Building the Blacklist: Help Us Help You End Telemarketing Calls

Palo Alto, CA - Friday, August 16th, 2013

Plenty of us share your frustration – but how often do you turn annoyance into action? According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the Federal Trade Commission processes 200,000 complaints every month from people receiving telemarketing calls known as “robocalls” – a small percentage of total robocalls received.

That’s why we’re making an ongoing effort to serve as your “personal bouncer,” providing a protective barrier between you and those pesky telemarketers- including non-profits and political pollsters that do not fall under the national Do Not Call Registry. To strengthen that barrier, we’re working with both Ooma customers and government organizations to build out our Community Blacklist, a massive national database of spammers who are instantly blocked from reaching Ooma users. Most recently, in a public-private cooperative effort, we collaborated with the Indiana Attorney General’s office to incorporate the numbers of undesirable telemarketers they identified into the Community Blacklist – preventing them from reaching you.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with our blacklist features– available to Ooma Premier subscribers- here’s the scoop:

Personal Blacklist – add numbers of unwanted callers to your personal blacklist to divert, block or send their call to voicemail

Community Blacklist –by enabling the Community Blacklist, users are blocked from receiving calls other Ooma subscribers have found to be invasive

To help our “bouncers” keep telemarketers behind the velvet rope and off your phone lines, please report them to blacklist@ooma.comand we’ll investigate.