Can I rant about something?

I'm presently trying to educate an older friend whose husband is incapacitated. He did everything and now she is floundering in the digital world and is very gullible. I've been making a list of all the phone calls she is likely to receive that are scams and am on my way over to set up her new iPhone so that it sends everyone not in her contacts to voice mail. Yesterday she got fishing calls from social security and Microsoft. She feels that she has to talk to these people just to be polite and I'm having to teach her to politely say no and hang up. The list of calls is getting really long, a far cry from the days when Rachel from card services was the only pest, although we still get an occasional card services call.

Extended car and home warranties, law suits for Zantac and Roundup, Microsoft windows needing computer access, Social Security, Amazon account charged _____$ please call this number, Medicare program changes and have you received your new Medicare Card?, Grandma, your grandson/daughter has been in an accident and is in jail needing bail money or lawyer fees....the list keeps getting bigger.
 
You're doing good work Ted. It's easy for those of use with a more cynical nature to laugh at some of these calls and wonder what type of person would fall for them, but the fact is that there are some scams out there that can be pretty convincing. And for those of us who might not be computer savvy, well, it just makes it even easier to.
 
You're doing good work Ted. It's easy for those of use with a more cynical nature to laugh at some of these calls and wonder what type of person would fall for them, but the fact is that there are some scams out there that can be pretty convincing. And for those of us who might not be computer savvy, well, it just makes it even easier to.
True - If the scams did not work they wouldn't waste their time with them.
 
If I don't recognize the number I don't answer the phone. Then when I have time I go through and block those numbers. It doesn't do much good to block them as they will just call from a different number. Heck sometimes I get phone calls from my own number.:mad:
 
One of our cell phones quit working when we were visiting Bobbie's mother in the hospital a few weeks ago. I went to the local Verizon store in Anniston, AL to get it checked. Apparently, the issue was simply that it was an older phone that was 3G only and they were slowly deleting those phones from operation. We had talked about getting new phones anyway, since we had the old ones since the middle of 2016. They had a deal for upgrading our service to Samsung Galaxy 5G phones, so I took the deal.

Something included in the package was far better spam deletion. Our phones have been strangely silent most of the time; so much so that we sometimes call our main phone from the other one to be sure all is in order. Our "main phone" is connected via bluetooth to our cordless house phone system. When I check the call history on the new phones, there are always calls that Verizon identified as spam that they don't allow through to ring our phone.
 
We've been having issues with the cellular device that was setup for my wife's grandpa to get calls to the house phone on. I'm currently looking at VoIP (voice over IP/internet) options for the farm house. I have a couple of Linksys ATA devices (https://www.ebay.com/itm/114980679509) that I used to use CallCentric services on. I'm going to set one of them up for here.

The CallCentric (https://callcentric.com) plans can be paid for by the minute, so incoming/outgoing we may pay about $.015 per minute. The service for them and to get a DID (local phone number) is only $6 per month. You can also port your current number to it if you decide to do so. We get about 3 calls a day, two of them from her aunt, so it's not worth paying for the unlimited plans, which aren't too expensive either.

Anyway, they have options to send Anonymous/Unlisted numbers right to and error message/dial tone/voicemail. You can also send them into "call handling" if you wish to torment them. Just have to do the old "press 1" for purgatory, "press 2" for human, next "press 1" if you are selling something, "press 2" (queue air horn mp3 file). :D

I've been setting up the account. Basically have all known contacts right right through, all unknown/anonymous callers going to VM, every one else currently can ring through, but we'll see how many spam calls are still coming through at that point, otherwise may have to send to vm.
 
Anyway, they have options to send Anonymous/Unlisted numbers right to and error message/dial tone/voicemail. You can also send them into "call handling" if you wish to torment them. Just have to do the old "press 1" for purgatory, "press 2" for human, next "press 1" if you are selling something, "press 2" (queue air horn mp3 file).

recording? i prefer hitting them with the real thing... lol
 
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