If you're like most Americans, you hate being bothered by solicitors.  Especially when they call your cell phone at all hours of the day or night.  It seem like they always call when your either expecting an important call or when your hands are full and you have to drop everything to find your phone and see who's calling.

The worst offenders in my opinion are the 'Robo' calls.  These are from companies who use a robot to repeatedly dial number with the intent to connect their sales people with potential customers.  Answer one of these calls and you might hear a recorded message or pitch and asking you to push '1' if interested.  Or the other option happens where once you answer, the robot transfers your call to a waiting sales person.

As we head into the holiday season, these 'Robo' calls will hit a fever pitch as companies fight for consumer dollars in any means possible.

If you're like me and you would rather not be bothered with these calls there are several things you can do and several things you should NEVER do.

Should you encounter such calls, you can file a complaint at the FTC’s donotcall.gov site.  If you haven't already registered your phone numbers at the website, I'd encourage you to do that as soon as possible.

But in addition to that, there is a new service which just started in September that claims to put a stop to those annoying 'Robo' calls and it's free.  Nomorobo.com offers a service developed by software programmer Aaron Foss, who won $25,000 in the FTC’s challenge for 'Robo' call solutions. Once you sign on, calls that come into your phone also are directed to the Nomorobo’s smart service, which analyzes frequency and blocks calls on a black list of known offender numbers. It's might not be 100% fool proof, but it’s an extra layer of protection.

Here are a few other tips you can use to protect yourself from unwanted solicitation calls:

Don't answer unfamiliar numbers

Hang-up immediately

Never give out personal information

Never Interact with Solicitation Calls - by pressing 1 or 9 could get you added to a hot list and open the door to even more calls.

Finally, you can also call your phone provider to block the calls, but be wary of fees tied to blocking calls.

Source: nomorobo.com/

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