"air duct cleaning services" phone calls

[pomakis]

For the last few months I've been getting unsolicited phone calls from "air duct cleaning services" almost daily. It's always from a different phone number, so I can't block them. I keep asking them to take me off their list, but of course that doesn't help. Is there anything I can do about this?

[WestCoasterBC]

Have you looked into the call control feature here. 

Best not to answer the phone and tell them to remove you. They’re not even located in canada and don’t follow any rules. 

[pomakis]

Yeah, I've considered the call control feature, but was hoping for a solution that didn't involve measures that were inconvenient for myself or any of the people who legitimately try to call me.  I'm not fond of the idea of having to keep a whitelist up-to-date with phone numbers of legitimate bot callers (such as my kids' schools, the doctor's office, and who knows what else).  Inadvertently missing just one legitimate call would be worse than having to put up the the almost-daily annoyance of this "air duct cleaning services" call.

[xray]

The Call Control isn't that intrusive. You can keep an exception list that bypasses Call Control but anyone not on that list only has to verify once. The next time they won't need to do it again. 

[polecat]

@pomakis  I assume you use the do not call list as i do i renew it on occasion. Also do the reverse lookup and from there you can report spam & robo calls. I had on really bad one so i  kept doing the reverse thing for about a month and it finally quit. Middle of night calls they received lots of nice words from me.

[pomakis]

How does one perform this "reverse lookup" of which you speak?

[polecat]

@pomakis  Google reverse lookup where you can lookup a persons name from the ph # or Ph # from the name. Look over the page and you will see a place to report telamarketing numbers. Can't be sure it helped me but they stopped after period of time. Maybe it was the airhorn used.

[starchoice]

Not sure that "Call Control" would help here. This works for robo calls but these calls are live people. All somebody needs to do is enter the requested digit at the time of the call and they will still get through.

[xray · Accepted solution]

I think these offshore companies use an automated dailing system that transfers to a person on the first ring. Call Control kicks in before the first ring so it will never transfer. If they are manually dialling it would be very time consuming and inefficient. In that case I would make it even more time consuming for them. Say "Can you hold while I check my furnace to see when it was last cleaned?" Then put them on hold until they hang up.