Dealing with Phone Spam

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Is your car warranty getting ready to expire? So is mine at least according to the daily calls I get on my land line and both cell phones (one of which is a business phone that doesn’t own a car). Web research has shown that this new brand of phone spam is rampant and there is little anyone seems to be able to do about it. There are a few websites such as PhoneSpamFilter that you can look up a number to see if its on the “spam” list. But that’s about all it does despite its claim that it can stop calls. At best it appears to be keeping a database of phone numbers that people report. The problem is that the phone numbers like many email accounts are bogus.

Dealing with email spam is much easier than dealing with phone spam. You can easily delete and block email. While the Do Not Call List can reduce the number of phone calls, stopping telemarketing calls all together is nearly impossible. I keep wishing for a button on my phone that I can push that automatically “unsubscribes” me from the list. No such luck. And going through the process of talking to a person and asking to be removed from the list doesn’t work either, even though by law the company is required to remove your name.

So what is a regular citizen supposed to do? Some clever people have resorted to payback including blowing loud noises to deafen the caller and feigning getting information and then leaving the phone sitting while going off to do something else. But these things take time. The standard answer now is to see if your phone company (probably for a price) can block numbers. This probably won’t work because most of these spam callers change their CID’s (like spoofing in email) anyway. So in the end, all you can do is just not pick up the phone if you don’t recognize the number.

That’s not the answer you were hoping for, I’m sure. I know its not the answer I was wanting either. But until someone invents a phone spam filter, its probably the best course of action.