Gadgetory

thanks for watching tech quickie click the subscribe button and enable notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos if you're like me one of the first things you do when you wake up is check your phone and see if you've missed anything exciting and ooh what's this a flashing notification light oh wait bloody hell it's a missed call from some number in some far-flung area code or even another country altogether and they didn't even leave a voicemail how rude well assuming it wasn't a wrong number or another angry call from some debt collection vulture there's a good chance that you've been Robo called this is essentially the telephone equivalent to email spam which you can learn more about here but unlike the messages that inhabit your email accounts junk folder robo calls and other kinds of phone spam can be far more intrusive and because they don't have subject lines it can also be much more difficult to know whether a call from a random number is from a scammer or an annoying political campaign before you pick up so why is Robo calling so pervasive and what can you do about it well although telemarketing was obviously around way before the internet era modern voice over IP or VoIP services like Google Hangouts or Skype have made it much easier to call tons of different phone numbers at once many times unscrupulous callers that use automatic dialer x' don't even bother working off of a database they just call tons of random combinations hoping that if they throw enough darts some of them will hit a target VoIP has also made it extremely easy for Robo callers and scammers to use a trick called caller ID spoofing where a phone call will show up as being from a different number than it actually is and although this isn't a rock-solid way for callers to mask their true identities it is very effective at defeating spam detection systems wait a minute spam detection systems so we have solutions in place they just don't work well sort of many modern smartphones can connect to databases that check incoming calls against known spam numbers and provide a visual warning if there's a match letting you know that you may not want to answer and there are third-party apps that provide similar functionality but as I mentioned before these aren't perfect solutions due to the caller ID spoofing and the fact that some of the data is crowd-sourced and inherently error-prone data collection method furthermore if you're on a more traditional landline these spam spotting features may be completely unavailable to you so unsurprisingly governments have tried to legislate the problem out of existence with mixed success who didn't see that one coming right the United States has had a Do Not Call Registry for 14 years where you can sign up to tell telemarketers not to contact you but this doesn't cover completely automated calls just ones with a human on the other end trying to sell you the world's most powerful toilet plunger or whatever so the FCC in the u.s. is currently attempting to work with major carriers to block spoofed numbers that aren't assigned to anyone on record so as to reduce scam robo calls many of which have actually ripped people off or stolen their personal data by pretending to be tax collectors or other government officials however robocopy however robocalling is still allowed under a number of circumstances for example you may still get calls from polling firms taking surveys or more irritatingly from political campaigns and committees during election season which makes me wonder if I should start my own single issue political party focused on reading the country of phone spam completely then again we need to find some way to get the word out hmm do you find yourself spending more time as a small business owner or freelancer dealing with accounting for the work that you've done and billing for it and taking payment then actually doing work well it's time to check out fresh books cloud accounting software it's designed for the way you work to help you be more organized more efficient and less stressed fresh books lets you track your hours track your expenses bill your clients and even take money directly through the platform all more quickly and more easily they've got amazing technical support you literally pull them and an actual person picks up and helps you out if you're having trouble and they've got cool features like the ability to see when a client has seen your invoice and put an end to the guessing games so try out fresh books for 30 days for free by heading over to fresh books comm slash tech quickie and entering tech quickie in the how did you hear about us section thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other channels leave a comment with a suggestion for a future video and subscribe it'll be great hit the bell to