LateralAccessDevice

You Can Hang Up On Them All You Want, But They'll Keep Robo-Calling

How to Free Yourself and Your Phone from SPAM Calls Using LAD

The Autodialer, Redux. No Call Registry or not, the nuisance of the Nineties has returned in force and it is badder than ever (or just makes you madder than ever? Probably both). Technology and the Internet has made it possible to conduct robo- and spam calling more easily and on the cheaper, using low-wage workers from overseas to ring you with unwanted nonsense and worse, over and over again. Accidentally answer the phone to one of these scammers just once and you're in for an avalanche of calls when they mark you as a live one. You can hang up on the spammers and robo-callers all you want, but they'll just keep on calling — they want something out of you, and it's not your goodwill.

Annoyance aside, these unwanted callers do not have your best intentions at heart and likely won't stop at convincing you to sign up for a subscription to Really Useless Stuff of the Month — at a minimum they will pass your name, number and any information they gleaned about you to someone else (or many somone elses) and it balloons from there. What do you do, though, if you have vulnerable individuals in the house who may answer the phone and get sucked into their scams, whether big or small? With operations based overseas these scam callers are often beyond the reach of the FTC and any US law enforcement.

The answer is surprisingly simple, particularly if you already use VoIP telephone service.

1. Download LAD, put it on a USB stick and install it on a compatible computer (the good news is that a lot of computers are already compatible with LAD and are easily obtainable if you don't have one already).
2. Register LAD with your VoIP service provider and your VoIP telephone with LAD so that all your calls would pass through LAD, instead of ringing directly on your phone.
3. Set up a greeting on LAD that will play to every caller, prompting the caller to, say, press 1 to leave a message and press 2 to talk to you, add some music or other audio to play for a little while and waste their time if the caller does not make a selection and then end it with termination of the call.

How does it work? Is it really that simple?

The technique is really that simple: play a message, require callers to press a single button to reach you and that's it. While you can put it together in a variety of ways and with other equipment, the ability to implement this technique is built into LAD — standard, not extra — and it does not require you to change your VoIP service provider or your telephone, nor pay any monthly subscription to a robocall killer service. Just join LAD's network of likeminded people who favor practical solutions. You can even consider the prompt as adding a touch of class and style to the experience of calling your telephone number. If you do not already have VoIP, however, that is something you would have to get from someone else, as LAD does not provide VoIP service.

This technique uses the robocallers own technology against them, namely its inability to understand the requirement to press "1" or "2". The telephone scammers rely on autodialer software to ring telephone numbers and then put someone on the call only if it detects that the call has been answered, meaning the robocaller's employee would either miss or not understand the first part of your greeting (the part prompting real callers to dial 1 or 2 to reach you) and be a bit confused to be on the line with whatever music or audio you choose to play. Either way, you don't have to deal with them or wonder whether to answer the phone or not any time an unfamiliar number pops up.

This prompt message with touchtone inputs is practical and quite effective, in our experience filtering out up to 99% of the spam calls. There is no way for the robocaller or spam/scam caller to get around it, unless they do without the autodialer (but that would make the whole enterprise too expensive for them to keep going).

LAD makes it easy to avoid scam- and robocalling without signing up for an additional monthly service. Keep the VoIP service that you already have, add LAD and you also get additional benefits in the other features LAD provides, for example, the ability to connect to multiple service providers to get the best rates for the destinations you call, the ability to connect multiple telephone sets (or SIP apps) and have incoming calls from your VoIP carrier ring on them all and conference calls plus many other features besides.

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What is LateralAccessDevice? It is software that you may install on your own equipment to gain all of the capabilities described above, plus a lot more, with a user interface designed for non-experts to use. We designed our LateralAccessDevice software to bring the feature-rich capabilities of our commercial, enterprise-grade network appliances into the hands of individuals and small-sized and medium-sized organizations with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface and practical suite of features and functions.

LAD: LateralAccessDevice is software that turns a computer chassis into a high-performance, multi-purpose Internet / network tool that combines multi-dimensional firewalling, network monitoring, access control, packet capture, DNS, NAT and a host of other applications into one easy to use, integrated, high-security package. LAD takes you back to before the Internet!