I feel seen. My wife thinks I’m crazy for straight up ignoring my phone now. If you aren’t in my contacts your calls are ignored and VMs are deleted without listening. Period.
What did virtual machines ever do to you?
She doesn’t get it, she owes the IRS money! All they need are Apple gift cards to clear it up /s
I don’t answer anything that isn’t identified and that I recognize. If they leave a message I will check it. It’s a pain that so many in the medical and service industries use unidentified numbers forcing telephone tag and they don’t use email or text only phone calls.
fuck the mobile system
sms, phone calls, sim cards, mobile data system
sms is way less feature complete and structurally good than options like Signal, Fluxer, and Matrix
same with phone calls
sim cards and esims are crap and could be replaced with accounts or Privacy Pass style anonymous keys
mobile data system is overcomplicated and has no reason not to just be an isp that offers mobile dataOrdered some stuff online from Merrell, two days later, order cancelled because I didn’t pick up the phone to verify an order which I had already gone through two different sets of two-factor identification to complete. No worries, upon considering redoing the order, it was too much money anyway. Thanks for saving me a buck, Merrell!
95% sounds a little low.
If I was magically in charge, I would make it so if you got an unwanted text or call you report it and the phone company has to pay you like $10.
They don’t deal with this problem because they only care about profit.
Same with number spoofing. They own the network they can ensure the numbers are verified. Yes, there might be instance where another network connects that doesn’t do verification, but all is needed is a way to signal the customer whether the number was verified or not.
Just preventing spoofing would be huge contribution as it would allow customers to have reliable blacklists.
Im not sure i want the phone company to make the decision.
It should be more along the lines of all phone companies must take a deposit to open an account. Foreign and voip calls must be linked to a deposit for the phone company to be allowed to connect those calls. A call gets reported as spam, the $ come out of the deposit, if the deposit gets used up, theyre banned from calling until they reup their deposit.
Suddenly all it takes is a bunch of organized complaints to shut down any number.
I’d take the potential for brigading if it meant no more spam calls
jtrek for prez
Or at least FCC chairman.
This is technically how it already works except for the government gets the $10 instead of us
There’s no enforcement on this though.
If I was in charge, all phones would be required to have a built-in taser. The recipient of a call should have a button they can press to tase the caller. This taser must be strong enough to seriously injure a human, like, burn ward you never hear out of that ear again strong enough, or strong enough to set any computer that phone is attached to on fire. Capital offense to remove or disable the taser from a phone.
That would solve the problem I think.
And suddenly swatting someone, to death, just became a lot easier.
theyre even doing it through sms more
How are people getting so many spam calls? I’ve gotten maybe 2 in the last 5 years. Not that I want spam calls but people consistently reporting getting several a week, or even day, makes me concerned I’ve done something wrong. Like some government system I’m supposed to be signed up to but I’ve somehow missed
I used to not get any as well. Then for a new job I had to sign up with an American company, and since I didn’t have a company phone yet, I used my private number.
Since then it’s been multiple calls/messages per day, but over the years it’s died down. I fucking hate it so much.
I get them because I was jobless for six months. Now that a lot of job sites sell your data and some jobs are straight up fake to collect data, it is so hard to stay off a list.
I was talking about this with my partner. The meta now is to use a dedicated email and phone number when applying for jobs.
Where are you getting 1 phone number/email per job?
It takes hundreds of applications to get a job these days.
I think they mean one alt account from their personal email. So like person-lookingforjob@gmail.com. They might be getting a serviceable number from google or other places just so they don’t expose their real number.
Yep, this is what I meant.
However, Rooster might have opened Pandora’s box here. It might be possible to apply to the same job multiple times with differently formatted versions of your resumé. Every recruiter/AI has a personal preference to how you present yourself… Some preferences more silly than others.
If you start at a new job and get a phone number that happens to have been owned by someone that signed up to a lot of stuff then you will get them… I sometimes also get random phonecall from old ppl that goes “oh shit wrong person” or text messages wishing me a happy birthday, I feel bad for those ppl. In the beginning did I answer them but it was annoying after x amount.
Apparently did I get a old mans phone number who was very loved but very bad at communicating that he changed his phone number and also signed up for many things. So I only answer if it is with in my work hours otherwise do I just ignore the phone call completely.
I got a lot of spam calls when I started signing up for “rewards programs” and eventually stopped signing up for them. I get 1-2 a week now.
Some mobile networks have spam protection that’s enabled automatically.
You could also have a “clean” number, especially if you don’t use your phone number anywhere online, haven’t answered a spam call before, and nobody used it before you (or the previous user was a long time ago).
