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Spam calls and texts have basically ruined the “phone” aspect of my iPhone. I now have my phone set to auto ignore anyone who is not in my contacts list. For SM

• warmwaffles 5y ago
  I wish I could do this, but I do field calls from people not in my contact list often.
  • giarc 5y ago
    My provider has 'Call Control'. If you call, it has a short prompt that says "This user has call control enabled, please enter <<some random digit>> to be connected." It ensures that only humans get through. However I have noticed some calls get through so I wonder if bots have already developed tech to listen to the message and enter the number. Wouldn't be hard I suspect.
• geerlingguy 5y ago
  Ditto, but regarding email, it's surprisingly bad on some providers.
• jetbalsa 5y ago
  It got so bad on my main emails, I just made a new one, started out with a custom domain and going to start doing per-website emails from now on to track where the hell its coming from
  • prepend 5y ago
    I’ve been doing this for a few years and find that the per website emails aren’t so bad and it’s whenever I use my old “legacy” emails that I’ve had with gmail for ages that gets the spam directed to it.
  • wlesieutre 5y ago
    Any good email services that offer unlimited aliases on custom domains at a reasonable price, or are you running that yourself?
    • drexlspivey 5y ago
      You can use a catchall, no need to set an alias for each address. Fastmail is very often recommended around here
      • wlesieutre 5y ago
        Does that not get you a bunch of extra spam that's been blasted at made up addresses?
        • ta988 5y ago
          I have my custom server for that. Yes it happens, the occasional mail on root@ etc but that's negligible compared to normal level of spam.
    • AhtiK 5y ago
      you can just add +myalias to most email services and get it delivered automatically. E.g. first.second+github@gmail.com delivers to firstsecond@gmail.com
      • vladvasiliu 5y ago
        But this is a quite well-known technique, so if someone is at least a little smart along the way, they can easily strip the +github part.
        • jjoonathan 5y ago
          Not just "can," they do strip the + part. Especially the sketchy ones. Or they barf. I tried this for a while and had a 30% success rate. It was dismal.
  • cube00 5y ago
    The first time I busted a company doing this was very satisfying writing to their privacy officer requesting they remove every trace of my data from their systems with an attachment of the spam email with their domain on it so it there could no doubt where it leaked from. Hopefully it was worth the few cents they got selling my address.
    • dylan604 5y ago
      You were satisfied with with empty calories? That's what I would consider this with the information you provided. Did the company you sent this removal request a) respond, b) honor your request? If no, then what you did was essentially waste your time. If they did, why not add that information to your post?
      • saimiam 5y ago
        Such a shortsighted view of the action taken! A) if more people make a fuss about their email getting sold the way OP did, we can still salvage something out of the situation B) results/outcomes are not the only reason people why should do things. After all, we lionize those Russians protesting the Ukraine invasion knowing nothing will come out of it at a personal level.
        • dylan604 5y ago
          I can see where you're coming from, but I disagree with shortsighted. Pessimistic maybe. I see this kind of messaging to a company doing shady things similar to clicking the unsubscribe link in emails. It's just confirming the message was read by a human, and validates the email address as a good target. Even if you send the cease email from a different address, you've just given them a new address to harvest.
        • azemetre 5y ago
          This is bad IMO, why should individuals have to rectify something a company did? All it does is encourage bad behavior because I'm sure that the still comes out ahead if even 10% (being generous) did the above. Society would be way better if we made a collective action to lobby our Congress to change the laws and make it illegal. Tech has been unregulated for far too long and there's too many bad actors taking advantage of this.
  • inetknght 5y ago
    > going to start doing per-website emails from now on to track where the hell its coming from Beware that some websites use this "legitimately": I ordered some stuff from Ikea and asked that it get delivered. Ikea forwarded the request to a third party, TaskRabbit. I now get TaskRabbit email spam to my ikea.com@ per-website email. And no matter how many times I unsubscribe from TaskRabbit the spam still comes. Spam detection successful! I just put @taskrabbit.com into the blackhole and call it a day. If I get more spam to ikea.com@ then it will also get blackholed. I already won't buy anything else from Ikea for something as dumb as this.
• carbocation 5y ago
  Same here but one aspect where MacOS is behind iOS is in Message filtering: there is no “filtered” setting for Messages on MacOS.
• prepend 5y ago
  Same for me. I’ve missed some important calls from random numbers and it’s frustrating. There’s even a group of spammers that call twice back to back, I think to get around the setting that allows double calls to come through. My iPhone helps a bit in that it will ring if I’ve ever called that number before. It’s funny because I think having a setting where only apple accounts are allowed would be welcome, but I think that only works on iMessages since calls can be easily falsified. I’m looking forward to the day that Apple will know if a device is actually originating the call and pass that info to me. I trust Apple more than any other org to actually care about eliminating spam calls. Sad state of affairs.
