Hello All
My partner Richard and I, 73 and 80 years of age respectively, recently acquired a BT Premier Phone Triple cordless set. I was scammed once a few years ago and since have gotten several scam calls per day. The last straw were two calls before 6 AM.
First we tried Telephone Preference, but the scammers are obviously criminals, so that doesn't work.
Because of UK insanity of legally allowing spoofed caller ID's, Call Protect doesn't do much because it is a 'blacklist' service. My partner searched for a practical alternative and found the BT Premier Phone. I'll let him describe some details:
Richard here.
BT Premier Phone is the only phone we found that does a practical 'whitelist'. Like many other brands is can store contacts, but as far as we could find,
- it is the only one that uses contacts as a 'whitelist', allowing these calls to ring immediately,
- it is unique that the contacts can be downloaded from mobile on-device contacts by bluetooth,
- although contacts are confusingly stored in 3 different lists (not explained well) it is possible to have 3000 of them! We have 549,
- it is the only phone where calls not 'whitelisted' can be 'announced' with a voiced name for the recipient to choose 4 dispositions of the call.
- with Custom blocking, a long list of call types can be given 4 different dispositions, especially 'Witheld' can be allowed. Witheld is rarely used by scammers; possiby BT holds the real Caller ID when they are witheld.
Premier Phone is not perfect:
- It sounds loud and tinny,
- It works with Digital Voice, but its range was not as good as a conventional Panasonic in our hard-wall flat. Interestingly, the Digital Voice Essential Phone was not any better at range, although better sounding, but we were able to fix Premier Phone range with a Digital Voice Adapter, which was not possible with Essential Phone!
- It's complicated and has quirks that are not documented in the lengthy user guide, but we found them through trial and error.
Our scam calling has stopped. The 'announce' feature makes it easy to add a contact after a desired call, and is a minor inconvenience to callers. We often ask new business contacts to call our mobiles until we work out their caller IDs.
To BT Product Development: Your newest phones do not have the extensive 'whitelist' capability above. We needed this to deal with serious scam calling. Don't let that feature go.
Richard for me and Elsa Nelson
