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What is Verizon doing to stop telemarketers?

This is now a huge issue with almost everyone. Being on the "do not call" list means nothing. Landlines are already going the way of the dinosaurs and daily telemarketing calls with hasten the death of the home phone. Cell phones are also victims to this crap, but why get pestered from two fronts when you can cancel one easy enough. Legislation to require caller ID is a joke. The phone still rings with nothing but recordings for mortgages and credit card crap.

Instead of helping, Verizon wants to charge me a bundle of money for blocking the repeatedly same numbers. I'm paying $600 a year to get harassed and they want more of my money to make the harassment stop.

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acraftylady2

@turbobuick86 wrote:
This is now a huge issue with almost everyone. Being on the "do not call" list means nothing. Landlines are already going the way of the dinosaurs and daily telemarketing calls with hasten the death of the home phone. Cell phones are also victims to this crap, but why get pestered from two fronts when you can cancel one easy enough. Legislation to require caller ID is a joke. The phone still rings with nothing but recordings for mortgages and credit card crap.
Instead of helping, Verizon wants to charge me a bundle of money for blocking the repeatedly same numbers. I'm paying $600 a year to get harassed and they want more of my money to make the harassment stop.

If telemarkets that are not exempt from the do not call list are calling you need to report them. What I would do is tell them oy are on the list and they need to remove your name and you will report them for calling you as they are in violation and will get in trouble. I have been on the do not call list since day one and the only calls I get are for donations and maybe 5 a year if that so the do not call list works fine for me, same for my Mom who is on it. I go in and re-do it every year just to make sure. I also don't fill out anything for contests or give my number out so that helps too, stopped doing that stuff years ago. Mary

turbobuick86

These calls are recordings made by machines. No one to talk to unless you give them more info and they call back. This has gone way beyond the simple "please don't here call again". They are ruthless and never ending and it's going to require intervention by phone companies and the government.

I'm 54 years old. Went decades without calls since the do not call registry became a reality. It's only in the last year or so that the harassment is crazy.

acraftylady2

Well take down the info they leave and google it and report them is all I can say. If they are not exempt from the do not call list then they are in violation and you would have to report them yourself and not wait for verizon to do something is all I can say. Sad to say but we as consumers have to take things into our own hands if we want something done I am finding out. I hear ya though as I have had that happen years ago before the do not call list. Come home from vacation to recordings about CC and such taking up the whole answering machine. We ditched the home phone and had the number ported to my cell and it's the best thing I ever did as I don't have to dial home anymore to check messages. Mary

mleduc35651

@turbobuick86 wrote:
These calls are recordings made by machines. No one to talk to unless you give them more info and they call back. This has gone way beyond the simple "please don't here call again". They are ruthless and never ending and it's going to require intervention by phone companies and the government.
I'm 54 years old. Went decades without calls since the do not call registry became a reality. It's only in the last year or so that the harassment is crazy.

Some of this is sounding like a problem that has been surfacing the past year or two.

There are some outfits operating outside of the laws and regulations. There typically involve selling you Car Warrenties or Discounts to your credit card rates.

These places use autodialers to dial every consecutive number. They ignore donot call lists. They get rude and hang up if you ask any questions. They often spoof the Call Display number.

There is something going on at the FCC about Call ID spoofing but not sure where that stands.

There really isn't a lot that can be done to stop these particular calls.

Jahala

The majority of the time these calls come through with Caller ID's such as Unknown or Unavailable or with nothing at all. Verizon has Call Intercept which is supposed to intercept all such unknown calls and require the caller to identify himself or herself. If the caller does respond, then your phone rings and the Caller ID shows Call Intercepted and the caller's message is given to you and you have the choice of accepting or rejecting the call. If the caller does not leave the required message [and recordings don't, but occasionally an operator will catch it and chime in], then the call is ended and your phone doesn't ring. The only drawback to this service is that it does cost extra.

EEEEEE

I'm pretty much just going to echo what acraftylady said....I am on the Do Not Call list and just about never get telemarketer calls. You need to be REALLY careful about who you are giving your number out to. Whenever I have to give my number out, I make sure to tell them that I do not want it sold on any lists. Also, the few times I do actually get a call I don't just hang up on them or say "don't call here again", you have to use the magic phrase: "please remove me from your list". They are legally obligated to do so, and it takes around 90 days. The last thing is, do not put your phone number on any contest forms or give it to anyone who is trying to offer you something (like Win $25.000 in Siding for your House!) Also, I have never once received a telemarketer call on my cell phone, most likely because I've never given my cell phone number to anyone but family and friends.

