Virginmedia landline - blocking nuisance / scam calls?

staggered

Grateful for any advice on blocking nuisance / scam calls from my dad's virginmedia landline.  Despite being registered with the TPS, he's plagued with these calls.  He's at a high risk of being scammed because he believes what callers tell him is true, despite all my efforts to convince him otherwise.  If it's an obvious scam he spots it but anything more sophisticated (like most of them seem to be these days) and he's taken in.

I've tried to get him to ditch his landline and use a mobile instead - this won't block all of the calls but should reduce them a lot (and save him money) - but he won't do that.

I'm not sure what I can do while he stays with virginmedia.  The only service they offer is to block calls from unknown numbers but I think most nuisance calls these days come from numbers that aren't blocked (Virginmedia charge to do that which isn't a deal-breaker but seems outrageous really!)

I know there are phones e.g. BT8600 which are good at blocking calls but these require you to have a BT line?  I could try to get him to switch from Virgin to BT but he might lose his number that way (the only reason for keeping the landline is to keep his number) and, in my experience, joining / leaving BT is an absolute nightmare.

Would be interested to know if any Virginmedia customers had been successful in blocking nuisance / scam calls.

Thanks in advance.

ladruid

We used to get numerous calls a day from all sorts of telesales, from the benign, 'you've been in an accident' ones to the intrusive government HMRC 'you owe money' tax or 'we have a delivery for you' fraud ones.

One simple product stopped all this nonsense dead in its tracks. We get zero dodgy calls now, not even one in the last year. The answer is a BT phone handset that has the trueCall virtual assistant. I guess these are like the phone you mentioned... you do NOT need to be on a BT line, ours works on Virgin landline perfectly well.

This is an example of a three handset version:-
https://shop.bt.com/products/bt-premium-phone---three-handsets-090632-D93X.html

The way it works is quite clever...

Someone calls you...
The trueCall assistant looks at the incoming number, if its on your phonebook/contacts it lets it through and your phone rings as normal. This means your trusted people get through with no hassle.
If the number is unknown or not on your contact list the trueCall assistant silently (to you) picks up the phone and automatically asks the caller to announce their name and press the hash button.
If the caller does not do this, the trueCall assistant drops the call and your phone never even rings...
As the majority of the scam calls are mass dialling automated callers, by the time they connect, they don't usually know to leave the name and press a key, so the calls get dropped.

There is a chance a scammer could say their name and press the hash key, but in my experience they have never done this.

The only downside is you do have to get callerID turned on by Virgin though.

Hope this helps a bit, I find it so sad when the older (much more trusting) generation get scammed by these scammers.

littleboo

My dad was very close to being scammed recently and so now I have got him the BT 4600 variant of the call blocker phones as they have big, clear buttons. As mentioned, they are very effective at stopping nusiance calls and genuine callers are getting through by using the announce feature.