Annoying phone calls

During the past few weeks my land line has been receiving calls from both land line and mobile numbers. If I or the answer machine pick up the call it immediately goes dead. I have now got to the stage where if I don't recognise the number, I don't bother answering it, The only exception is witheld numbers, which quite often are from various medics, nurses etc.

On several occasions I have rung these numbers back using my mobile with the number witheld and got a "number not recognised" recorded answer. My question is this. The telephone operators must have a list of all subscribers in order to bill them for their calls. The system is also able to recognise "fake" numbers. Why are these "unrecognised numbers" allowed on the system to annoy the likes of you and me? I bet if it was a scam to get free phone calls the operators would soon find a way of stopping it.

The number you see is not necessarily the one that originated the call. It's trivial to insert any number into the called number field in the call setup message. In any case I doubt that an operator will check that the source of a call given in the CLI message is a genuine number because first they would need a full list of every number that every sub had for every operator; and second it would be a huge processing overhead. Many of these scam calls will be generated from overseas using mass diallers that generate called numbers at random, only putting through the call to one of their operators when you say something AND is they have an operator available. They will be using one of the arrangements where working from outside a country they pay a fixed charge to get access to the UK phone network and can then make calls at ordinary national or local rates.

From time to time I receive telephone calls which begin suspiciously. I explain that I’m cooking and ask the caller to hold on. After fifteen or twenty minutes, I return to the call and explain (if the caller is still waiting) that he or she will have to hold a little longer because I’ve come to crucial part of the recipe.

Invariably, the caller has gone away by the time I return to the call.

This means that he or she can’t bother anybody else while waiting for me (and his or her company has to pay for the call) !

MC

On a smart phone , set the number as spam and the phone will no longer ring. Works on android phones.

We were always being pestered by nuisance calls, so I bought a BT branded cordless phone (actually have 3 phones but you can get just the one). This incorporates call screening and blocking facilities without any extra ongoing costs and can be used with any service provider.

Have had it for a couple of years now and it has completely stopped nuisance calls.

You can programme friends, family etc in and they get through straight away. Any number not in the list gets a recorded message asking who is calling. A legitimate caller responds, the phone then rings and plays the callers message. You can choose to accept or reject the call, or leave it to let the answerphone switch in. Scammers and nuisance callers don’t respond and also silent calls don’t even cause the phone to ring.

Cant recommend it highly enough.

It incorporates Truecall technology, but there are no ongoing costs.

Stuart

Best not to ring these numbers back! One scam is to dial people randomly from a premium rate number in the hope someone will call back to find out what's going on. Then the callee is charged several quid for listening to a useless recorded recorded message, or is engaged in a time-wasting conversation...

In the good old days phones were hard-wired making it possible to associate numbers to subscribers, and individual calls were metered. Now most of the phone network is packet switched, and phone numbers are ordinary data rather than unique routing information.

Billing is calculated rather than metered. The system is completely different from when my mates did their GPO apprenticeships. For example, International calls used to be expensive, but they're dirt cheap in a packet switched system because a multitude of users all share the same fibre optic, microwave, or satellite links. Connections are many to many rather than one to one, which enables services like Zoom.

As John says, with the right equipment, calling numbers can be changed by the sender to anything he fancies. To trace the call, which could be international, it's necessary to unpick network addresses, which can change over time. All very double edged: not much incentive to phone companies to monitor what goes on for the purpose of stopping crime because they are paid for bandwidth, whilst the same technology makes it easy for governments to keep an eye on communication users. OK when democracies use it to detect terrorists, highly dubious when authoritarian governments use it to crack down on their opponents.

Dave

Many moons ago I worked for a telecom company, but that was back in the days of GPO, when you had to have a 95A socket installed to plug your rented answering machine into. I have since moved on and am therefore not au fait with the current phone systems. With regard to "spoof" phone numbers, there is no need to check the entire phone book. When a call is made there are two numbers in the system. The first is from the originator (which the system needs to be able to charge him for the call) and the second is the "spoof" number being sent to the recipient. I am sure that it is possible to compare these two numbers and if they are different, block the call. A quick tweak of the operators T&C's and they could charge the culprit £10 for "Misuse of the network"

Any telecom CEO's reading this?

Not much will change until the law is changed at the moment as I understand you need to 'contract' out from selling calls the law should be changed to you need to 'contract' in will it happen no to much money at stake for telecom companies

H

Agree with BT Gaurdian, had the system for years and never had an unwanted call, occasionally the phone will display the fact that a call was blocked which is easily deleted.

Martin P

I dont have a home phone any more. Still have to pay for a landline though via VM to get a decent price for a tv/broadband package but a phone hasn`t been plugged in for years. At least with a mobile the unwanted calls are easy to block.