Spam Detective and Blocking Spam Calls

Overview

Spam calls can happen on local or toll-free numbers. You may see spam calls coming into your tracking phone numbers for various reasons—they could be targets of traffic pumping schemes, war dialing, or phone hacking, just to name a few.

These issues are challenging to fix and in fact, the FCC is going to great lengths to try and stop these practices and have several investigations ongoing.

CallTrackingMetrics works with our carriers to ensure that the numbers we offer for purchase are not currently involved in any of these schemes. For example, our numbers sit unused for at least 6 months before we re-offer them into inventory, and even then, we do not release numbers into inventory until they have reached minimal levels of incoming phone calls. We are also continuously reporting suspicious patterns to our carriers so that they may make blocks upstream to prevent these dialers from getting through. But the game is changing every day in this space, so a number that had no spam activity yesterday could all of a sudden be added to a dialer list the next day.

Spam Detective

We have partnered with several carrier databases to extract information about the path a call is coming through and if the path is likely “spammy”, you can choose to handle that call differently. The Detective can either tag calls as spam or route these calls through a voice menu that asks the caller to enter keypresses to get any further. This allows CallTrackingMetrics customers to a) filter spam calls out of their reporting using the auto-tagging feature and b) prevent these calls from distracting your agents or eating up valuable minutes. For each call, in addition to the caller ID, you will see the carrier routes the call came through.

To turn the Spam Detective on for your account, go to Numbers → Call Settings → Spam Detective. The fee to enable Spam Detective will vary depending on your plan.

After you've enabled Spam Detective, you'll want to select how to handle the call. You have two options here: either simply add a tag to mark it as a Spam Call, you can send the caller to a Voice Menu, or have the caller solve a simple math problem as a captcha. By sending the call to a Voice Menu, the caller will have to press a key to be connected to your receiving line. If they don't select a keypress, then they can be re-prompted or disconnected.

Note: This will only work for spam calls, not spam text messages.