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Getting a lot of Annoying Calls?? Try this, for Cell or Landline AnswerMachine.

dent007
Good Citizen / Bon Citoyen

IF you want to keep the phone number you have and you want to stop junk calls/voicemail here are 2 suggestions:

 

1) set your phone to only accept calls that are in your contact list. (drastic)

2)THIS works great and is easy to do....Set up your voicemail to say " hello this is a recording, wait for the beep".........10/15 second (or more) of SILENCE................. beeeep. Play around with the length of silence. What happens is the spammers connect and only hear silence, then they hangup before your voicemail beep kicks in. Anyone that knows you will wait to leave a msg, or you call them back. ( I have used this tactic for years and it works )

And no more Voice Mailbox Full.

UPDATE: Most of the Replies below are confusing and unnecessary. I posted this to hopefully help someone stop the junk calls.

9 REPLIES 9

BEER
Town Hero / Héro de la Ville

Good advise - in addition what I do is activate the  - reply with "respond with text" - that sends a text back to the caller with something like " Can't take your call - would you please text me. I also activate the "block this caller" feature.

Zyl
Model Citizen / Citoyen Modèle

@Korth   There is no excuse whatsoever for hospitals to hide their number when calling.  If it's to hide from the spammers/scammers and telemarketers, hiding their number is not going to cut it.  If a spammer, scammer or telemarketer wants to find you, they will still find you regardless whether your number is hidden or not. 

Korth
Mayor / Maire

@Zyl 

 

The paranoid secrecy is a symptom of arrogance, lol.

 

Of course medical professionals don't want patients calling their personal numbers. Of course they don't want to be bothered by work when they're not working. There's probably all sorts of formal rules and regulations and requirements (about minimizing liability risks, etc) which overspecify exactly how many calls a doctor can take per day and how they must be handled and all that stuff.

 

But receptionists and offices were invented a long time ago, and now they've even got machinery which can automatically take messages and do callbacks and confirm appointments and stuff - all sorts of businesses use these things - so there's really no acceptable excuse for certain services (especially the most critical of services) failing to provide basic courtesy and service to their customers.

Zyl
Model Citizen / Citoyen Modèle

@Korth except hospitals.  They call you once to give you an appointment and if they can't reach you they just give up.  They don't care.  And if you complain, they can show that they called.  And you can't even call them back because they show up as "unknown numbers". Dunno why they have to be so secretive.  

Meow
Mayor / Maire

@Zyl wrote:

And you are going to lose lots of calls from legitimate .  


Some doctor's offices are blocking their number so you see 'unanimous' or similar for name and number. Very inconvenient move from their side so you have to pick it up not knowing is it Dr. or spammer.

Zyl
Model Citizen / Citoyen Modèle

@dent007  now that you have published this, the spammers and the scammers after going to wait for the beeps now to leave you a message now.  🙂 And you are going to lose lots of calls from legitimate businesses/organizations like hospitals who do not know you well but actually called you to tell you something important like giving you a doctor's appointment that you have been waiting for for 6 months.  

Korth
Mayor / Maire

@dent007 wrote:

2)THIS works great and is easy to do....Set up your voicemail to say " hello this is a recording, wait for the beep".........10/15 second (or more) of SILENCE................. beeeep. Play around with the length of silence. What happens is the spammers connect and only hear silence, then they hangup before your voicemail beep kicks in. Anyone that knows you will wait to leave a msg, or you call them back. ( I have used this tactic for years and it works )


I just go one step further. I turn off my mic and immediately hit the stop button when recording my voicemail greeting. Simple silence with no length, or as short a silence as possible. So incoming callers hear nothing at all.

 

If they're people I know (on my contacts list, etc) or they're calls I'm expecting for then I can already see their missed calls on my phone and call them back. Immediately ... or whenever. Which is all okay with me since I can already see that they've called, I see their number and time and date, I might even have texts from them as well, I don't need to waste time listening to a message saying they called.

 

If they're people I don't know then they probably don't know me either - and they also aren't even sure whether or not the number they dialed or the voicemail even works. I find that important incoming callers always leave messages, if they feel it's urgent then they always explore every option they can to reach you. But unimportant and unwanted callers simply hang up, they don't waste their time talking to a machine, they don't waste their time leaving messages which (as far as they know) will never be heard.

 

Only the automated robocallers sometimes persist (when programmed to do so), but they're all garbage anyhow so I have no qualms about my habit of routinely interrupting, deleting, and permanently blocking them.

Meow
Mayor / Maire

1. Not good as legitimate calls will be rejected.

2. Not good either as your vmail will provide voice feedback and most likely make machine wait for vmail to start recording.

I believe those spam systems wait for ANY kind of sound when connection is made to start their pitch.

When I answer such calls if I do not say a word after 2-3 seconds connection is severed; if I respond with ANY sound, machine starts taking.

softech
Oracle
Oracle

thanks @dent007 for the suggestions,  spammers are really hard to get rid of these day.

 

Another highly respected  member suggested the help of  "Lenny" as well:

 

https://productioncommunity.publicmobile.ca/t5/Get-Support/Lenny-the-Telemarketers-worst-nightmare/t...

 

 

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