Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Sorry, wrong numb...

There must be something about my new landline at home that just makes spam callers itch to call it. It seems like I’ve had more junk calls in the past few weeks than in entire years in the past. I’ve been blocking a few more of them each day. (And there’s a series of numbers from Bellevue, Wash., that just keeps trying.)

So, I’m glad that Comcast offers me a more robust call blocking capability than Verizon FIOS did. Their offering was so convoluted to set up that I got the impression that they actually wanted to encourage the spam calls.

Also—Verizon does not support NOMOROBO, the free platform to block actual robo calls, which rather lends credence to my suspicion.

Well, yesterday I was waiting for a handyman to show up and in the middle of trying to activate NOMOROBO, when the phone rang with a Vienna, Va., number on Caller ID. I picked up because I was expecting the handyman, with an unknown-to-me mobile number to be calling, but “Jennifer” from some “vehicle warranty” outfit launched her spiel. Seems they’ve sent me several notices that the warranty on my “vehicle” is about to expire, and…

Well, dear reader, my Saab is 16 years old, and the warranty expired 13 years ago, so this was a wasted call on “Jennifer’s” part.

I’ve got NOMOROBO installed. Let’s hope it works better than the Do Not Call Registry. Someone on Twitter posited that the Do Not Call Registry sells the numbers we register with them to telemarketers. It certainly doesn’t seem to stop them.

Unless there are about 14,277 callers per day who aren’t getting through.

Meanwhile, if you want to talk with “Jennifer” about extending your vehicle’s warranty, give her a call. Her number is 571 474 1049.

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