Spam!

Spammers – the callers we love to hate!

We all hate getting those annoying phone calls, at the most inopportune times,  from people trying to sell everything from Life Insurance to raffle tickets, but there’s not much we can do about it…. or is there?

I’ve found a really useful way of dealing with these calls. And don’t get me wrong here – the calls from Charities trying to squeeze an extra dollar out of us for a good cause are the exceptions; the rest are just annoying.

I know you can go on the ‘Do Not Call’ list, but we all know what a joke that is. It’s like a Green Light to every spammer on the planet as it identifies your number as a legitimate phone number, and spammers know every trick in the book for getting lists of phone numbers. I kid you not, there are businesses that make a lot of money out of selling lists of phone numbers.

I’m going to share with you what has worked for me. It takes a little bit of time, but it is so worth it.

1. Create a contact in your Contacts list called ‘Spam’
2. When you answer a call and it is someone trying to sell you something that you just couldn’t possibly live without (according to them), but you obviously don’t need or want, immediately add the number to your ‘Spam’ contact
3. Keep on doing this until you can’t fit another number in – then create Spam 2 etc. My original list is pretty long, but still going, so you shouldn’t really need to create a second one… hopefully.
4. You might want to put Charities in a separate Contact called ‘Charities’ so that you can choose whether to answer or not

You don’t answer a call because you suspect it might be spam based on the fact that you don’t recognise the number, and decide to wait and see if the caller leaves a message, and trust me, they usually don’t.

The next steps explain what I do with those calls…

1. Write the number down
2. Find out who the number belongs to by going to Reverse Lookup Australia
3. Type in the number – chances are you won’t get a result, but if you look down the page you will see the comments made by people who have also taken calls from that number – and 99% of the time – it’s spam
4. Add the number to your Spam folder

When you get a call from one of those numbers, it will show up on your phone as ‘Spam’, and you simply ignore it

Simple – but effective!