Patent ID: 8005074

Claim:
A method for identifying undesired telephone calls in a network in which telephone calls coming in for a telephone subscriber, a callee, from at least one calling telephone subscriber, a caller, are subjected to a test, the method comprising the steps of: determining, in a framework of the test for incoming calls, a time of receipt of each incoming call and, for each incoming call, a probability that each incoming call is an undesired call, said determinations including developing a statistical profile of a temporal structure of previous undesired calls over a predefinable time period including recording at least one of i) times of receipt of the previous undesired calls and ii) times of an end of the previous undesired calls, relating i) the time of the receipt of the undesired call to ii) the one of the times of the receipt and the times of the end of the previous undesired calls, and calculating an average value of a time interval between the time of the receipt of the undesired call and the one of the times of the receipt and the times of the end of the previous undesired calls, and calculating, for a current incoming call, the probability that the current incoming call is another undesired call by relating a time of receipt of the current incoming call to said temporal structure of previous undesired calls.