“An unfamiliar number appears on your cellphone. It’s from your area code, so you answer it, thinking it might be important,” Christopher Mele writes for The New York Times. “There is an unnatural pause after you say hello, and what follows is a recording telling you how you can reduce your credit card interest rates or electric bill or prescription drug costs or any of a number of other sales pitches. Another day, another irritating robocall. If it feels as if your cellphone has increasingly been flooded with them, you’re right.”
“In a Robocall Strike Force Report in October, the Federal Communications Commission said telemarketing calls were the No. 1 consumer complaint,” Mele writes. “The most simple and effective remedy is to not answer numbers you don’t know.”
“List your phones on the National Do Not Call Registry. If your number is on the registry and you do get unwanted calls, report them,” Mele writes. “Download apps such as Truecaller, RoboKiller, Mr. Number, Nomorobo and Hiya, which will block the calls… And then there is the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, which turns the tables on telemarketers. This program allows a customer to put the phone on mute and patch telemarketing calls to a robot, which understands speech patterns and inflections and works to keep the caller engaged.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Read the full article. The National Do Not Call Registry is certainly not a panacea. These unsolicited calls are an insidious problem and the lengths to which some of these scammers go (don’t say the word “yes” or they’ll use it to bill you) is criminal!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Whit D.” for the heads up.]