Automated telemarketing calls are driving us all crazy, but there is a surprisingly simple way to win the battle. One of my primary roles as the owner of a technology support company is problem-solving and I have spent years solving so many weird technology issues it would be impossible to track them, but this one is one of my all-time favorites. One of the things I like best is that it uses an obscure technology designed for a completely different purpose, but a creative trick I cooked up makes it work to help you conquer obnoxious telemarketers without having to be a technical expert. In fact, it’s really pretty simple, when I walk you through the steps. It’s a long article because it’s a complex problem and I want to include detailed explanations so the non-technical readers will feel comfortable.
It may not be obvious but the hardest part of effective problem solving is making sure you actually know what the problem is. You may think the problem with telemarketing calls is wasting your time answering these calls and getting some fast-talking salesperson who you can’t gracefully get off the phone with. Even if you’ve given up on being polite, you still have to hang up on them and deal with the aggravation the interruption caused. Then you have the flood of pre-recorded messages because new technology allows telemarketers to hammer you relentlessly without paying a human caller. Telephone scams are a huge problem, too. I register with the Do Not Call registry but that’s largely futile due to the automated dialers that just dial every possible phone number. With computers playing pre-recorded messages, they can burn through a huge volume of phone numbers pretty quickly. You’ve probably noticed that you are one of them. That all adds up to a sheer volume that can make you crazy, but there’s another twist that makes it even harder. Sure, we can just ignore anonymous and toll-free numbers but these guys have gotten good at calling from numbers that look local. What if you just met someone new at church and offered to help them unload the moving truck when it arrives. They call to arrange a time but you don’t know the number, so you ignore it and then have to go check your voicemail. Because you don’t want to miss a meaningful call, you’ve already done that for the past 20 unknown numbers, just this morning and gotten nothing but the last half of recorded messages for something you don’t want. By the time your new friend calls, you’re sick of the game and don’t check the message and they end up struggling to unload the big stuff, by themselves and you’re new neighbors first impression is that you don’t keep your word. Even worse, what if you get a call from a number you don’t recognize that you blow off, only to find that your child was just involved in a big dust-up at daycare and the daycare worker anxiously called you on their mobile so they could reach you more quickly than calling you from the business phone that you have in your contacts.
So, the deeper problem is not just the volume of junk calls you get, but the impossible situation you find yourself in because you almost have to answer them all, just in case. I have days where that could easily burn an hour of my time over the course of the day if I didn’t have a way to thumb my nose at these hucksters. The simple secret is good old fashioned call screening. For those that remember landline phones and the answering machines, you know you could ignore a number you didn’t recognize, listen as they left a message and jump in if it was someone you wanted to talk to. In my opinion, every cell carrier should simply have a feature that automatically allows you to screen any call that is not in your contacts, but until they do that, here’s a way to do exactly that.
I suggest you read through this article completely before you begin. The first thing you need is a Google Voice account, which gives you a free phone number that works very nicely for this. Google tends to change the steps involved so rather than walking you through a bunch of steps that will be irrelevant next week, I will just link you to their support page that tells you how to do this. The Google Voice instructions assume you already have a Gmail account, so if you don’t already have one, you better do that first here at this Gmail Account Creation Page. If you have an email that is provided by your Internet Service Provider, now is a good time to get rid of it. There are a ton of reasons why you should NEVER be dependent on the email address your ISP provides, but that’s a topic for another day. If you have an address you really like, you can actually create a Google account using your existing, non-Gmail address. That’s a more complex option that I will not cover here but you can go to this Google Account With Another Email Address page to find out how.
Once you have a new Gmail address or Google account with your existing address, go to this Set Up a Google Voice Account support page. It will ask you to log in and then you can choose to get a new voice number. It will ask if you want a new number or use your existing mobile number. I suggest getting a new number as the simplest method. First, it will ask for your forwarding number. Assuming it’s your mobile we are trying to protect, enter your existing mobile number and tell it that it’s a mobile number. It will take you through some steps to verify you really own that number and then walk you through selecting a new Google Voice number. (If you can’t get a number in your area code, it’s not a big deal because you probably aren’t going to make calls FROM this number.) I’m not going to outline all the steps because they are pretty self-explanatory and Google does a good job of providing you directions to walk through the process if you encounter problems.
Once your Google Voice account is created there are a few steps for the normal setup of your new number which you can follow through with this Set up Phone to Receive Calls support page. Once that is done, go back to the settings page you just used to set your phone to receive calls and do a couple more things. The most important options are to enable call screening, enable the phone spam feature and tell it to use your Google Voice number as the caller ID when it forwards calls to you. When you enable call screening, you will have to have a call screening message. It can simply be a statement that says you don’t recognize this number so you need them to identify themselves by saying their name and press the # key. Once we have completed the setup, declining a call on your mobile will send it to this screened phone number. It’s the end of the line for every automated call because the recording can’t respond to press the # key. The daycare worker making an emergency call from their personal mobile, will simply state their name (and probably that they are calling from your child’s daycare) and press the # key. The call then rings back to your mobile displaying your GV number. (If you have added that GV number to your contacts with a unique ringtone, you will instantly know it’s a human who wants to talk to you badly enough to respond to the prompts.) Most human telemarketers will move on because if you are screening calls they are wasting their time with you. I’ve been doing this for years and have never had one punch through, but even if a few do, you have still dramatically reduced the unwelcome interruptions on your phone. That’s probably because the spam filter already stopped them before they even had the chance to rudely punch through. Voicemail on this GV account is optional because you are probably never going to get or listen to it on this account anyway. This is strictly for screening calls.
