My wife and I constantly get spam and scam phone calls and so does everyone else we know. Some of these calls are garden variety spam, but some are sophisticated phishing attempts by people who did their homework on me presumably by background checking my phone number. We want to buy a SIP trunk that can receive calls only and use a home Linux server to answer the line. This number can only receive calls and if anyone ran a background check on it, it would come back to the VoIP company we bought the SIP trunk from. There would be no way to get E911 information like names and addresses out of it since it, in fact, cannot place emergency calls. Apparently it would cost in the neighborhood of $5 per month. We then give this number to people and organizations as if it were my default phone number and we would have full control of what actually gets routed to my personal phone through the Linux server. "Press <random number> and/or state your name to be connected" to filter the overwhelming majority of bad actors and only forward actual callers to our real phone. If someone tried to fax the number we could receive the fax and have it in my email as a PDF. There's almost no limit to what should be possible by having the raw stream in Linux. As for the actual spam and scam calls to our true phone number, we just set the phone to ignore all calls except for contacts and forwarded calls.Has anyone done anything like this before, and are there any guides to this sort of thing?
>>109277617First learned of SIP while discovering [d]irect [i]nward [d]ialing, when Google voice was the free option. Dunno where things are now, the setup you describe is fully sane. Suing the world is step 2, when everything works as you like.
>>109277617what if you have an emergency and need to call 911?
>>109277653I would just dial 911 on my cell phone or any other suitable device at hand. The Linux server with a recieve only phone number never needs to call 911
>telephone rings>I don't know the number>I don't take the call>it stops ringing>I don't receive more calls from the same number
>>109277804>this happens every 15 minutes during normal business hours and every hour overnightI've been hearing more people talk about this and nothing is getting done about it. The irony of the situation is that my cell phone already has the ability to perform the filtering and vetting I want to do, but just like a lot of things with cell phones, the powers that be generally don't want to give these abilities away for free even though you own the hardware
>>109277825This is a normalfag problem. You're not Tom fucking Green.
>>109277617I used to get these weekly then one day, after listening and leading the scammer on for 3 minutes, I told them that I knew it was a scam and that they had phoned the number of a (insert here) State Police officer and that the conversation was being recorded. They promptly hung up. Since then, I only got scam calls 3-4 times per year. I then noticed the number of scam calls I get has gone to zero after changing service providers, even though I kept the same number, it's as if my new service provider filters scam calls better.
>>109277617I remember for my first job we had to use two-factor authentication. Not throughp Google authenticator or any other current app but by registering our phone number to some third party that would text us a code. They very clearly sold our information because I would get calls from unknown number 10-15 times a day. We complained but nothin was done because our company called the third-party cand the aaid "nah we don't sell thsir information". Clearly a lie because as soon as I left that job, the call spam stopped.
>>109277617Try not living in a third world country.
