US Patent 9819797 Methods and systems for inbound call control

An indication of an incoming call may be received at a call control unit communicatively coupled to, and/or resident within, a telephone. The indication may include identification information for the incoming call. It may be determined whether additional information regarding a caller associated with the identification information exists, and if so, a first operation may be performed on the incoming call responsively to the additional information, otherwise, a second operation may be performed on the incoming call responsively to an absence of the additional information. The additional information my include a user-configurable list of desired callers (e.g., a whitelist) and/or undesired callers (e.g., a blacklist). The additional information may also include caller identification information and/or a spam score. The first operation may be blocking the incoming call, forwarding the incoming call to a voice mailbox, transmitting the incoming call to the telephone, enabling the telephone to receive the incoming call, and/or answering the incoming call and then terminating the incoming call. In some embodiments, the first and/or second operations performed on the incoming call is/are user configurable.