Mallicious phone calls - Good news

At one point I wrote several posts on this general subject.  The most recent one is at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2013/06/malicious-phone-calls-57-results.html.  That's a while ago now.  Why did I stop?  Frankly, the reason was the situation at that time was hopeless.  Everywhere I turned I hit a brick wall.  So I gave up, or at least put the problem on to the back burner.  Now that has all changed.  I now have a fix that works for me for the vast majority of these calls.  Since only a few now make it through they are easy to deal with.  So for me the problem is solved.  But the solution that worked for me will not work for everyone.  In the hope that it will work for you here are the details.

There are two components to the fix.  One of them is a free web site and the technology behind it.  The site (http://www.nomorobo.com/) (short for NO MOre ROBOcalls) is available to all.  And have I mentioned it is FREE?  You have to create an account but that's a piece of cake.  So this is not the part that will get in the way of people using their service.  So what might get in the way?

Your phone company has to support a feature called "Simultaneous Ring".  What's that?  It is a feature that used to be available only to business customers because it was complicated, and therefore expensive, to implement.  But it is not complicated now because so much of phone service is now computerized.  Is Simultaneous Ring available to everyone?  No!  But it is available to lots of people.

It is available to pretty much anyone who uses Voice over IP (VoIP).  Vonage is the vendor most associated with this technology so if you get your phone service from Vonage you are covered.  And it turns out a lot of other companies that provide phone service use VoIP without making a big deal out of it.  Comcast does.  So if you get your home phone service from Comcast you now have access to the Simultaneous Ring feature.  By the way, Comcast only recently opened this feature up to all of their customers.

Lots of other companies also offer it.  I suspect that the other cable companies that offer home phone service do too but you'll have to check.  The simple way to check if your phone company offers the feature is to go to the NOMOBOBO web site and press the "Get Started Now" button.  They will ask you about who your phone company is.  They in turn will tell you if that company offers the feature and how to access/activate it.  So what is it?

Let's say you are a high powered executive who jets all over the place (this is before cell phones).  Wouldn't it be nice if a local phone would ring wherever you were?  And as soon as you picked up the phone your call was instantly and seamlessly transferred to that phone.  You can see how in the era before cell phones that would have been desirable.  Now people just give their mobile number out.  Your phone registers itself with the local cell tower and the information is relayed back to your mobile phone provider.  Whenever a call comes in it is automatically routed to wherever your mobile phone is.

In the same way the computers that implement mobile phone service can find you and route things around, the Simultaneous Ring service is an old school way of doing the same thing.  And in some situations it can still be useful.  Let's say you still have a home phone. Then you may want people to call you on your home phone when you are home.  But you might also want calls to your home phone to be automatically routed to your mobile when you are away from home.  Is there a way to do this?  It turns out there is if you have access to the Simultaneous Ring feature.

Let's say that whenever someone calls your home number it rings at home.  But it also rings on your mobile.  If you are home and both phones ring at the same time you just pick up on your home phone.  The telephone computer figures out what happened and stops ringing your mobile.  If you are not at home you don't hear your home phone ringing so you answer your mobile.  As soon as you do your home phone stops ringing, hopefully before voicemail kicks in.

That's the key to how NOMOROBO works.  You enter the phone number of NOMOROBO in your "Simultaneous Ring" list.  Your regular phone rings and the NOMOROBO line rings.  When this happens NOMOROBO gets the caller ID information from your call.  It does a nearly instantaneous lookup on the number.  If it is in its "bad" list it picks up the call and sends a recorded message to whoever has called.  As soon as NOMOROBO picks the call up your phone stops ringing.  You have to remember to wait till your phone rings a second time before picking up.  If your phone rings that second time it means that NOMOROBO has not found the calling number on its "bad" list.

So you create an account and register your home phone number in it at the NOMOROBO web site.  And you add the number NOMOROBO gives you to your Simultaneous Ring list with your phone company.  That's it.  And it works.  I used to get up to three and four of these kinds of calls per day.  I was forced to always let my phone go to voicemail if I didn't recognize the number.  I rarely get any of those kinds of calls any more.  I now feel it's safe to answer my phone even if I don't recognize the number.

I do occasionally get a bad call.  I just note down the details, log into my account on NOMOROBO and fill out a simple form with the information.  NOMOROBO checks it and, if they decide it's a bad actor, the number gets added to their "bad" list.  Then neither I nor any other NOMOROBO subscriber get harassed by calls from that number.  Bad actors can change numbers quickly.  But NOMOROBO quickly gets a report and the number is quickly added to their database.  I can't think of a time I have gotten a second call from a bad actor after reporting their number to NOMOROBO.  I suspect that by now bad actors are maintaining a list of phone numbers that use NOMOROBO.  It saves them from calling numbers that are not going to go through.

The NOMOROBO web site is extremely easy to use.  So instead let me run you through the Comcast procedure because there is one tricky item on the list.  It is after all Comcast I am talking about.  Here are step by step instructions:

1. Go to the infinity.comcast.net web page.
2. Click on the "Sign In" box in the upper right part of the page. 
3. Complete the regular sign in procedure.
4. Click on "Voice and Text" from the column on the left.
5. Click on "Preferences" from the bar across the top.
6. Click on the "Voice" Icon.
7. There will be a number of blue bars along the left side of the screen.
8. Wait a few seconds.  One of them will change to say "Advanced Call Forwarding".
9. Click on "Advanced Call Forwarding" to expand that part of the screen.
10. There will be four slots for phone numbers.
11. Your home phone number will already be in the list.  Leave that number alone.
12. Click the "Add" button next to one of the other slots.
13. Now fill the NOMOROBO number in and make sure it takes.
14. Close everything out.

By now you should have complete everything on the NOMOROBO end so you are done.  All you need to remember is to let your phone ring a second time before answering it.  And, if you want to be a good citizen, fill out the form with the appropriate information when a robocall from a new number comes in.

Finally, phone companies like to use their own names for the "Simultaneous Ring" feature.  Centurylink calls it "Find M - Follow Me" in at least some of their literature.  But you should be able to find the information you need on the NOMOROBO web site.