The newest marketing ploy now trending is called the ringless voicemail.
It is simply the latest clever attempt by telemarketers and debt collectors to reach the masses.
The calls are quietly deposited through a back door, directly into a cell phone’s voicemail inbox — to the surprise and major irritation of the recipient, who most often cannot do anything to block them. For the curious, the way this works is that every carrier has a dedicated voicemail access code running behind the scenes. Ringless voicemail operations dial these access codes, put in your number, and leave a voicemail without ringing your phone. The message then suddenly appears in your voicemail inbox.
Proponents of the ringless voicemail drops argue that it’s a non intrusive alternative to a robocall. But consumers think otherwise and say it’s even more invasive, more time consuming and more annoying in some ways than a standard phone call. Consumer advocacy groups say that ringless voicemail is done without consumer consent, with no way to get the perpetrators to stop.
Unfortunately, the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better. A firm recently petitioned the FCC to treat these voicemail drops specially – so that they wouldn’t be regulated and wouldn’t require consent. While they’ve dropped their petition, there’s no reason they can’t petition again, and there are court cases now that may decide that ringless voicemails are perfectly legal. If that happens, watch out!
Stopping Ringless Voicemail
In the meantime, what can you do?
Well, you could disable your voicemail, but that’s not super easy to do. And it’s a pretty drastic solution.
You could just delete those voicemails, but that’s what these folks count on. They can hit a ton of people’s voicemail inboxes very cheaply hoping for a few responses, just like the nasty robocallers do with robocalls.
The real thing to do is get a voicemail service that doesn’t allow ringless voicemail drops and even better, plays them an out of service message on your number if they try to do it. That’s what YouMail does. That means we prevent telemarketers, scammer and debt collectors from leaving those annoying, wasteful and time consuming ringless voicemails! If you’ve got YouMail already, congratulations – you don’t have to worry. Otherwise, simply download the YouMail app for your iPhone or Android or sign up here.