Rachael from Card Services calls EVERY MORNING. We have already switched our answering machine to announce only. We dread answering the phone.
If Verizon can't deal with this spammer - if it can't control its own wires and network - then we are prepared to dump Verizon and just use cell service. Than's $500/year of lost revenue including the "inside wire maintenence" annuity because of Verizon's total management incompetence or indifference not to mention lost revenue to 3 levels of government.
I'm guessing less than a month before they are gone.
Welcome to the forums.
I could give you the long story, but trust me when I tell you no landline phone company has any control over who calls you. They are legally required to pass each and every call through. Rachel is not Verizon's fault and they can do nothing to control her.
What you can do is use the tools provided to reduce or eliminate junk calls. If you have FiOS Digital Voice, you can use the 100 entry block list to stop many callers. Even better is to setup your phone to use nomorobo's free junk call block list, which contains thousands of phone numbers and is updated constantly. Works great and costs nothing. Check out nomorobo.com for the details (again, know that this only works with FiOS Digital Voice).
If you have a traditional phone line you can get a phone with call screening and blocking features. Many folks find these devices work reasonably well. If you want suggestions on equipment post back.
Of course, you should also make sure you're on both your state's and the federal do-not-call list. While many junk callers ignore these lists with impunity, there are still plenty of (semi) legitimate business that do obey the law. It can only help to have your number of the DNC lists.
If you really aren't using your landline, then maybe it is time to dump it and go cell only. Cell numbers currently get less junk callers than landlines, but I expect that may change after a few years. These junk callers just don't care about regulations and they are very good at hiding who they really are so government can't go after them.
Good Luck.
Some years ago when I was on jury duty, the ADA finished her summation with a “Follow the Money” discussion. The same applies here.
Verizon has an expensive, paid for, rapidly obsoleting, copper wire land line network. It is still a profit center. Jobs, salaries, bonuses and promotions depend on its use. Verizon gets paid to carry calls to our home or business on their land lines. Look at the numbers:
Even at $.01 (a penny) a call, 1 million calls per day (and Rachael is a multiple of that) equals $3,600,000 per year! And that doesn’t include the “charity”, “your computer has a virus”, and all of the other scams that pay Verizon to reach your home.
Obviously, the technology to stop these calls is available. The motivation is not. Do you see Verizon going to its lobbyists and regulators saying that to protect its customers, they need to stop robocalls (and give up the revenue)?
Follow the money.
Obviously, the technology to stop these calls is available. The motivation is not. Do you see Verizon going to its lobbyists and regulators saying that to protect its customers, they need to stop robocalls (and give up the revenue)?
Actually, the technology to stop this calls is not as simple as you think. The telephone network is based on standards that go back decades. They were written at a time when the phone network was run by one company and all network equipment was trusted. This is not true today. It is trivial to "spoof" callerID which will get around any call blocking system. Heck, you can even get an app for that.
A lot of these scammers don't pay Verizon on penny (or fraction of a penny) for their calls. VoIP calling allows all sorts "interesting" calling profiles that just didn't exist before. You are wrong to assume that Verizon is making money off these calls.
The existing telephone network needs extensive and very expensive changes to solve these problems. In the unregulated telephone world of today, there is no easy way to pay for these changes. International telecommunications agreements present another layer of complexity as it's possible to inject calls into the system that have no source information.
It really is a hard, expensive problem to solve.
In the meantime, we have call blocker equipment, call block lists and services like nomorobo.com to help. Determined junk callers can get around these, but they do block a huge percentage of the problem callers. If you want to control your landline, use one of these methods.
Good Luck.
You make Verizon's plight to be so sad! Poor Verizon. It is so hard to locate and block a source of a several million daily phonecalls.
But note:
-nomorobo does not work for traditional land lines like ours.
-"one company" was broken up in 1984! Certainly, you are not using 1984 technology!
I have signed the Consumer Union petition against robocalls. So have many people. CU believes that the companies are not doing as much as they can to solve this problem. They are probably right.
While I firmly believe that companies should act without government intervention, it is clear that ultimately, but probably sooner, Verizon will be forced by its regulators to clean up its act, hopefully at the shareholder's rather than the customer's expense. And the negative publicity to Verizon will substantial and justified.
Good luck!
UPDATE -
A few days ago, I got an email from Verizon asking me to check one of the above resonses as "accept as a solution".
Obviously, someone at Verizon has a sense of humor!
Within hours of the email, I heard from both "Carmen from Card Services" and from actor talking like a senior citizen trying to scam me into subscribing to some sort of notificaton alarm service. They day before, there were two calls in a row from two different actors pretending to be law enforcement people raising money for some sort of police "charity".
So NO, Verizon, I do not accept your "solution" because you haven't provided one. Indeed, you have already said you have neither a solution nor the technology to create one. Not only funny, but absurd.
The good news is that Consumer Union is starting to put real pressure on telephone companies to deal with this issue.
Good luck.
Please remember that you're talking to customers here. Nobody from Verizon has responded to your questions nor will they through this forum. If you want answers from Verizon you need to contact them through different channels.
These forums are provided as a way for customers to collaborate with each other. To help people find answers to common problems, the system allows posts to be marked as "solutions." All you got from Verizon was an automated message asking you to mark an answer as a solution to help other users. It's up to you if you want to mark a post as an answer or not.
I know you don't like to hear it, but the problem of spoofed caller ID and junk calls really is a difficult, expensive one to solve. No phone carrier, Verizon included, makes money from these calls.
Phone carriers are required by law to connect all calls. It's called common carrier status. Look it up.
Upgrading the entire national and international telephone network to solve these problems is a very complicated, expensive process. A few complaints on a random Internet board won't change anything.
If you don't want to wait for the funding to be figured out, research and development to be completed and equipment deployed; there are ways for land-line customers to deal with the issue today. You can probably find some by googling "call blocking devices" or similar. The good news is the technology is within your hands and you don't have to depend on the phone company to deploy something you probably wouldn't even trust.
Good Luck.
You have my most sincere apology!
I thought I was dealing with people from Verizon who had the authority (and even responsibiity?) to deal with this issue.
In light of the fact that the responders have neither, please delete the entire thread.
Thank you.
@peter144 wrote:You have my most sincere apology!
I thought I was dealing with people from Verizon who had the authority (and even responsibiity?) to deal with this issue.
In light of the fact that the responders have neither, please delete the entire thread.
Thank you.
Can't do that either as we are all users.
Only a Verizon admin has that capability.
I see this thread is still here. Unfortunately, so is Rachael. So last week, we switched our home-office phone from Verizon to our internet provider. I know that internet wi-fi phone service has issues and is less reliable that Verizon. The offset is a lower cost; free caller ID and free number blocking. The last two should significantly reduce spam phone calls. Indeed, Rachael seems to have lost us since we moved service.
We understand that land lines are a dying, slowly being replaced with wireless. That is technology. What we don't understand is why Verizon accelerates the trend by not making every effort to deal with the parasites who thrive on their complacency and drive remaining customers away from their service. Ultimately, people vote with their feet.
Someday, it will make an intersting business school case.
Meanwhile, we will probably make the same switch at home within a few months.
Start a new topic or ask questions in the open forum.
