How to stop scam phone calls for good?

As I've said before I bought the BT phone system soon after it came out, I dont miss calls as the likes of the Doctors etc have my mobile no, the home phone sits quietly in the corner doing its job of blocking calls, we get the odd one or two a week blocked by the phone which are easily deleted.

Martin P

I don't have any blocking software or pay for any such services, and I get maybe 2 silly phone calls a month. As soon as I answer, if I or my phone don't recognise the caller, I ask what it's about, and if it's any unsolicited business I just say 'No, not interested' and hang up immediately.

As I said, unsolicited calls certainly haven't stopped completely, but they're not giving me much grief these days.

Look around the market near the end of contract for the nxt cheap supplier and dont take phone no. with you. Just pass new no. on to friends and relatives and club membership secretaries with instruction not to publish. Members know to contact the M.S. for info missing from membership list. Only give out new no. where forced to do so, leaving all the commerciial sites to "whistle" with obsolete no. My phone never rings from scammers these days.

I think the main problem is that most of these calls originate from random diallers that take a valid STD code and combine it with a random number. Then they use an ISDN connection to throw this at the network, generating calls at a very high rate. Only if the call is answered will the computer doing this pass it on to a human operator, and often not even then as they can engage the person called with a recorded message so only bring in a human scammer if the called person selects an option or stays on the line. Very often when we get a call and do answer it, it quickly disconnects anyway as they clearly don't even have the computer capacity to play the recorded message. These calls can be generated so quickly and easily and cheaply for the scammer that they only need a small hit rate to make money.