[TriLUG] Phone calls

[Brian via TriLUG]

Telephone SPAM is a scourge upon the developed world.  Due to the need 
to support legacy systems from the days of POTS party lines, it's still 
trivially easy to war-dial from anywhere with an Internet connection and 
a SIP provider willing to look the other way.  Spoofing caller-id was 
possible from day 1.

My advice?  Ditch the land-line unless you have really unreliable 
cellular coverage in your area.  Then set your cell phone to silence 
calls from numbers not in your contact list.  Those calls still go to VM 
if the scammer cares to leave a message, but my experience is that very 
few ever do.

When I moved out of my parents' house for good back in...2005-ish?  I 
never got a land-line.  I've never once missed having one.

I keep trying to convince my Boomer mom to ditch her land-line, and I 
think I've almost gotten through to her.  She's already stopped 
answering it as a matter of course due to the crazy amount of SPAM it 
gets (my dad fell for a couple scam callers a few years ago, so the 
floodgates opened...they never close).

So, yeah.  Ditch the copper if it's at all feasible.

/rant

$0.02,
-Brian
<snip>

>>> On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, James Jones via TriLUG wrote:
>>>
>>>> Help needed. My home phone number has been tagged by a spoofer of sorts.
>>>> About every five minutes, there is a call which has as its identifier a
>>>> phone number with a town usually in North carolina. Each call will be a
>>>> different number/town identifier.
>>>>
>>>> Any thoughts on how to stop this?