I get a lot of telemarketer calls. So many, in fact, I’ve contemplated changing my number just to try and get it under control–it’s that bad.

So in search of a better option to help stop telemarketer calls, I think I came up with a way to limit them that, so far, seems to be doing pretty well.

Now, you can, and should, use your phone’s built-in blocking feature. You can tap and hold on a phone number you know is a spam caller in the call log and tap block on most devices but the issue with this is that these companies have an unlimited amount of phone numbers so this just creates an endless loop of calls and blocking and calls and blocking.

Block a Spam Caller

Ideally, you’d want the system or person dialing you to remove you from their list and, I’m sure we all know at this point, that simply asking them to do so, doesn’t work. In some cases, by answering the phone or letting it go to voicemail even lets their system know that the number is a real number and keeps it in their system longer. So, what does one do? We need to convince them the number doesn’t work.

To do that, I found a cheap recorder on Amazon that lets you plug in a 3.5mm jack that it comes with into the recording port and the other end into a headphone port to get a cleaner recording than using a mic against a speaker. Then I found the standard disconnected phone message on YouTube.

And I think you can see where this is going.

Plug in the recorder to your computer’s headphone jack with the video of the disconnected message queued up and push the button to record and push play on the video. Once it’s done, you can push the button again to stop the recording and unplug it from the computer.

Recorder Plugged into Computer

Play it back to make sure it worked and then you just need to now keep this little guy on you for a while as you continue to get robo calls, etc. When you get one, make sure you’re in a quiet enough area, and then answer the call (being careful not to make any other sounds) and push play and keep it looping until the person/machine hangs up.

If it’s a machine, it should recognize the tones and disconnect and a person will hear it and mark it as a disconnected phone number (these companies get charged by the minute to make these automated calls usually so they don’t want to waste the time on phones that don’t work).

Then it’s just a matter of keeping it up until enough of the companies calling remove you and you hopefully don’t need to use it anymore.

Hope that helps someone else who’s sick of unwanted calls like I am. Let me know if it works for you in the comments below and follow me on social for more tips and tricks.

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