Who Calls: Let’s fight phone spam together!

— Hello, am I talking to Mr. Snow?
— Yes, that’s me.
— My name is Brian, and I’d like to tell you about a fantastic new opportunity. We are developing a highly technological investment business…
— Thank you, but I’m not interested.
— Mr. Snow, this will just take one minute!
— No, I told you—
— But Mr. Snow, you are missing a unique opportunity for great…
— You are wasting my time and yours. I’m not interested!
— Please, could you…
click

Sound familiar? Somebody calling you from an unknown number — could be an acquaintance or an annoying salesperson.

Or it might be someone important, which is why many of us pick up the phone. However, quite often it’s just another irritating, time-wasting cold call. One can filter spam in e-mail (for example, with our Anti-Spam feature) but it’s much harder to filter out phone spam.

Good news: It will be possible soon! We are developing a new project, Kaspersky Who Calls. It uses a database of telephone numbers of different companies together with their fields of work. Numbers of telephone spammers and fraudsters are also added to the database. This service will show users who is calling them even if they don’t have the number in their contact list. If it’s a cold call, they’ll be able to make an informed decision about whether to pick up the phone.

The Who Calls app is in beta testing right now, but you can already help us improve this project and speed up its development. When you get a call from yet another telephone spammer, visit callerid.kaspersky.com and add their number to our database.

The site will prompt you to select a category: spam, bank, car service, fraud, and so forth. You can also post a comment regarding why you are adding this number to the database, but that is optional. You don’t need to sign up or enter your name; everything is done in a few clicks.

Once the number is in our database, if a Who Calls user receives a call from that number, their phone will display information about who is calling — a criminal, a spammer, a lawyer, a bank account manager, a prankster, or whoever else. The more numbers we have, the more cold callers we’ll detect.

Kaspersky Who Calls will help people of all ages and levels of experience. Older and younger people tend to become victims of phone fraud more frequently than others, but no one is immune.

Let’s put an end to telephone spam! Simply visit the Who Calls page and add the numbers of callers that have bothered you with cold calls