MSE News: New BT service to divert millions of nuisance calls

Ian011

First it will block nuisance calls. Later, various additional features will disrupt the communications of other targets...

Bay

footyguy wrote: »

Will it handle "number withheld", International" and "number unavailable" calls on an individual basis?
(i.e. not block all of them, just the individual callers the customer selects)

buglawton wrote: »

How Long before false positives occur? So your building society which witholds it's number (mine does) gets diverted to the spam box when they call you to discuss that mortgage application.

This is a worry given how many important calls are 'number withheld' etc

VisionMan

Arrrgh! Theres a red under me bed!

Johnmcl7

Although the number is withheld to you, BT will know within their network where the call is coming from as it's just a flag that means the number isn't normally shown to the end person. I would assume BT would need substantial amounts of data that calls were spam before they took any action.

I agree with the recommendations above for the Call Guardian system as I bought the phones for my parents and instead of calls all day which would get ignored, instead the only time the phone rings it's a genuine caller. The only issue has been it does trip up genuine automated calls such as those from the Halifax to authenticate an online transaction so have had to temporarily disable Call Guardian or switch the authentication number to a mobile phone.

buglawton

Anyway this will be a marketing triumph for BT, presumably Virgin Media, Talktalk, Sky, mobile networks et al won't be able to offer this for some time.

I think false positives are a certainty since banks etc also use automatic outgoing call management and frequently use new originating numbers. I doubt BT has fully thought through that part of the scheme, it would require 100% participation with all genuine calling organisations registering the outgoing numbers they use. Add to that the fact that banks, mobile networks etc also frequently originate calls from the Philipines, India and so on. Sometimes they are permitted to spoof a UK number, somethings it just shows as number withheld. With email, when you click mark as spam in many systems it sends feedback to the email provider that it's spam. Phone systems can't do that. Watch this space...

Ian011

The functionality provided by trueCall systems could be built into telephone networks, especially mobile networks. This would offer a far more flexible system than BT's proposal, giving unknown callers a chance to get through. BT's system has no method for monitoring for false positives.

When you receive a call from a callcentre, the CLI shows the central number that they want you to call back on, not the number of the line that made the call. This is deliberate. Unfortunately, scammers and criminals can present a fake number or pretend to be someone else using the same method.

Kite2010

Probably will be 'free' if you sign up for Caller Display.

And on an unrelated note the cost of Caller Display will be increased by £2 a month and no-longer free if you have Line Rental Saver

spenderdave

Caller Display has never been free if you have Line Rental Saver, the free offer for a one year contract is totally separate.

Honda2ner

The only company that spam calls me is BT. Are they going to blacklist themselves? I'm not holding my breath.

Just wait until BT realise they can sell a 'whitelist' of spam numbers to the spammers, just another revenue stream...