You've received these phone calls yourself, the only difference is, while my computer is set up to my audiogram and all that to allow me to far better hear than I could before on my PC, my phone is a completely different story, so I still rely heavily on a relay service in order to make and receive calls.
How a relay service works, for the deaf and hard of hearing, is we get a special phone number to give out to people that would need to call us for something. This is usually doctors offices, hospitals, various specialty clinics, government offices (like Social Security), family and finally friends. So I have a direct line to my cell phone I use for texts and data and a relay operator line that people I know personally can call me on.
So when someone calls this special number, it connects to a relay operator that's a certified stenographer. This person only hears the callers side of the conversation. So someone calls up that number, is placed in a short queue until a stenographer is available, then the call is hooked up to flash my phone's screen and make it vibrate like mad to notify me that I have a caller.
My direct number only flashes my screen once, the relay service flashes my screen several times.
There is a bit of a backstory to this. I normally use a call blocker that blacklists every number except those in my contacts, my contacts list is my whitelist. Now granted, normally people that know me don't call my phone, they'll text because they know I'm deaf and won't be able to comprehend them. Or they'll IM me, one of the two. And while they do have my direct number, they know to call my relay operator to speak to me. They literally put my number in their phones as "Glenn Text" and "Glenn Call".
However, my husband needed my phone to verify something for his domain name for his hobby website as his was screwed up at the time, so I allowed him to do it. Figured "Why not?"
Well he didn't put a whois block on his domain name at first so my phone started blowing up left and right. At first it was all for people calling for him to try selling him SEO services for his "Business" which is a personal hobby website, not a business.
They don't bother to check that it's a hobby website or a business website first. Secondly, I know SEO myself so if my husband was really, truly wanting to try ranking high in the SERP's he wouldn't pay a third party service, he'd literally turn to face me, tap me on the shoulder and request the assistance, I'm literally sitting right next to him the majority of the time. Why pay for what you can get for free? (Or perhaps pay for with certain favors ;) If ya know what I mean, ok, all that part aside ehem.)
I had the call blocker disabled for a little while, about a week, because the notifications stopped rolling in so I figured they must be done trying. My call blocker immediately picks up then hangs up on them so it blocks them from voicemail too doing that. I have voicemail set up for a specific reason which I won't go into here.
Then out of the blue the last couple days, I had to re enable the call blocker. Why? Because of idiots thinking they can get me with a fake IRS call saying that we owe them money or we'll be arrested and that that person on the phone right this instant can save us from prison if we just send him money via MoneyGram. Eh yeah sorry, but the IRS doesn't accept payments via MoneyGram, Western Union nor Walmart Money Transfers.
Then another scam caller rang trying to sell me fake health insurance. Red flag besides the one calling my direct line? My husband and I are both medicare recipients and they're actually all trying to reach him on my phone, he's only used my number once for his website domain name, that's it. So it's bloody obvious the scammers are truly scammers.
Also it's illegal still to do telemarketing calls to cell phones and it's also still illegal to try selling third party insurance to medicare recipients.
Thusly, call blocker enabled and will remain enabled. I was hoping to be able to have the free space on my low end cell phone and not have the call blocker draining my battery faster than it drains without it, but I suppose jackasses without a single lick of sense in their skulls will continue to call my number endlessly in an effort to scam cash out of us and it's simply just not going to work.
Calling my direct line is the biggest red flag.
