Ooma Forums

During the past 6-9 months I have noticed an explosion of 800 Service calls and sneaky Telemarketers who rotate caller ID numbers. I also have some Collection agencies seeking people unknown to me, which appear to call from all over the country using a different phone number each time, and at early/late hours. Simply adding a specific number to a Blacklist is no longer an effective means to keep these companies out.

Ooma, please get creative on how the Blacklist can deal with this evolving situation. Blacklisting by name would help (though you'd need a Whitelist option), and blacklisting by area code and/or exchange would be useful too. Blacklisting is a great tool, but it needs to evolve.

What do other people think? How could Blacklisting be improved? Please nicely let Ooma know what you would like to see by adding your ideas, suggestions, desires to this thread or create your own. Also, please add your vote to this feature request by leaving your positive or negative post expressing your interest in this topic. Let Ooma know what you think!

I would like to see the option to add wildcards to blacklist numbers, and to add caller names - when sneaky marketers play with using different caller ID numbers.

Yes, wildcards for phone numbers and name would be great!

Whitelist ability would be cool as well but wildcard options for the blacklist would be an excellent start to adding more precise control tailored to each individual user.

Same here, that feature IS needed it would greately and truly increase the value of the Ooma Premium package.

I was thinking that black listing really needed to be crowd sourced so that you could opt-in for automatically blocking a number if some # of other ooma users had blacklisted it in a certain category. I'm not too familiar with how the robocallers work - if they do use continually random #'s then you would need to also look at it in terms of the caller ID name rather than #.

I did run across this which might be interesting and ooma might want to look at long term to add into their arsenal - it's a crowd-sourced blacklist API for telephony:

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2011/05 ... t-is-here/

As an aside Heather from account services has called me multiple times and even when I press one she just hangs up! I'm so disappointed she doesn't really want to help me get a better interest rate. I'm wondering of what use the calls are since when I say I do want to talk to someone no one does...

xdcx11 wrote:I was thinking that black listing really needed to be crowd sourced so that you could opt-in for automatically blocking a number if some # of other ooma users had blacklisted it in a certain category. I'm not too familiar with how the robocallers work - if they do use continually random #'s then you would need to also look at it in terms of the caller ID name rather than #.

They already have that. It's called the Community Blacklist.

Guess I should be more aware of this. Thanks for the pointer. Do you know if they are hooked into youcantcall.us?

I like the idea of being able to block a number based on name text too.

"800 Service" would be the first thing I add.

There are a few other examples where no matter how many numbers I blacklist, the caller (in this case a charity I no longer support) always seems to have another number (but name is always the same) to call from.

I couldn't agree more. The blacklist feature is ineffective against telemarketers that rotate the number called from. The blacklist is one of the reasons why I switched from Vonage to Ooom (other than $11+/mo in nonsense fees), however, unless it is improved, I'll stick with the Ooma basic plan. A useful feature would be to block not only certain numbers, but CallerID name strings as well. Wildcards would also be useful. Unfortunately, the governments Do Not Call registry is completely ignored by these telemarketers for the same reason that people speed...you can't catch them all....if they're trying at all.

Also, can Ooma users recommend telemarketers that should be added to the community blacklist? Ooma could validate the submission as a telemarketer and then add them to the community list so that all could benefit.

Here's another idea. With all of the digital technology in todays telecommunications, why not urge our useless representatives to require telephone companies to have a single bit of information in their database that says whether a number belongs to a telemarketer or not. Then, give phone subscribers the (free) option of rejecting all telemarketing calls from reaching their number. I do no pay for my telephone to be used as a marketing tool for people.

And it's the loop-holes in the do-not-call registry that are killing us too.

I was really hoping I could close the ALL the loop-holes with ooma, but it's not quite there yet.