System and Method Employed by Answering Service to Dynamically Shield Against Unwanted Telephonic Contact Attempts

摘要

An answering service answers calls on behalf of called parties when callers place incoming calls to the called parties and the called parties are unable or unwilling to answer the incoming calls directly. A dynamic shield is employed to detect and respond to unwanted (junk) calls from nuisance callers. The dynamic shield includes: a detection module that detects patterns from calls received at the answering service and, for each of one or more nuisance callers, identifies the nuisance caller from the detected patterns; a database module within which the detection module creates and stores a caller record corresponding to the identified nuisance caller; and a shield module operating with reference to the caller record in the database module to screen out further junk calls from the identified nuisance caller.