Ed Effrein lives on the northeast side of Fort Wayne, and he’s had the same telephone number since 1966.

A few years ago, like most people tired of telephone solicitors, Effrein signed up to be on the state’s do-not-call list.

But something happened recently, he said. He’s been getting bombarded by calls from solicitors, at least half a dozen every day. He said he spoke to someone – no one in any official capacity, he said – who told him the do-not-call list had expired. That was his problem. He had to re-register if he wanted to avoid those calls.

Effrein was miffed. The calls would start about 3 p.m. and continue through dinner. He always answered the calls because he has several children and grandchildren on the East Coast, and he didn’t want to miss a call from any of them.

“Nine out of 10 calls would be one of these calls,” Effrein said.

They are from computers with recorded voices, called robo calls, and they usually start out with a recording that there might be problems with his credit card or his card might have been stolen.

Effrein just hangs up when he realizes who is calling, but, he said, “The robo calls tie up your phone. You can’t get them off. You can’t use the phone till they hang up.”

I called the Indiana Attorney General’s office to ask about the calls Effrein was getting and whether the no-call list had expired. No, I was told, the list hadn’t expired. Once you’re on the list, you’re on it, and Effrein is on the list, I was told.

The problem is that Effrein is being targeted by scam artists who ignore no-call regulations. Honest companies use the no-call list to scrub their list of numbers to call, said Erin Reece, a public information officer with the attorney general’s office. If you’re on the no-call list and you get a robo call like this, it is a scam, she said.

A lot of the scammers are operating out of Jamaica, Reece said. If you actually stay on the phone and speak to a person, they will have an accent, but your caller ID will make it look as if they are calling from a local number. “They’re difficult to find,” Reece said.

The scams vary. One offers to lower the interest rate on your credit cards. Fall for that and it could cost you hundreds of dollars. Some warn there might be a problem with your credit cards and try to sell you a solution. Those are the calls Effrein is getting. Some live callers are claiming to be from Microsoft and offering to remotely clean up their computers to make them run faster. “They’re relentless,” and abusive, said Marguerite Sweeney, section chief of the telephone privacy section with the attorney general.

The best thing that anyone who gets these calls can do is try to get some kind of phone number and file a complaint with the attorney general’s office. Even then, though, it might be hard or almost impossible to track down the scammers.

So far this year, the attorney general has received 5,000 formal complaints about these robo calls/scams, but that isn’t necessarily a good measure of how many calls are being made. How many people go to the trouble of complaining, Sweeney asked – one in 10? One in 100?

With computers, these scammers can make millions of calls quite fast.

If it’s not bad enough already, a bill is in Congress that would allow people to make robo calls to cellphones. If that happens, you won’t even be able to complain about the scammers.