After living with this nuisance for over a year now, I've learned several things about it:
1) Much of this solicitation is from overseas and thus outside of U.S. jurisdiction and laws, so forget about stopping most of it.
2) The F.B.I. is far too busy and understaffed to be messing around with annoying phone calls.
3) Phone numbers are "spoofed" so that you cannot just block them - they change constantly. If you have caller ID and return the call, it will either ring in some innocent person's phone, or it will come back as "disconnected." They leave no trace.
4) They use high speed autodialers to spam the phone networks which is why you receive so many calls. It must be productive or they would give up, so there are still "suckers born every minute" and more elderly with cognitive dysfunction who cannot intelligently screen for scams.
5) They are high-speed, high volume operations, so they do not have time to "remove" your number from the call list. In fact they have no idea what number the computer dialed.
In short, no one can stop it...not the FBI, not the FTC, not law enforcement, not being on "no call" lists because they are off-shore and our U.S. laws do not apply. You can either ignore the phone and use an answering machine to screen calls, or you can check your caller ID for unknown numbers or callers and not answer. We have been so conditioned to jump when the phone rings that we ignore common sense. Tell your friends to leave a message and you'll call them right back.
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Unstoppable - deal with it
1) Much of this solicitation is from overseas and thus outside of U.S. jurisdiction and laws, so forget about stopping most of it.
2) The F.B.I. is far too busy and understaffed to be messing around with annoying phone calls.
3) Phone numbers are "spoofed" so that you cannot just block them - they change constantly. If you have caller ID and return the call, it will either ring in some innocent person's phone, or it will come back as "disconnected." They leave no trace.
4) They use high speed autodialers to spam the phone networks which is why you receive so many calls. It must be productive or they would give up, so there are still "suckers born every minute" and more elderly with cognitive dysfunction who cannot intelligently screen for scams.
5) They are high-speed, high volume operations, so they do not have time to "remove" your number from the call list. In fact they have no idea what number the computer dialed.
In short, no one can stop it...not the FBI, not the FTC, not law enforcement, not being on "no call" lists because they are off-shore and our U.S. laws do not apply. You can either ignore the phone and use an answering machine to screen calls, or you can check your caller ID for unknown numbers or callers and not answer. We have been so conditioned to jump when the phone rings that we ignore common sense. Tell your friends to leave a message and you'll call them right back.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by mldavis2.
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