Spam Calls

Have you been receiving spam calls, unwanted calls and/or robocalls to your campus phone number?

Phone number technology is remarkably open and flexible, but that openness also creates the intractable problem of spam calling and phone number spoofing. This is true for traditional phone systems and newer software-based phone systems like Microsoft Teams calling.

There are two ways that spam calling affects William & Mary faculty and staff:

Receiving unwanted calls. This could include unwanted sales calls from companies who have discovered your phone number to sell you something or could be from auto-dialers methodically calling blocks of numbers with automated messages.
Your phone number can be represented (“spoofed”) by auto-dialer software and used to call someone else. You could receive a call from someone demanding that you stop calling them, even though you never called them.

The university does not have any power to stop spam calling overall, at least at this time. Read this NYT article for more context.

Unfortunately, it is very likely that you will get spam calls, even from phone numbers from our area code that look legitimate. You can block individual phone numbers from calling you again. In your call history in Teams, click on the triple dots next to the entry for the number you want to block and choose "Block" from the popup list. You cannot block campus extensions.