Spam callers can’t robodial literally every number, so they rely on lists of phone numbers that are known to be good/active, for example if they’ve answered a spam call before, if the number has been in a data leak, etc.
I don’t know if this is still accurate, but I have a friend who used to answer calls from unknown numbers with “hello, this is First name Lastname.”
I don’t even answer calls from unknown numbers. His approach boggled my mind, in part because of what you just said.
Older people do this a lot. Either their full name, or “Lastname residence”
The scary thing these days is that someone needs just a few samples of your voice to be able to clone it using AI. I suspect that scammers will do that, if they’re not already doing it. We’re going to get to a point where we can’t trust people are who they say they are.
You and I do not sign up to shit that requires our phone numbers. Presumably because we do not enjoy getting fucking owned.
I don’t know how or why, but it’s 5-6 a day some days. Most get autofiltered so it doesn’t even ring but they still get to leave voicemails for some dumb reason. So I end up with an inbox full of clearly AI voice generated messages. Many of them are the exact same handful of recordings. It’s honestly frustrating as hell.
I can’t use voicemail anymore. My message says “You can leave a message if you want, but I’ll never listen to it. If you want to reach me, send a text at this number, or email me at XXX.” That gets rid of most of the bullshit, and I only have to deal with people who were motivated to go the extra step to reach me.
Don’t participate in contests where you get a code, and you have to go to a site to verify that code and give your data. They’ll sell that phone number immediately to telemarketers.
Don’t sign up for things that need a phone number
Job application
Don’t. Don’t job.capitalism bad.
Burner number
Then you have to always have your burner active in case a recruiters gets to call it, so you can never truly put it aside until you get a job
VoIP number you access through software.
Yeah, cool, but that doesn’t change the fact that if you’re actively looking for a job, you’re ALWAYS picking EVERY call, because they ain’t gonna try again later.
Oh. While you’re doungthat yes you are fucked.
Call screening features are great. iPhones recently added a call screener that pre-answers the call to ask who is calling. I know at least Pixels have had it for a while.
Funny thing about that though is that it asks the caller to say their name but many of the spam caller just say my name, so now my iPhone says maybe: my name as the caller.
To me, that’s a flag that the caller isn’t worth my time. More often than not if they refuse to identify themselves, they’re not actually legit, so the mechanism still works.
Oh absolutely, it’s just funny seeing your own name pop up as the “caller”
Yeah sorry my reply came across like I was dismissing your comment. I agree with you completely lol
I’ve been pretty successful at reducing spam calls by simply reporting the calls to the USA’s donotcall registry LINK HERE and also pretending to be a robot trying to take up as much of the scammer’s time as possible.
Of course the BEST defence is to have a company find and remove your number from online as much as possible, but that’s trickier for businesses.
since STIR/SHAKEN rolled out, the scam and robocalls here have really dropped off. only a few per week now… even to the phone numbers that are published (intentionally) online.
of the ones that get through, nearly all of them are coming through new voip points-of-presence popping-up in small towns all over our very rural part of the country.
I’m still getting about 5-10 per day. They’re all spoofed numbers with different area codes and the same or similar AI recorded voice lines.
I’ll answer almost every call I can, but not say anything. I’ve learned that they wait for an answer before starting their shpeel, so if I answer and remain quiet, they hang up thinking I’m another bot. Then I block the number to be safe.
You gotta at least start with your most white-person “hello” possible. If its a human they might just assume silence means the call was dropped.
i do that too. if it’s from a number i’m gonna answer (but don’t recognize), i do. and then watch the call timer on the phone and don’t say anything until after three seconds. legit callers are always still there, the computers–never are.
if a call rings through that the phone company has tagged in caller id as probably bogus. i just answer and hang-up right away. they don’t call back.
This is the way.
From what I understand there seem to be some sort of lists that mention activity of any given number based on whether you answered a call so I literally never answer if I don’t know the number and now I rarely get a spam call. Like maybe 4-5 times in a year. My number is probably flagged as inactive or something on these lists.
Unfortunately, some of us have to. I need my (and my bosses) phone number on danger / caution tape so people can ask me why its there & if can they ignore it.
Ah, that explains those roving gangs of overseas scammers and their cross-country caution tape tourism excursions
Anecdotal, but several people I know who used to get loads of spam calls noticed a very significant and lasting decline in frequency after signing up for https://www.easyoptouts.com/. Seems like a good thing to do anyway, might be worth trying if you struggle with this.
There’s also donotcall.gov that is for free.
If you are in California you also now have another tool: https://privacy.ca.gov/2026/01/californias-opt-me-out-act-your-privacy-just-got-easier/
I think it starts taking effect in August.
There’s also donotcall.gov that is for free.
LOL. This has literally never worked.
