Thanks for that, TrueCall is what I was thinking of - their website is
https://www.truecall.co.uk/.
No worries. I don't use it myself, but it's a brilliant product that works very well and laid the foundation for all such products including the one I use (BT 6510 phone, which is a simpler and more limited implementation of the same idea). It deserves the praise and recognition it gets. I hope the inventor has become very rich from it.
It is not exactly clear how they deal with the "silence" that precedes an answered call being transferred to an available Scammer so I fear that they will not actually get your number removed from the list but it certainly seems a lot better than nothing - thanks again
Getting your number removed from lists is impossible nowadays, so it's not worth trying. Even if you succeed in getting your number removed from one list, it'll be added to others. Not all scammers have specific lists anyway - with the tech available nowadays it's profitable to have robocallers run through any valid numbers and transfer to a human scammer when a robocall is answered.
Call handling products like TrueCall have a good success rate at getting your number removed from any particular list indirectly. If a specific scammer business is set up efficiently, it will try a potential target a limited number of times without getting a human response before removing it from the list of potential targets. Judging by my call logs, I probably don't get targetted by the same scammer more than 3 or 4 times. Not that I care. Their roboscammers can call my phone a dozen times a day for all I care - it won't ring for them, so it won't disturb me in the slightest.
Call handling products generally handle the delay between switching from a scammer's robocaller to a scammer's human employee as a side effect of the way they work:
i) If the call is routed silently to voicemail, it can be detected by better quality and correctly configured scamming kit as an unanswered call. In that case, the scamming kit disconnects the call immediately and moves on to the next potential target. Lower quality scamming kit and/or badly configured scamming kit (both very rare nowadays) results in the robocaller automated message being left on your voicemail. I have never had a human scammer leave a message on voicemail. Not a single time since I installed the call handling kit. When I say "installed", I mean "plugged it into the phone socket and left it on the default settings". Hundreds, maybe thousands, of scam calls but not a single one that switched to a human scammer. Very few scammer's robocaller messages and none recently. Never a single human scammer.
ii) If the call handling kit has the option to have the caller state their name and you enable that option, the "name" you get is either part of the scammer's robocaller automated message or silence as the robocaller incorrectly detects the call handling kit as a human answering the phone and switches to a human scammer. Either way, it's obvious to you. You answer your phone, the call handling kit says you have a call from <silence> or <snippet of scammer's robocaller automated message> and asks you if you want to accept or reject the call, you realise it's a scam and you reject the call.
In a way, call handling kit is a bit like a lock - it's main purpose is to raise the security bar above the level of casual thieving so the vast majority of thieves skip it and look for an easier target.
Blocking foreign calls doesn't work either when they're using mobile numbers or voip with local area codes.
