Re: Voicemail without a call

On Thu, 27 Mar 2025 08:12:32 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:

 
VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> wrote:
 

Stan Brown <the_stan_brown@fastmail.fm> wrote:

Is it possible to send a voicemail to an Android phone without
actually calling the phone?

I don't know where my mind is lately. I really should have googled
that before posting a query.

Do you have spam filtering enabled with whomever is your cellular
provider?  If so, they may send spam straight to voicemail rather than
issue a call.

Like you, I have an MVNO for a carrier. Mine is called Visible, and
it's a wholly-owned subsidiary of Verizon. Support is pretty basic,
to put it mildly. They're good with SIMs and transferring phone
numbers, but I don't know that I could get a straight answer to
questions about spam protection or ringless voicemails.

I do have Google Phone's spam protection enabled, and call screen for
unknown numbers, but in the past any rejected call has shown in my 
call history. I suppose I should say I've seen plenty of rejected
calls in call history, so I assume that's what always happens when
Google Phone rejects a call.

One of the hits when I searched on "ringless voicemail":
 
https://www.itelecenter.com/blog/how-to-leave-a-voicemail-without-calling

Thank you for this. I don't know if the author intended it, but it
reads like a how-to for spammers. In any case, it answers Yes to my
question of whether a voicemail can be created without ringing the
phone.
 

Some courts have sided against the spammers saying "call" also includes
any method to communicate with a recipient.  The FCC has their own
ruling which would assist plantiffs in class action lawsuits against the
spammers; see:
 
https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-finds-ringless-voicemails-are-subject-robocalling-rules
(click on one of the doc file links to read the ruling)

The robocalling rule was a good idea, like the Do-Not-Call List.
Sadly, when it comes to actual enforcement I know that DNC is
toothless, and I'll bet that the robocalling rule is too. Of course,
under the present administration, all forms of consumer protection
seem to be out of fashion.
 

Ringless voicemail is not a new problem.  The FCC ruling was dated back
in 1991.  The pro-spam providers of ringless voicemail are several, and
they make money to subscribe to their service.  Slydial is HQ'ed in
Boston, MA, so you'd think they would be subject to the FCC ruling, but
they're still in business.
 
Under the FCC's ruling, ringless voicemail are robocalls, and are still
"calls".  You can register with the FCC for Do Not Block registry, but
that isn't very effective.

Indeed! It's fundamentally flawed, in my opinion, because the person
receiving the unwanted call virtually always gets a spoofed number.
The victims have no way to know the actual number from which the call
is made, and the FCC has no way to aggregate calls from a number that
uses multiple spoofed numbers, as most spammers do.

I'm on the Do-Not-Call list, and have been since before the turn of
the century, but I don't have any illusions about its effectiveness.

Contact your carrier to see if they offer tools or options to block
ringless voicemails, or to disable their own feature that is getting
abused.  Blocking numbers won't work. 
 
https://robotalker.com/blogs/how-to-block-ringless-voicemail-calls-on-your-phone
 
Shows a list of options for some carriers.  You need to be a subscriber
to those carriers.  I use a MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operator), so the
carrier to which I get assigned through the MVNO does not see me as
their customer.  If I call the carrier, they dump me back to asking my
MVNO for help, and MVNOs have little or no support, and little or no
[anti-]features to combat ringless voicemail since such level of support
would cut into their cost savings they pass onto their customers.

I'm in the same position. I've never even tried to get customer
service from Verizon, even though my MVNO uses their network
exclusively, but if I did I'm sure I would just get bounced back to
Visible.

For a laugh, I went to Visible's site and searched Help for "ringless
voicemail". The AI told me there was no text available or that
search, which surprised me not even a little. :-) There doesn't seem
to be any way to contact a human as a follow-up, but since this has
happened once in a year and a half I don't feel a need to pursue it.

--
Stan Brown, Tehachapi, California, USA         https://BrownMath.com/
Shikata ga nai...