Tell them you know it’s a scam and you’ll report them if they don’t remove your number from their list.

Tell them you’re recording the calls and forwarding them to the FBI. That ended it for a friend of mine.

I agree with the above. I’d say something like “Please don’t hang up so I can transfer your call to law enforcement” (or the FBI or whatever).

As each number comes in, add it to your “block” list.

Also, consider taking your phone off the hook for a few days.

@jca How do you access a “block list”?

@janbb: I have Comcast and I googled once, after getting some weird calls, how to block calls. I don’t remember offhand how to block or how to unblock, or how to see who is being blocked.

It is a scam so there is nowhere official to end it. You can say that you are reporting it to law enforcement.

@marinelife: I didn’t mean there’s a real official place to report it to. I meant say that to the caller and hope they’re intimidated.

Comcast call block is as easy as hitting * 60 on your phone and listing the number as per instructed. Anonymous call block is * 77.
Each time I block a number ( now that they can’t call as ‘anonymous’ or ‘unavailable’ ) they come back using yet another number.
This phone has to stay on the hook.
I’ll try the FBI angle, I tried law enforcement a few months ago. Since they’re in India they couldn’t care less about that.

I wish I had a boat horn!!! :/

If you have a second phone like a cordless, put the two phones speaker to earpiece of the other. You don’t need an air horn, feedback is just a good.

Tropical Willie, will try that on the next caller. WOOT !!!

If you have a VOIP phone, look into NOMOROBO.

I have no idea what that even is….

Nomorobo is a service that will intercept ‘annoyance’ calls and “answer” them for you.
This is how it works, and you need VOIP for it to work, as noted above
You go to their website and register. What will then happen is that Nomorobo will monitor your calls. If a call comes from a number on their registry it will intercept the call, after the first ring and answer it for you. So, you still get the annoying first ring but you don’t have to answer it yourself,

They maintain a database. If you get a telemarketer call that Nomorobo does not intercept, you can go to their website and add the number to their database.

It’s free and a no-brainer.

SRM

them

Keep a loud whistle by the phone.

@Hain_roo That is the same type of phone calls I get. I have a mac. My 100 db whistle is always handy to blow into the receiver. My most recent fraud call tried to convince me they were calling from the Department of the Treasury! Asked for me by name. Again whistle!

Nomorobo sounds great, but I can’t have it ring even once. I care take for someone who barely sleeps, and I need to be able to rest when she does!

I love the idea of a whistle, and I have one, but loud noises totally freak my frail 87 year old mom and the animals out. Tropical Willie’s idea sounds like it will be loud on their end but not on mine.

Those jerks SUCK. I need them gone.

Thank you all so much for your input!! :)

You might also tell them you use Ubuntu. They can’t do anything with that system.

I’ve told them I’m on a Mac and they still bug me. They don’t care.

There is absolutely NO way to stop them. Simply hang up.

BEWARE, if you insult them or blow a whistle, they can call you every hour of the night, as long as they wish for revenge.

When they wouldn’t stop calling us I tried this…
Something is wrong with your windows PC. I asked them which one. They said again my PC and I said I have more than one so which one. He said he had to get his supervisor and suddenly he hung up. Our calls from them went down dramatically.

@dubsrayboo Yes, simply addressing them with an unsolvable question works. I always say “My husband is the computer expert, I can’t help you”. That gets rid of them until the next one calls.

@Hain_roo

“Nomorobo sounds great, but I can’t have it ring even once.”

Can you turn off or completely lower the volume on the ringer?

I have occasiionally had this conversation: “May I ask you as question” “yes” “Did your mother teach you right from wrong? Don’t you know it’s wrong to lie and cheat people?”

They nearly always hang up with that.

These calls come from call centres in Pakistan and India, so they don’t care about law enforcement where you come from. If you do the research, you’ll find that people who have tracked down the call centres and then filed complaints with the appropriate local police have found the police do absolutely nothing. They won’t even respond to the complaints. The callers are usually openly abusive if you tell them to stop calling or that you know it’s a scam.

That said, I went from getting multiple calls daily to zero calls after I started telling the callers that I’m a union organizer, and that if they unionize their call centre, they’ll get a lot more money. The way I pitched it is: “You know your bosses are criminals; if they rip other people off, you know they’ll rip you off in a heartbeat. I can teach you how to unionize your workplace to get a lot more money out of your bosses.”

Three times I tried this and while I was able to give the guy the contact info for my union the first time, the last two times the call got interrerupted and cut off midway through my pitch, probably by a supervisor listening in. After that I stopped getting any calls at all. So if you want the calls to stop, offer to help the guy calling to unionize his workplace.

Here’s a video of a guy tracking down the scammers and the (non-)results he got from filing complaints with the police in Calcutta where the call centre was located:

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhD7pF59WE
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jllY-8oBsso

And a video of the scammers yelling insults at a cop and daring him to come to India:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4sy2-SMhL8

Also: What methodology do they use to determine who to call? I’ve never gotten one.

When I first got my new phone number, apparently it had quite recently belonged to someone else.

This was many years ago and ATT didn’t have call blocking. But with caller ID I coukd see that they were a foreign area code (turned out it was Africa)

So, whenever one of those calls came in, I would connect to it but not say a word. I would then keep the line active but not say a word and just let it sit that way until eventually they just hung up.

Since I had unlimited on my cell and they were calling from overseas, it cost me nothing but must be costing them something no matter how little.

Plus, a lot of them get paid on commission so wasting time trying to talk with absolutely no response from the other end is wasting time they could be spending annoying someone else.

It only took a few weeks of the silent treatment for my number to be put in the “not worth bothering with” list and I’ve never gotten another call like that since.

Since you can’t use the loud horn method, perhaps the totally silent treatment will be frustrating enough for them. So, just use that consistently and see if it helps.

But, you do have to train yourself out of the habit of saying anything as soon as you pick up the call. If it’s a legitimate call, they’ll say something first and identify themselves. So saying nothing at all is unlikely to really cost you calls with someone you really do want to speak to.

This whole silent thing worked far better for me than I could have hoped. Hopefully it will help you out as well.