Telemarketer Problem

[tpinnovations]

Our company was recently featured in a large trade magazine, as a result it seems every telemarketer on earth is robo dialing our number. It is quite frustrating, particularly when consistently five lines are tied up with this nonsense.

So I have to ask, Has anyone else encountered the problem? What did you do to curve the amount of garbage calls?

I have changed the way our digital receptionist handles call timeouts, but now the rob callers will not hang up.

 

[LeonidasG_3CX]

I would ask you:
Did you try blocking their numbers?

But something tells me you wouldnt be posting here if it was that easy

I dont know how phone spammers do this kind of stuff because honestly this kind of spamming issues are non existant where i come from.
You're gonna have to throw me a bone here... Do they Call in Anonymously or use a random Caller ID's every time? Are there people on the other side of line, or just Automated Calls? Are they stuck in the DR loping over and over or are they connecting to your operators all the time?

 

[tpinnovations]

They are spoofing caller ID & phone numbers so blocking is useless. We've tried doing call backs on some of these and they come back as disconnected, not in service etc. I think its artificial because it doesn't have a network/carrier error ID and location. The robo calls are getting stuck in the looping DR, but the calls with actual users (legit or not) are getting to our phones. We have even had a few bots make it to our receptionist, and another trigger our emergency response dial tree. (We working to figure that one out atm.)


Right now 3CX and our Infrastructure is handling this no problem, but its hard to get any work done with the phone is ringing off the hook.

 

[leejor]

I haven't yet tried out version 8. Is there a wildcard option in the blacklist feature? In other words, can you block all caller-ID calls that begin with 800 XXX-XXXX? I find that a lot of telemarketers in North America like to use toll free numbers as the outgoing ID. If you could blacklist certain area codes AND prefixes, but not have to specify down to the last digits, or a range of numbers, that would be fantastic. It might help in a situation such as this.

 

[tpinnovations]

After over 200 calls in the span of 8 hours, numerous calls to the FCC, the FTC, the FBI and our local law enforcement. We were finally able to trace back to the individuals responsible for this. I have never experienced such a blatant abuse of telecommunications in my life, and quite frankly I hope I never see this again. Given the amount of data collected over the last week, I am considering the launch of a new blacklist service for business. I think that it is a necessary defense against this sort of abuse.