Meat Plow wrote:
Now my mom has digital phone on cable and she gets several of these calls
every day. She ignores them if she doesn't recognize the caller ID.
Before she switched to digital phone she seldom got telemarketing calls.
I think the cable company got hacked into and phone numbers were stolen
and they never told anyone. My girlfriend also has digital phone from the
same cable provider and she gets telemarketing calls all day long. I
asked her if she was plagued with these calls with a traditional land
line with the same number and she said no. This bolsters my thinking
there was a breech in the cable company's security or maybe they just
flat out sold a list of numbers. Of course they would never admit to
either the numerous times I've talked to them at their main office.

Do they have a unique prefix? Here the landline numbers are 02,03,04,06,08,09,
cell phones 05 and the various secondary landline (e.g. cable, DSL remarketers,
etc are 07).

Cell phones cost a lot to call, landlines less and the secondary provider
landlines are very cheap.

Although you can port a number from one to others, no one seems to notice. :-)

Maybe they have a similar setup and call the cable phone numbers hoping to get
a hit without having a list.

BTW, one way you can get around this is if you live in the US is to use
Google voice. You can program in a list of numbers to forward, numbers to
reject, numbers to go to voice mail and numbers to screen (ask for name).

Another is with a SKYPE incoming number. I cheat and have my incoming
voicemail message the old three tone pattern which tells an autodialer its
a dead number. :-) Once you get a call from a number, you can select block
this number and they get a number not in service error if they call you.

I wish there was a realtime black hole list for asterisk systems (freeware
PBX software) like there is for SPAM email addresses. I.E. your asterisk
system would check a database of SPAM callers and reject the call, with
someone maintining a global list.

Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Making your enemy reliant on software you support is the best revenge.