I also think you are misdirecting your anger towards Verizon. No matter what company you had you'd be receiving the same calls. It is not Verizon's job to control the calls coming into your home, no matter how frustrating that may sound. Your number got out there somehow and Verizon does not sell their names and numbers on lists (that would be unethical).

acraftylady2

@EEEEEE wrote:
I'm pretty much just going to echo what acraftylady said....I am on the Do Not Call list and just about never get telemarketer calls. You need to be REALLY careful about who you are giving your number out to. Whenever I have to give my number out, I make sure to tell them that I do not want it sold on any lists. Also, the few times I do actually get a call I don't just hang up on them or say "don't call here again", you have to use the magic phrase: "please remove me from your list". They are legally obligated to do so, and it takes around 90 days. The last thing is, do not put your phone number on any contest forms or give it to anyone who is trying to offer you something (like Win $25.000 in Siding for your House!) Also, I have never once received a telemarketer call on my cell phone, most likely because I've never given my cell phone number to anyone but family and friends.
I also think you are misdirecting your anger towards Verizon. No matter what company you had you'd be receiving the same calls. It is not Verizon's job to control the calls coming into your home, no matter how frustrating that may sound. Your number got out there somehow and Verizon does not sell their names and numbers on lists (that would be unethical).

Yep I don't give my number out on anything anymore unless important. My home number I had 20yrs. was ported to my verizon cell so we could drop the home phone since we hardly make or receive a lot of calls. Depending on who I am calling I can just use the call ID blocking feature on my verizon cell service so my number does not show up on the other end when I make the call, love this feature.

When I did have a home phone I just screened the calls as I knew out of area or unavailable was junk. My theory was even if family was calling from a hospital pay phone for an emergency they would start to leave a message and I could pick up.

Now someone in another post said that the out of area or unavailable would come through with a number on other providers. I would like to know if that's true as when I visit family in Pa. and Ohio they don't have verizon as their home phone service and junk calls still come up as out of area or unavailable. I just thought the telemarketers had some way to make the number like that and no matter what it didn't show up with any phone service caller ID. Mary

hbowles@gmail.com

One of beauties of the now-discontiued IOBI was that you were able to block a certain number of numbers - and you could easily update the list at any time. I also receive a number of telemarketing calls that show up as "unavailable" - if I do answer, most of the time, there is no one there.

Funniest telemarketing call I remember was actually from Verizon - as the guy (from India) was eplaining the benefits of FIOS, the call dropped.

charliebarrett

I once purchased a call block service from Verizon in which you could block specific numbers.

UNFORTUNENTLY, It did not work with Long Distance numbers, so it was worthless and I canceled it after much frustration, and finally reading that in the fine print of the service description. If that's the same service you mentioned, that's probably why it was discontinued - I'm sure they got a flood of complaints about it not working. It was also time consuming entering the phone list, because you had to do it manually if the number already hung up.

As a solution, I purchased a software program for my PC called "Teley Phone Call Filter" that uses the Caller ID feature of my computer's Fax/Voice modem to capture the call, and match it to its number list. If there is a match, the modem picks up the call on the 1st or 2nd ring and plays them a .WAV sound file of my choosing, using the voice feature of the modem, then hangs up on them without allowing them to even leave a message. So it works pretty good if you wait to the 3rd or 4th ring to answer the phone. There is a certain satisfaction to hearing the phone ring twice and then go silent :-))

Teley lets you assign a different WAV file to each number, so you can use the PC's sound recorder to create customized messages for specific callers. I also have a lot of .WAV files I got off the Internet which sound like official Telephone Company messages, with the loud tones, followed by "Number is not in service", "You must deposit 25 cents", 'your phone service has been restricted", "Not accepting calls from your number", etc.

Also, Teley allows you to add to its number list by right-clicking on the Teley's Caller ID record, and then it pops up a window to let you pick the WAV file from a list and set the number of rings to wait before answering the phone.

Teley is rough around the edges though... .I had trouble configuring it for my Voice Modem and Sound card, so I had to buy a better Voice Modem than the WinModem I had (seems to prefer a good Sportster voice/caller id modem with a built-in processor)), but that was like $15 on eBay.

DANG IT though, if my PC can block the call, then Verizon could certainly add the same features to their service and prevent the phone from ringing even once. Both the WAV files and number list could be managed by a pretty simple web page added to the existing "My Verizon"! web site, and there would be no modem installation issues.

charliebarrett

Oh... I forgot to add to my post above: Be careful about just automatically blocking numbers on Teley that never leave a message or say "Unknown" even though Caller ID displays a number - I always call them back to see who they are before adding them to the list. If you Google the number, several web sites often pop up whenever someone has reported the number as a telemarketer. Those are handy to be sure about numbers that don't answer when I call them back to see who they are.

My doctor's Caller ID says "Unknown" for HIPPA reasons he says, and my mother's and brother-in-law's cell phone displays "NOT_AVAILABLE", even though both display a number. Ditto for my bank and one of my credit card companies. They all have a habit of calling several times a day for a week and not leaving messages for privacy reasons. Their Caller ID has a number, but the name usually says "Unknown" , "Not Available", "Unavailable, etc, or sometimes the name just has the State name. But telemarketers do all that too, so it's hard to tell whether it's a telemarketer or just my bank or doctor, especially when they call from different phone numbers.

acraftylady2

On my phone I can just go into settings and have it to only receive calls from people in my address book then all other's my phone does not ring and sends them right to voice mail then if I get a voicemail notice can check and see if it was important. Mary

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