I am getting,
on an average, of ten robocalls each day.
I have quit answering my phone and now let the answering machine pick up
all calls.
For a while
I was answering the phone only to hear the same spiel over and over: The IRS
is auditing you; The first 100 callers – press one; knee braces almost free;
Free medical alert; congratulations you have won; your automobile warranty is about to expire...
Sometimes
the call would be followed twenty minutes later with an identical call.
I don’t know
if everyone is getting calls at this frequency, or are they particularly
targeting older people.
It makes me
wonder how many people are actually falling for and answering these scams?
I know that
people want the government to step in and somehow limit robocalls; but the
easiest way to stop them would be for all TV and Radio and internet sights to
run a one-minute info-commercial each hour telling people not to answer or
reply to any call that is not recognizable, and impress on the public that
these calls are scams.
If people no
longer responded to robocalls they would stop.
the Ol’Buzzard
I don't know many people who still have a land line if it's not for some sort of business.
ReplyDeleteWith my cell I can block numbers after the first time they call, then I have to look at the history (if I'm curious) to see if they keep calling.
The ones that annoy the bejesus out of me are the spoofing calls. They look like local numbers but it's actually some robocalling automaton half a world away. We try to screen our calls -- don't answer unless we recognize it -- but the spoofing makes that hard.
ReplyDeleteAs you know, I volunteer at a the local county historical society museum. It's small and open only seasonally. We were paying a small fortune for a landline. I started tracking the phone calls and realized a good 95% were robocalls. Then I learned we could transfer the landline number to a TracFone, so that's what the museum has now. Costs us maybe a quarter of what the landline did annually. I'd ditch the museum phone entirely but every two or three months we'll get a call from some local (or former local) geezer who's still living in the 20th century.
I never answer my phone unless I recognize the number or caller ID. Everyone else gets the cold shoulder.
ReplyDeleteMy son has put a message on my computer phone that says if you want to talk to "XXX" press 1, if you are a telemarketer press 2. 1 gets the caller through to my phone or answering machine, 2 cuts the call off. And I never ever get any kind of robocalls now.
ReplyDeleteDavid enrolled our phones, mobile and house phone with the No-Call network here in Texas. You should look to see if your state offers it. The phone only rings if it's a wrong number. Although the phone does only ring one ring if it's a robo-call or the callers from India/Pakistan. It's wonderful. No more telemarketers.
ReplyDeleteMy 80-something mother once received a call telling her that her 80-something sister was in jail and needed some exorbitant amount of money wired for her bail. Mom called me at work in hysterics asking for me to help her get the money sent...thankfully she reached out to me instead of trying to handle it herself, and I was able to convince her that it wasn't real. It's just disgusting to learn how low those scummy scammers will go, though. I hope there is a special place in hell for them.
ReplyDelete