Thursday’s column: 2 more ways to stymie infernal robocallers
Digitone Call Blocker | from digitone.com
Recently I got on my high horse to complain about robocalls once again. They’ve been swarming the Casey household like flies on an elephant’s rotting corpse.
The best solution I’d heard was canceling your land line altogether and going 100 percent wireless.
But there are less radical strategies out there that other readers were quick to suggest. These solutions cost a bit of money and take a little effort. But they vanquish all unsolicited calls, so they might be worth it.
The first came from Keith Finch, an attorney who lives in Blacksburg. It’s something he discovered four years ago, when he bought a house. Finch wanted the same level of land line service at home that he had at his law office. But that provider only offered business telephone service.
So Finch formed a corporation to own his home land line. That cost $75, and it can be done online at the State Corporation Commission website.
Next he got a tax identification number for that corporation. That can be done on the Internal Revenue Service website and it’s free, he said.
Then he used the tax ID number and corporate documents to sign up for landl ine phone service at his home. Finally, he put the phone number on the national Do Not Call Registry.
Finch did not have to open a bank account in the shell corporation’s name. Nor does the phone company care if you fail to renew your annual corporate registration, he added.
“I didn’t do it to avoid robocalls,” he told me. “It was purely by accident.” But it ended them for good.
READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.
October 11, 2012 - 6:00 AM
We simply let our answering machine take our calls. My mom hates answering machines, so she lets it ring twice and immediately calls back and we pick it up. We have the minimum land line package that allows us to keep our DSL price guarantee. So, no caller i.d.
There are three former Hokies in my family and Va. Tech is by far the biggest solicitor of phone donations. They still call here even though the youngest of my children graduated eight years ago, and all have long since moved out.
They’ve been swarming the Casey household like flies on an elephant’s rotting corpse.
The comparison of his household to a rotting corpse surprised me until I learned that the only place to sleep in Dan’s house are in these Tauntauns:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/bb2e/
Down with the Sith lords Darth Rove and Darth Koch brothers!
Turn lemons into lemonade: My brother and his wife have found a way to enjoy pollitical pollster calls (of which they get several each day. When asked who they would vote for, they come up with original replies
> “Are those my only choices?”
> “Which one is gonna give me more tin foil for my hat?”
> “Which one will declare ice cream to be a vegetable?”
> “I’m sorry, but I don’t have a phone.”
If you have an old PC with a modem laying around, you can download and install PhoneTray Free – it will analyze Caller ID information and block calls accordingly. [I believe] it has a pre-loaded database of known telemarketing numbers that you can add to with ease. You can set it to play disconnect messages to unwanted callers, etc… based on the settings you choose. I used it for several years before dropping the old land line in favor of cellular only. It is a good reason to put an aged computer back to work, plus it’s free to download and use – and very effective to boot.
http://www.phonetray.com/
We pay a bit more for our DSL by not having a landline, but Verizon put the kybosh on allowing that earlier this year…in order to have any of their internet services like DSL of FIOS, you must have some sort of voice service, cell service, or DirecTV through them. We won’t ever have any of them, just DSL. Thankfully we were grandfathered in as an existing customer, but we didn’t get the notification of that substantial change until a week after they put it into effect. Hell, the letter notifying us of the change was even dated 3 days AFTER the change was made.
But, no robo-calls or any other solicitations on my cell phone, aside from a persistent and annoying frequent call asking me to subscribe to the Roanoke Times, that thankfully, I haven’t gotten in several months now. But for a while, I was getting 2 or 3 calls a day, every day, from a call center in St. Louis.
Kevin…what’s the internal temperature of a Tauntaun?
Luke warm!
Re: My post @ 09:52
When I posted a few minutes ago I did not realize that PhoneTray had removed the free download link as of 09/15/2012. Below is a CNET link that will allow you to download the free version if you wish to do so:
http://download.cnet.com/PhoneTray/3000-2074_4-10540928.html
Other John: Cox is my ISP (an aptly named one at that) and they’re doing the same thing. Methinks it’s becoming the industry standard.
I take offence to your comment,”flies on an elephants rotting corpse”.You love to intentionally provoke people,don’t you?Wuld you have dared say,”flies on an Ass or donkeys rotting corpse”. I think not.