if I had only seen a number I didn't recognize.
 
I've received a couple of voicemails from nurses at distant hospitals, calling me as a wrong number and addressing me by the name of a doctor, asking what to do about a certain patient. That really worried me, for the poor patient, so I phoned back and left a voicemail message that hopefully let the nurses know that they reached a wrong number.

Could be one of our pre employment drug screening failures who’s given us a fake Dr number thinking it’ll save them longer from us reporting a positive.

Doesn’t work that way but they do try to delay getting fired.

One guy said recently (the agents keep a scoreboard of the best excuses) that he tried to not take amphetamines but he really had to mow the lawn before his drug test. LOL.

I could kinda feel his pain there. Hahaha.

I had also gone quite a while, but yesterday I received a call from a spoofed number (my local exchange) saying they were from Apple and that my account had been compromised. In this case caller ID wasn't helpful because it showed someone's name. Even though I didn't know the person, I answered. If I had just seen the number I would have known it was spoofed.

Maybe caller ID is not such a good idea. Just now a received a call that showed up as 'Agilent Tech', a real company. It was a SS scam. Again, I probably wouldn't have answered if I had only seen a number I didn't recognize.

The bad guys spoof any number they want. Your carrier looks up the real owner of the number and displays it to you. It’s truly utterly a worthless feature. Most of the real name/number databases are also three months behind on any changes.

There is no money in voice. It’s just a commodity data stream riding along with the data money maker. There’s zero investment or real standards work being done in it. It’s literally network garbage traffic. Kinda like USPS and junk mail. Except it doesn’t pay any bills. Just overhead.

Given the choice, carriers would just shut down voice PSTN interconnect to cell phones and tell ya to go use Zoom or something else. They’d just leave the price the same and charge you for delivering data.

Of course if they did that, spammers would suddenly decide if figuring out how to get into things like FaceTime would still turn a profit. LOL.

“I’d like to buy a thousand iPads please...”

Or whatever the next version of spam calls turns out to be.

But the PSTN has NO ability to control it. No matter what their marketing says about blocking features and such that they sometimes even get people to pay extra for.
 
Answering the calls can be fun! Take up as much of their time as you can...pretend you are having trouble understanding them, make them repeat pitch several times, ask a bunch of questions, tell them you want what they are selling, then ask to put phone down to go get your credit card...but don't pick up handset until you hear, "if you would like to place a call..."

Be creative,this is agent Flynn NSA intercept station AB please authenticate or XYZ Police Department, Detective Friday...just some suggestions.
 
Answering the calls can be fun! Take up as much of their time as you can...pretend you are having trouble understanding them, make them repeat pitch several times, ask a bunch of questions, tell them you want what they are selling, then ask to put phone down to go get your credit card...but don't pick up handset until you hear, "if you would like to place a call..."

Be creative,this is agent Flynn NSA intercept station AB please authenticate or XYZ Police Department, Detective Friday...just some suggestions.

takes too much time to get to a real person...
 
If the telcos didn't make money on this, they would have fixed the caller ID spoofing problem a long time ago.

AT&T now graciously offers me a feature that shows 'spam alert' for suspicious caller IDs. What they dont offer is a feature to simply block those calls from even making it to my phone.
 
I simply do not answer any call that I do not recognize the caller id. If they leave a message, I listen to it.
 
Many of the spoofing calls use an exchange close to the one your number is in to get you to pick up exploiting the 'oh, its gotta be that new neighbor' affinity scam . Works for me as my cell is an out of state number and from an exchange that only contains other cell numbers, so there is a virtually zero chance that anyone would call me from there.
 
Answering the calls can be fun! Take up as much of their time as you can...pretend you are having trouble understanding them, make them repeat pitch several times, ask a bunch of questions, tell them you want what they are selling, then ask to put phone down to go get your credit card...but don't pick up handset until you hear, "if you would like to place a call..."

Be creative,this is agent Flynn NSA intercept station AB please authenticate or XYZ Police Department, Detective Friday...just some suggestions.
Some people, me included, are not entertained by playing games like this.
 
If the telcos didn't make money on this, they would have fixed the caller ID spoofing problem a long time ago.

AT&T now graciously offers me a feature that shows 'spam alert' for suspicious caller IDs. What they dont offer is a feature to simply block those calls from even making it to my phone.

Truly they don’t make much of anything on voice. If they lost more money on it they’d just stop offering traditional voice service.

Voice requiring extra hardware is a money suck they don’t need except it gets them other regulatory perks like rights of way, etc.

News came out this week or last that a bunch of cities are suing the direct video content providers because they bypass the cable systems and they’re going to lose those precious cable franchise “fees” and taxes.

Direct data to the home and direct content provider to the home, means uh-oh, the municipality loses money from the cable monopoly they created...