You may want to explore some of the other features because it really is a pretty cool feature on its own. You can use the number to send and receive text messages with a number that doesn’t reveal your private mobile number, among other benefits. It can be handy to text someone who you don’t want to have your cell number. You can even use this number to give to people you wouldn’t trust with your actual mobile number. If you are technically adventurous, they have options to customize the greeting and actions based on the callers’ number. So if your ex is blowing up your phone, you can create a personalized message that no one else will ever hear, so you can let your imagination run wild with the message where you can say “what you REALLY want to say”, and they will hear that every time they call. You are on your own for any legal issues you create with that. You can even deliver the message and just hang up without giving them the option of call screening or even going to voicemail. This whole process could be worth it, for that alone.
You may be getting excited about diving in, but it may not have occurred to you, yet that in order for any of this to accomplish the original goal, we have to get all those annoying callers to call us on our shiny new Google Voice number instead of our regular mobile number. The simple fact is that there is NO WAY they are going to willingly do that. This is where my clever trick comes in to force them into our newly configured call filtering system. I’ll give you the Cliff Notes on the geeky bits, just for background and then show you the really simple trick to enabling it on your mobile phone. If you want to go “Full Geek” check out this Wikipedia description of GSM page, but honestly. it’s boring stuff, even for me.
There is a standards-based functionality all the telecoms are supposed to use that they call GSM codes. It’s a complex set of codes you can send to your phone carrier to make your phone number do certain things. You can send your phone a GSM code that tells it to forward to a different number if someone calls you and you don’t answer. By default, your carrier has set up your phone so that if you don’t answer, the call gets forwarded to a hidden number they use for your voicemail. At the simplest level, your voicemail is actually nothing other than a phone number that does nothing but take voice messages. When you press the button to check your voicemail, it simply calls that same number and uses more of these GSM codes to tell it you can listen to the messages rather than leave one. You can instruct your phone to call a number if you don’t answer, a different number if your phone is turned off and a different number yet if you decline the call or your number is busy. Your cell carrier simply programs all three of those events to go to the hidden voicemail number. You probably have no idea what that number is, but they will tell you if you call and ask. You may have to work your way past the first tier customer support who have no clue that voicemail actually works that way. Keep it on a card in your pocketbook or wallet so you can still retrieve your voicemail if you lose your phone.
The event we are going to play with is busy or declined calls. If you have call waiting on your phone, the busy function never kicks in so the only thing this will handle is declined calls and that’s where you gain the power over every unwanted caller. I am going to show you an incredibly easy way to teach your phone to send every call you explicitly decline to this carefully filtered Google Voice number you just created. Let me give you the fun stuff before we get to the boring technical stuff. If your ex calls for the tenth time in 2 hours, you simply press the decline button (or whatever your phone requires if it is locked when the call comes in) just like you have the previous nine times. You have nothing left to do other than a little happy dance because you did not have to talk to this annoying former love of your life and knowing that they once again had to endure your very special message tailored just for them. Your victory is sweet and complete. If you get that call from a number you don’t recognize, using a local area code. you simply press decline and forget about it. If it’s your daycare worker with an urgent message about your child, they will respond to your call screening prompts and your phone will ring again in just a few seconds calling from your Google Voice number. You answer your phone, listen to the callers’ name and choose to accept the call or not. If you immediately recognize the caller, press 1 and say “Hello”. If the name is too vague to comfortably answer, you can press 2 to send them to voicemail, but continue listening as they leave a message. If it was a daycare worker whose name you didn’t know, the voicemail will give you more specifics and you can still jump in by pressing the # asterisk key. For the junk calls, Googles spam filtration will simply dump the vast majority, the remaining automated ones that don’t get dumped as spam, will be unable to respond to the call screening prompts and human telemarketers are very unlikely to push through because they know it will be a waste of time, because you are already poised to just hang up.
The short version is that every unknown call is diverted by simply hitting the decline button, and other than the small percentage you really wanted to get through, that’s the end of it, for you. Your voicemail box doesn’t get overloaded with the last half of recorded messages, and you don’t even have to acknowledge the existence of any telemarketing callers. No more letting it go to voice, immediately checking your voicemail to see if it’s important and angrily deleting that message when it’s not. Complete peace is restored to managing your incoming calls with no fear of missing the real calls you used to have to worry about. When you are the problem solver for peoples technology frustrations, your phone rings a lot but I sure don’t want to miss the people who need my help because I get tired of answering the flood of junk calls. I have been using this technique for years and it does it’s thing very well, without the stress.
Here’s the technical part. I’m not going to explain the GSM function, just give you the codes you need to plug in to make it work. You need to make sure call waiting is enabled. If your carrier doesn’t enable it by default, find a better carrier. If you’ve ever been on the phone and another call comes in, giving you the option to switch to the new call, then call waiting is on. Now, on your cell phone enter the numbers **62*1112223333# and you substitute the digits after the **62* for your Google Voice number and press Send or Call. The example as shown would enable declined call forwarding to the phone number (111) 222-3333. Most carriers will display a message on your phone that you completed the change. Then have someone call you so you can decline their call and test it out. If it doesn’t go through to your Google Voice number, you can press **62* SEND without specifying a number and it will reset to the defaults. Try again but be prepared to call your carriers support number if you can’t get it back to normal. It’s pretty unlikely you can mess it up, but you are engaging this at your own risk and may need your phone carriers help if you get it wrong. Don’t call me. I’m sharing this trick with the world for free so I can’t justify taking the time fixing it if you miss a step.
If my free advice helps you regain your sanity when it comes to the flood of junk calls we all deal with, you can thank me by giving us a call when you are faced with a technology issue that has you stumped. Check out the Services page to see what kind of services we offer. We called the business Personal Care Tech Solutions because that’s the way we feel about serving our customers.