Ooma Forums

Now that we have switched to Ooma, we are getting calls from a whole new class (to us) of telemarketers. The last couple of days calls have come from numbers with nothing in common, but having a name displayed in the form of "V040316100800788091"- the numeric parts of that template differ. I've never seen anything like that on our caller ID before Ooma. I would like the ability to blacklist by name, using wildcards.

I understand from reading other posts that the number of personal blacklist entries is limited to 256. At the rate I am going (as someone who has had my number ported for less than a week), I am going to reach that limit within a few months. Since the aforementioned are obviously Telemarketers, I cannot help but wonder about the effectiveness of community blacklists, and of personal blacklists, since it is clear that unwanted (or "junk") callers can change their caller ID at will. "Spoofing" is one widely known and well understood technique for doing that.

It seems based on the popularity of Ooma, that many more than one Premier subscriber must be getting calls from the same Callers. Would someone Ooma please inform the users on these forums as to what are the criteria for a number to be placed in the community blacklist?

Telo_BK wrote:Would someone Ooma please inform the users on these forums as to what are the criteria for a number to be placed in the community blacklist?

While we are waiting for this....

If you google or bing "caller id starting with v," you'd see others experiencing this as well.

If these guys can spoof numbers, the callerid name would certainly be random too. Not sure how blacklist by name can help other than block all calls with callerid name starting with "v" but then what happens to Victor and Vivian trying to call you? My guess is that blacklist by name would be very taxing on the system but would the benefit outweigh the cost?

If the idea is to eliminate junk calls for all of Ooma's subscribers, or even just for the subscribers who pay for blacklisting, I do not think the benefit outweighs the cost. As for the cost- it depends on how it is implemented. An even better scheme would be to support some regular expression tokens in the name (and even the phone number) field. At the very least, Caller ID names that contain numerous digits should be easy to nix. Yeah, a few companies with numerals in their names might have to change in order to get through. Such is the price of progress.

As it is, the number of junk calls I get now is no fewer than two weeks ago (before our number was ported) to Ooma, when I had a cable carrier who didn't support blacklists. It's just that their Caller IDs have taken a wild turn. Was COX able to filter them out? If so, shouldn't Ooma also be able?

At the least, now that wildcard blacklist is introduced, I don't think 256 entries max is as big of a problem any more. I went down from 247 to 111 entries. viewtopic.php?f=5&t=14774&start=20#p108473