(1888PressRelease)
May 19, 2008 - The day of the phone solicitor is coming to an end.
Since the advent of the Do Not Call registry, businesses and individuals have been plagued with a barrage of calls from phone solicitors.
Some are legal -- political robocalls and nonprofits, for example. Some are illegal commercial spammers.
Whatever the sources, telephony users have gotten used to picking up the phone to hear either dead silence or a sales pitch at the other end, sometimes as often as 10 times per day.
PhoneSpamFilter.com initially aimed to provide individuals and businesses with a way to complain about specific telemarketers. These complaints include the marketers' caller ID, allowing PhoneSpamFilter.com to build a database of solicitors.
A surprisingly high percentage of marketers do send a caller ID, partly for legal reasons, partly to bypass those who filter out blocked caller IDs.
Today, PhoneSpamFilter.com has expanded its reach to offer PBX users an automated database of "bad" phone numbers.
Much like the most successful e-mail spam filters, PhoneSpamFilter.com uses collaborative filtering. The simple yet powerful idea is to harness data generated from millions of individual users throughout the country.
As with e-mail spam, a small number of individuals will receive solicitor calls, but the vast majority will avoid such calls thanks to the work of those initial few.
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