BT must block fake-caller IDS

I signed up this week for BT Call Protect ( www.bt.com/callprotect – see News, Issue 494, page 8), and was delighted to discover that unwanted calls (including withheld, unavailable, international and blacklisted) can be stopped before they reach the home phone. Many so-called call-blocking phones don’t actually block calls – they merely suppress the ringer, leaving the caller none the wiser as to why the call isn’t being picked up. This doesn’t matter for unwanted calls, but some legitimate calls don’t get through because the calling organisation withholds the caller ID (our local NHS does this).

BT Call Protect plays the caller a statement, such as “Welcome to 1572. The person called is not accepting anonymous calls. Please redial without withholding your number, or leave a message”. Our GP called my wife this morning, heard the announcement, and knew immediately he had to redial using 1470.

However, Call Protect has a major failing. It does not detect incoming calls with a fake-caller ID. We are receiving unwanted sales calls from a company selling new boilers under the Government’s boiler-scrappage scheme. These guys are one step ahead because they use different fake-caller IDS each time they ring. But why aren’t these numbers on the BT blacklist? Whenever I make a phone call, the exchange checks the number dialled and then routes the call to the destination, but will recognise an invalid number and play the message “the number has not been recognised”. So why isn’t BT Call Protect using this database?