Silent Spam Calls to toll free numbers

Ryan this is Huh. For some reason I couldn't sign into my account. I get your point. Can you dispute the bogus incoming calls with your provider like At&t or whoever you have? When you get your bill, highlight all the bogus incoming calls and send them for a refund...?

I had to cancel my 800 number I had for years over it. I now won't get another 800 number. The phone company couldn't help. Someone pulled my number off my website.

The only thing I can think of is my 888 number is calling me to rack up minutes.  The calls are always the maximum of 90 minutes and it is annoying to be paying for this.  My service is Intermedia which has changed hands a lot.  They send me bogus service messages and I think they are scamming me.  Is anyone else having this problem with Intermedia?

I did this with Kall8.  The first time, they credited all of the calls for a couple months and then refused from there.  They said that it was MY problem that I was getting these calls because they were coming from upstream.  I talked to a couple other providers and they had adopted the same policy.

Kall8 finally admitted that many of their clients were getting spam calls but that they were no longer refunding them.

Do you have automated attendant functions on your number?  I set mine up to make callers punch a digit to continue and that stopped 99.9% of the calls that I had to answer.  I have had a few make it thru the AA and am not sure how they did it.

I still get billed for numerous calls per day of 24 seconds but at least I'm not having to stop and answer the phone 10 or 12 times a day for silent calls.

These idiots harvest numbers off of web sites just like they harvest email addresses for spam.  I proved this by dropping one of my old numbers that hadn't been published anywhere for years on my website.  Within a couple of weeks it was getting spam calls at the same frequency as my other numbers.

If you put a toll free number on a website, it should be in an image instead of plain text.  And that may not be 100% effective...

Hve been using the area code blocking on Kall8, since I really only need a few states and area codes.  However, as fast as I block an area code, another call comes thru from another area code. Have filed another report with the FCC.  And of course, I can't block area codes from states I do business!

I suspect that it is actually the service provider (grasshopper etc...) placing the calls, they are all  exactly the same  minutes, and they hangup -- no telemarketer is going to hangup without hitting one of those extensions we have to reach someone. So that leaves who exactly?  Why would anyone call and hangup if they want to sell you something... only the minutes keep adding up, and there's only 1 beneficiary in this situation, and that's the company itself...  They found a way to add more dollars to their invoices they're exploiting it.  I think the key is questioning your provider about these calls and demand that they find a way to stop them.

Zinger's post has some validity.
To give you an example, I use a cheap vm company and rent a vm number which I give out to all personal business contacts ( banks, credit cards, cable, stores ) because that number doesn't lead to anything. Despite everyone having that number it never gets any scam calls, ever. I asked this question to the vm company which is a really small company in NJ that doesn't even take credit cards. But even they screen out scam calls. They have a software by which they block out the overseas computer generated calls. My point is that if they can do it, the phone companies can do it too. They choose not to. Dunno why. They have dissatisfied customers who pay them a monthly fee. Is it worth it? How much money are they making off of these scam calls that they don't do anything?

} Why would anyone call and hangup if they want to sell you something

A live human sales caller who abandons calls all day would soon be looking for a new job. If it's not been made clear enough, the great majority of sales calls (and those for charity and debt collection) are not dialed by humans like they were a couple decades ago. Predictive dialers can blast out a dozen calls at once, and the first one to reach a human response gets connected to the call center. Thus the client company saves precious labor hours while expecting the rest of us to absorb collateral loss of time and sanity on "ring and run" calls.

} they [at the voice mail provider] block out the overseas computer generated calls. My point is that if they can do it, the phone companies can do it too.

I would presume the voice mail provider is not considered a common carrier and is free to allow its spam-hating engineers to filter your message traffic without asking your permission each time. Maybe you agreed to such a service when the account was established.

The phone carriers are required by federal law not to interfere with any phone traffic -- pause for drama here -- unless you the customer request otherwise. When state regulators beg the carriers for help with runaway illegal sales calls, the carriers all point to "common carrier" and close the discussion. This is the sore subject of several pending FCC rulings and part of yesterday's Senate Aging committee hearing.

Both the FTC and the FCC chairman insist that: (1) carriers on any platform can at least provide their customers with call management tools, similar to those on VOIP services, and (2) the law never said carriers were prohibited from giving their customers such a choice to filter their own traffic.

The fact that we must have this argument at all suggests the carriers have used "common carrier" rules as a cheap excuse to avoid doing something which is not a profit generator, and/or threatens to scare away business clients.

That's very good info Res, Thanks!

Yes I am also getting call from this number they call in early morning when i receive the call for 1-2 min they don't say anything and after that they said i am an [***]...... Which is very frustrating Please tell me how to get rid of it

Block the number?  If it is the same number all the time, most toll free providers have the ability to block numbers or even subsets of numbers.

Zinger,

If it is the provider, they are all doing it...  I had toll free numbers thru 3 different carriers at one time and received this crap on all of them.  Often within minutes of each other on different carriers.

I still believe that these calls are related to the caller ID dipping fees but no one seems to be able to get a handle on it.

Whatever the motive is, I think that it is computer sitting there churning out thousands of calls per day without a human involved.  It is probably a former telemarketer using his equipment to make an easier buck.