Cox → Re: [PHONE] Anonymous Call Rejection and "Unavailable Unkno

Ender3rd Can you send me your phone number in IM please. I know the product manager for this feature, we might be able to find out more if we can look at it from our side. Thanks.

Message sent, thanks.

The Do Not Call Registry, which I have utilized since its inception, has helped greatly, but there are still unscrupulous telemarketers who simply ignore it. One obvious example is the "Card Services" phone harassment campaign that has been running rampant for several years. There's a fairly long thread in the "Security - Scam and Phishbusters" forum here at DSLR regarding their elusive number origination tactics and phone exploits.

One thing I can say for certain is that I have never received a call from an "Unavailable Unknown Number" that wasn't a solicitation. At this point, we simply defer them to the answering machine and let them listen to the SIT tone. If it's a human, they can leave a message, but not one of them has.

It would be great to have the option to prevent them from ringing the phone. I can "whitelist" my incoming email, so why not have the option to do the same with my phone?

So here's the scoop on Anonymous Call Rejection from our Product Manager. The short answer is after looking at some call record detail, it worked like it is supposed to you, and she looked at the thread, and found most of your comments were pretty accurate. Here's the background she gave me:

Anonymous Call Rejection is a switch feature that only rejects calls that are blocked by the call originator (using *67 per call blocking or with caller ID blocking on the line.) These are calls that would appear as “Anonymous,” “Private,” or “Blocked.” Anonymous Call Rejection does not block incoming calls that are tagged as “Unavailable,” “Unknown,” or “Out of Area.”

As a practice, Cox does not return “unknown” or “unavailable” for incoming calls that do not have any calling name associated with them. Instead, we display the city name and state abbreviation. So why do customers still see “Unknown” & “Unavailable” on their caller ID or call log displays? Many telemarketers actually populate their calling name information with a name of “Unknown” or “Unavailable.” They'll even pad these with leading & trailing blanks. We have live filters to catch this, but it is a constant battle.

One more special case - if Cox receives bad TN information on an incoming call (e.g. 999-999-9999) this will result in “Name Unavailable.” Often times these bad TNs are the result of the caller spoofing their calling number.

As far as if we would offer such a feature, not quite sure where it would fall in at this time, but we'll keep it on the big feature request list.

Thanks, Jim

CoxJimR,

Thank you for bringing this to the attention of the Product Manager and for confirming the difference between *67 per call blocking (along with caller ID line blocking) and the annoying "Unknown" or "Unavailable" calls. At this point, no one in the house bothers to pick up the phone unless the Caller ID is visible and is either someone we know or a call from a business we deal with. Everything else goes to the machine where 99% of them instantly disconnect when they hear the SIT tone at the start of the message.

The only persistently annoying calls have been from a company that calls itself "Card Services" with a relentless credit card debt spiel and an ability to generate unlimited banks of spoofed numbers. They have no regard for the "Do Not Call List" and appear to be untroubled even when investigated by the CT State Attorney General's office. The thread detailing their exploits can be read at the link below.

As you said, it's a constant battle. Thanks again for assisting!

Regards,

Ender

»[Scam] Card Services relentless phone calls revisited

Something that may be worth pointing out there is the do not call list doesn't apply to debt collectors as how these aren't telemarketing calls. If you aren't the person they're looking for and they refuse to stop calling you could always send them a cease communication letter certified return receipt. If the continue to call after that you may be able to go after them for violating one or more laws.