For the past day or so I've been poking around looking at the call blocking feature, and while it's great for blocking a single number quickly and easily, I've been running up against an issue where I'm having to block entire area codes due to a substantial amount of calls being received that were just "dead air".
I'd started to mitigate the problem by screening calls on the extension in question, and when I'd pick up the phone and hear silence instead of a name, I could just hang up.
But even that is too distracting.
So I looked at my call logs and found that the calls tended to originate mostly from the NYC metro area (in this case, the destination is an NYC number, but I don't really know anybody in the area who'd be calling me on this number).
So I created a short recording telling any potential real people to reach out some other way, created a new inbound route (set to 99, which puts it above any of the standard incoming routes), and started tinkering, eventually stumbling across regex that worked.
Unfortunately, this is probably a bit of an edge case - for someone who lives or works in the same area as their phone number, this solution probably won't work as well, but, for someone who registers a number in another state from where they or their business is located... it could be helpful.
Either way, there's no reason someone couldn't modify this to mitigate junk calls for their own situation, such as preventing calls from toll-free numbers:
^(\+?1)?(8(00|33|44|55|66|77|88)[2-9]\d{6})$
I don't believe the destination_number condition is necessary - this could potentially be set as a global rule for all destinations & extensions; and instead of a message you could simply send them to voicemail (but I don't want to keep getting a bunch of 3-second voicemails and/or emails with audio attachments, hence the hangup), or to an IVR, or something. I've also used a method where it requires input before calling the extension (basically a sound captcha... "dial 1357 to continue this call").
I'd started to mitigate the problem by screening calls on the extension in question, and when I'd pick up the phone and hear silence instead of a name, I could just hang up.
But even that is too distracting.
So I looked at my call logs and found that the calls tended to originate mostly from the NYC metro area (in this case, the destination is an NYC number, but I don't really know anybody in the area who'd be calling me on this number).
So I created a short recording telling any potential real people to reach out some other way, created a new inbound route (set to 99, which puts it above any of the standard incoming routes), and started tinkering, eventually stumbling across regex that worked.
| condition | destination_number | ^\+?1?(2123334444)$ | 0 | 0 | true | |||
| condition | caller_id_number | ^(\+?1)?((212|347|516|518|646|716|718|845|917)[2-9]\d{6})$ | 0 | 5 | true | |||
| action | lua | streamfile.lua Restricted_Area_Code.mp3 | 0 | 10 | true | |||
| action | hangup | 0 | 20 | true |
Unfortunately, this is probably a bit of an edge case - for someone who lives or works in the same area as their phone number, this solution probably won't work as well, but, for someone who registers a number in another state from where they or their business is located... it could be helpful.
Either way, there's no reason someone couldn't modify this to mitigate junk calls for their own situation, such as preventing calls from toll-free numbers:
^(\+?1)?(8(00|33|44|55|66|77|88)[2-9]\d{6})$
I don't believe the destination_number condition is necessary - this could potentially be set as a global rule for all destinations & extensions; and instead of a message you could simply send them to voicemail (but I don't want to keep getting a bunch of 3-second voicemails and/or emails with audio attachments, hence the hangup), or to an IVR, or something. I've also used a method where it requires input before calling the extension (basically a sound captcha... "dial 1357 to continue this call").
