DealFindersFunnel takes reports of unwanted calls or messages very seriously and we work vigilantly to protect our customers and combat unauthorized or fraudulent use of our platform.

Deal Finders Funnel phone numbers may receive calls or texts from outside users, just like any other phone number. When a customer purchases a phone number in DFF, it is their number and not used by any other DFF customers.

To help protect against calls that aren’t intended for that customer, whenever a phone number is released, we typically reserve it for a minimum of three months before it can be purchased again so that the former owner can update their records. In addition, we monitor each reserved number until it reaches an acceptably low number of phone calls before re-releasing it.

Dealing with Unwanted Calls

If you are getting unwanted calls from abusive parties, you have several features you can use to help combat it:

1. Blocking: Use DFF’s “block caller” feature in the call log to create a blacklist and make sure that your account won’t receive nor be charged for on calls from those numbers. You can block callers by clicking the “flag” button in the far right column of the call log and then choose to “block future calls like this one.” You have the option to block by CNAM (the name of the caller) or the phone number of the caller.
2. Release the Number: If you find that one particular number seems to be getting more unwanted calls than others, you can always release your DFF number and provision a new one to your account. It could be because of the former owners of this number.
3. Voice Menu: If you are concerned about unwanted calls distracting your agents, we also recommend using a voice menu (aka an IVR menu) in DFF to present callers with a greeting and keypress instructions to help combat spam from reaching your agents.
4. Spam Detective: Finally, our optional Spam Detective service can add an additional layer of protection to your numbers by detecting if a caller appears to be coming through a suspicious rate and if so, route them to a captcha, voice menu or voicemail box to force them to take particular actions before being sent to a live agent.

Refunds

We are not able to refund time for unwanted calls. In many cases, there are no clear criteria to use to distinguish whether a specific call was unwanted, fraudulent or spammy, without careful consideration and us having to potentially analyze each and every call. The best defense is to use the tools Deal Finders Funnel provides to minimize the duration of these calls and the distraction they may impose on your team.

What We Are Doing

We regularly monitor the work the FCC is doing to address the perpetrators of spam calls and we aggressively report the situations to our carriers so they can report these cases to the FCC. It appears that this situation will only change when the Federal Government enables the tracing of inbound calls to their source in order to stop the perpetrators. We work with our carriers to escalate known cases of abuse and thus far, our carrier’s escalations to the Justice Department have received responses that law enforcement is not able to fully trace these calls upstream to the points of origination due to existing privacy laws.