Putting the Brakes on Spam Phone Calls
By Diane Tait Image courtesy flickr I’m old enough that I still remember the days before cellphones, as well as the first generation of mobile phones that either resembled a brick with an antenna or lived in a bag that we plugged into the cigarette lighter in our cars. Back then it cost a small fortune to make calls on mobile phones. That was the bad news. The good news was when your mobile phone rang, you could rest assured it was a call from a client or friend who had your cellphone number. Today, the odds are about 50/50 that the call routed to your smartphone is spam. That’s right, nearly half the calls received in the US are from telemarketers. That’s ten times the amount of spam generated just two years ago. What’s even worse is that many of us took the time and trouble to register our cell numbers on the Do Not Call registry maintained by the government. While the registry was supposed to reduce the amount of spam ...