Trapcall

One of the most frustrating calls you can get on your cell phone is the dreaded “unknown caller.” I don’t even bother answering these calls; I send them straight to voicemail. I figure if it’s an important call, they will leave a message. A new company, Trapcall, allows you to unblock the caller ID information of the unknown caller.

The service is very easy to setup, simply visit www.trapcall.com and choose the signup link. Input your cell carrier and phone model, and you will get a sequence to key in that will program your phone for the service. To use the service, if your cell phone receives a call that has the caller ID blocked or unknown, all you have to do is “ignore” the call (that is what my Blackberry calls it). The call is sent to Trapcall and then sent back to your cell phone displaying the caller ID information. Basically, you are sending the calls you “ignore” or don’t answer to the Trapcall servers rather than your carrier’s voicemail. The caller never knows the difference as they hear ringing throughout the entire process. Once you have the caller ID information, you can login to your account and blacklist the caller. If the caller calls again, ignoring the call will result in them hearing, “This number has been disconnected.” In my testing, I found that the service worked great the majority of the time, occasionally the caller ID information would show “999999999.” From my research, this seems to be caused by the caller originating overseas or from a VOIP PBX system.

Trapcall offers four service plans – one free and three paid. Its free “Fly Trap” service offers the caller ID unmasking, blacklist support and web-based voicemail. The paid services range from $2.95/month to $24.95/month and all offer a free, 15-day trial. A credit card is required for the trial of the paid services. It’s easy to downgrade to the free service if you decide the paid service is not for you – do so before your trial ends and there is no charge.

I chose to evaluate the highest level service, the “Bear Trap.” This plan offers features such as no advertising, unlimited voicemail transcriptions (have your voicemails transcribed and sent to you via text message or email), carrier voicemail integration, the billing and street address of your callers sent to you via text message, call recording and toll-free phone support. To use the call recording feature, you must first ignore the call — even if you know the caller. This allows the call to be routed through the Trapcall servers. When the call is sent back, you answer normally. By default, the caller hears a warning message that the call is being recorded. You can disable this under your account settings, but you should check your state laws first. You can see a complete breakdown of all the available features and the different plans available on the website at www.TrapCall.com.

Trapcall is one of the slickest services I have come across lately. The service was easy to setup and worked seamlessly. One of my favorite features is the voicemail transcription. I never have been great about checking my voicemail in a timely manner, but the transcriptions allow me to catch important messages. If someone would just figure out how to do this on home phones too, I think they would also have a winner.

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