Why We Use It
Like many people, we added our home phone number to the FTC’s “Do Not Call List” some years ago. That seemed to keep unwanted telemarketing calls to a minimum for a long while. However, across the last year or so, the number of telemarketing calls steadily increased to the point of absurdity – some days we were receiving more than a couple of dozen of these intrusive nuisance calls.
Evidently, advances in technology have made it easy for unscrupulous telemarketers to ignore government regulations and to evade enforcement efforts. Worse, a growing proportion of telemarketers are scammers. Unfortunately, the “Do Not Call List” now seems pointless.
Who Developed It
Curious, I did a web search to see if there might be a solution I hadn’t been aware of. I came across some articles about Nomorobo, a recently developed, free service for blocking telemarketing calls. A software developer named Aaron Foss created Nomorobo. It was selected by the FTC as one of two winners of its “Robocall Challenge,” a public contest to see if anyone could come up with an effective solution to unwanted telemarketing calls. Foss was awarded a $25,000 prize.
Here are articles from the New York Times and Wired magazine with a little more about Nomorobo:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/22/your-money/free-ways-to-stop-unwanted-ads-phone-calls-and-mail.html
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/guy-found-way-block-robocalls-phone-companies-wouldnt/
How It Works
The way Nomorobo works is pretty cool. You do have to have digital telephone service in order to use it (such as Verizon FIOS or Comcast Xfinity). You log into your telephone service account and set up what’s called a “simultaneous ring” with Nomorobo. This way, each time a call comes to your telephone, it simultaneously goes to Nomorobo’s computer. Within the first second, Nomorobo determines whether the call is from a blacklisted number. If it is, Nomorobo hangs up on the caller. So, when your phone rings once and doesn’t ring again, you know Nomorobo has blocked the call.
Here’s the short video from Nomorobo’s home page, which does a great job describing how it works:
Our Results
We started using Nomorobo four months ago. The results have been phenomenal. At first, Nomorobo was blocking telemarketing call after telemarketing call, which was great. Then, after only a couple of weeks, the number of calls that Nomorobo needed to block declined dramatically, which was even better. Evidently, once telemarketers are aware that you’re using Nomorobo, many won’t even bother trying to call you. Now, Nomorobo only has to block a few calls per day.
On rare occasions, a telemarketing call makes it past Nomorobo. That’s because telemarketers are constantly switching to new phone numbers. It doesn’t take Nomorobo long to identify this when they do. On Nomorobo’s website, if you’d like, you can quickly and easily report phone numbers from any unwanted telemarketing calls which weren’t blocked. This helps all Nomorobo users.
Overall, we’re thrilled. I never expected that there’d ever be a way to put an end to unwanted telemarketing calls. Nomorobo is, for now at least, a really effective solution.