Stop Telemarketers
Telemarketers: you can hate them, or hate them. But there’s not a lot you can do about them, except complain.
Today we’re announcing that Mr. Number has figured out how to identify telemarketers and other spam callers automatically.
Why has nobody done this before? It’s a hard problem. All we’ve got to go on is a phone number. Unlike email spam, there’s no header, no display name, and no content to analyze.
Some services will let you report telemarketers and other abusive callers by hand. (It’s good to vent, so we let you do that too at http://mrnumber.com/report.) Most apps that claim to block spam rely on manual blacklists. But telemarketers change their phone numbers frequently; by the time you complain, that number may not be in service anymore. Worse, numbers get re-used, so ordinary people wind up on these lists.
Mr. Number has a new approach. Every time one of our users gets a call or text from someone who is not in her address book, Mr. Number knows about it. Over the last six months we’ve discovered that telemarketers, debt collectors, and other nuisances have very distinctive calling patterns. Based on this research, we can now identify phone spam based on calls to just a handful of users. Instead of a name, our caller ID app displays “Suspicious number”.
One example: until six weeks ago we had never logged a phone call from the number 717-200-9898. Now we estimate that each day 60,000 Americans are getting spam phone calls from this one number in Loysville, PA (population 2,364). But our system marked it as spam within hours.
Please help us to test our results by reporting numbers that we miss at http://mrnumber.com/report. The next step will be to block those calls automatically, so you can flip a switch and never be bothered by telemarketers again.