Buddy of mine jokingly fixed it already. “Ok, so Netflix and Disney just say no service to that city. Problem solved. The people will love that!”
 
Answering the calls can be fun! Take up as much of their time as you can...pretend you are having trouble understanding them, make them repeat pitch several times, ask a bunch of questions, tell them you want what they are selling, then ask to put phone down to go get your credit card...but don't pick up handset until you hear, "if you would like to place a call..."

Be creative,this is agent Flynn NSA intercept station AB please authenticate or XYZ Police Department, Detective Friday...just some suggestions.
Meh.

I have no use or time for the bombast and invective in political calls these days. Not worth my time to screw with them.
 
I had gone a few months without a spam call and in the past 24 hours have had 6 social security scam ones. They're baaaaaack!

Yeah, same here. I noticed I had 5-6 calls rejected by my phone yesterday, and so far today 2 of those numbers has called back. No voice mail left so it is not important.
 
Someone spoofed our office fax line. We couldn’t figure out why daily for two hours we’d get call after call for a couple hours on the fax line. One day we hooked a phone to the line and answered..

my partner chewed the guys arse bad that answered. But the guy hollared back and says “I missed a call from you and was calling back.”

that’s when we figured out someone had been using our number to call people... all the calls were from people that missed the call, seen it was local and called it back!
 
Someone spoofed our office fax line. We couldn’t figure out why daily for two hours we’d get call after call for a couple hours on the fax line. One day we hooked a phone to the line and answered..

my partner chewed the guys arse bad that answered. But the guy hollared back and says “I missed a call from you and was calling back.”

that’s when we figured out someone had been using our number to call people... all the calls were from people that missed the call, seen it was local and called it back!

Gotta ask. Why would the ringer even be on, on a fax machine or fax line? :)

I get the fax machine thing and fax servers. We do something like 50,000 of the stupid things per month or more.

Just not the ringer. Silence is golden. :)
 
Gotta ask. Why would the ringer even be on, on a fax machine or fax line? :)

I get the fax machine thing and fax servers. We do something like 50,000 of the stupid things per month or more.

Just not the ringer. Silence is golden. :)

idk it was an old POS we have since put in the trash... we looked for a ringer silent..
 
I've received a couple of voicemails from nurses at distant hospitals, calling me as a wrong number and addressing me by the name of a doctor, asking what to do about a certain patient. That really worried me, for the poor patient, so I phoned back and left a voicemail message that hopefully let the nurses know that they reached a wrong number.
Now they know that you are a live person with an active functioning phone number. One more for them to put in their "for sale" column.
 
I think some of these 'wrong numbers' are genuine. About a year ago I kept getting messages for some guy whose boss was calling from Macys. I never answered, but I don't shop at Macys and thought it was some promotion. But the message was always about this guy's work scheduling. Finally I called the number back. It really was Macys, and his supervisor.
 
I think some of these 'wrong numbers' are genuine. About a year ago I kept getting messages for some guy whose boss was calling from Macys. I never answered, but I don't shop at Macys and thought it was some promotion. But the message was always about this guy's work scheduling. Finally I called the number back. It really was Macys, and his supervisor.

Bet that guy never got called on his day off after giving that bad phone number! LOL!

“Yeaaaaahhhh... soooooo.... you’re going to have to come in on Saturday....”
 
Answering the calls can be fun! Take up as much of their time as you can...pretend you are having trouble understanding them, make them repeat pitch several times, ask a bunch of questions, tell them you want what they are selling, then ask to put phone down to go get your credit card...but don't pick up handset until you hear, "if you would like to place a call..."
Doesn't work. It's almost never a live person, all robocalls. Apparently they've figured out that scripted voice robocalls are even cheaper than third-world coffee shop scammers.
I simply do not answer any call that I do not recognize the caller id. If they leave a message, I listen to it.
Bingo. They almost never leave a message for us.
Many of the spoofing calls use an exchange close to the one your number is in to get you to pick up exploiting the 'oh, its gotta be that new neighbor' affinity scam . Works for me as my cell is an out of state number and from an exchange that only contains other cell numbers, so there is a virtually zero chance that anyone would call me from there.
I never - EVER - answer calls from our own exchange. 100.0% scam rate.

We switched to Ooma about a year and a half ago. Although it's not perfect, they do use Nomorobo to reduce the number of scam calls. They also let you block numbers based on partial numbers. I can block an area code and exchange (NPA/NXX) or even an entire area code, which I've done for DC and parts of Florida, as well as many exchanges in our own area code. The spammers and scammers usually use our own area code and some random exchange, which mostly shows up on caller ID as the name of some remote town in the boonies.

I would dearly love to just dump our house phone number, but my wife is vehemently opposed to the idea... sigh.
 
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