  • WorldMaker 5y ago
    > It’s funny because I think having a setting where only apple accounts are allowed would be welcome, but I think that only works on iMessages Most of my iMessage spam seems to be from fly-by-night Apple accounts (often setup with @gmail.com and @outlook.com email addresses). It surprises me that Apple seems to make it really difficult to report these as spam accounts (it's like five taps in iMessages to even find the right profile page to do so) and at this point because I get so many of them I've gotten to just deleting the threads rather than reporting them as spam because it is too many steps to report and the spammers are just cycling through random email addresses anyway so you never see more than one message from the same "Apple account".
• twobitshifter 5y ago
  Be careful using the silence unknown callers setting in iOS. I had an interview set up and the call silently went to voicemail. They had called through some Google service so calling back didn’t work.
  • muttled 5y ago
    I wish there was a setting to turn the silence unknown callers feature off for x hours. As it stands, I'll manually toggle it during periods where I know I might get an unknown call I actually want to answer. Leaving it on 99% of the time has dropped my spam calls significantly.
    • vmception 5y ago
      You can set the focus modes to do exactly that, but for all calls
  • willis936 5y ago
    I nearly missed a "next steps" call from a recruiter recently because of this. The solution to me seems clear: use video/voip apps for everything and ditch the phone number. I don't know how to reach that critical mass. It feels like we should already be there with zoom and teams, but apparently not.
  • chrisfinazzo 5y ago
    The only way I've found to get around this is to either temporarily disable the setting if I am expecting a particular call or make sure that I have contact info for every single person I interact with during these exchanges. Even if I know where the call is coming from, your experience shows it is still possible to mess up because you can't possibly account for all the kinds of weird phone systems people might be using.
  • MiddleEndian 5y ago
    I always keep my phone on if I'm interviewing (or dealing with mortgage or govt bullshit) because you have to answer unknown calls regularly. I also turn it on if I'm expecting to sync up with someone specific. But otherwise, I leave my phone on silent and have it set not to notify me about voicemails. My friends and family know how to reach me.
• II2II 5y ago
  This is the main problem with spam: it is reducing the effectiveness of our communications systems. It doesn't matter whether we disregard a legitimate call/text since we do not know its source or whether legitimate calls/texts are blocked so we never see them (or even if we miss a call/text since it is buried in illegitimate ones).
  • encryptluks2 5y ago
    Sounds like terrorism yet it is treated like petty white collar crime.
    • rattlesnakedave 5y ago
      Entire call centers are setup in certain countries to prey on the elderly in the West (particularly the US). This should absolutely be treated more seriously than it is. Probably not terrorism, but whatever is between that and elder abuse.
      • saltminer 5y ago
        A couple years ago, I got people returning calls I never made for about a month. They were all elderly, and my phone number was being spoofed by people claiming to be Aetna (a health insurance company). None of them knew it was possible to spoof your phone number. Some thought I was lying and that I had been leaving voicemails as a prank. I'm sure most of them would have fallen for whatever scams these people were peddling. It's fun to imagine old cranks replying to Viagra spam and forwarding chain emails, but the reality is far darker.
    • pc86 5y ago
      Who is treating it like any sort of crime?
  • macNchz 5y ago
    Yeah this became apparent to me in the past month after a family emergency. I have gotten tons of spam calls and texts for a long time, which I usually just ignore. Now, I’ve started getting important, legitimate calls from unfamiliar numbers at any time of day and the weight of all the spam has become more apparent. The American telephone system is totally broken by this issue.
• djbusby 5y ago
  TMobile has been blocking 2FA texts/calls so everytime I sign in to Twilio is a supreme hassle. But only a problem with Twilio - so maybe the issue is on their side
  • lloydatkinson 5y ago
    Probably a double irony because twilio is used for sending a lot of spam SMS.
  • death_syn 5y ago
    Twilio is often a source of the spam texts and calls, so it would make sense for a cellular service provider to block them.
    • 300bps 5y ago
      It isn't just Twilio. When I had T-Mobile, I was able to get 2FA SMS from about 1/3 of the companies that I use it with. Even financial companies like Vanguard and many others, never were let through with T-Mobile. I called T-Mobile and asked them to open it up completely. No improvement. I switched my same phone with same phone number to another provider and I get all texts that I am hoping to get now and get literally no spam texts.
  • dylan604 5y ago
    Maybe TMobile is doing you a favor is showing just how insecure 2FA via SMS really is.
  • zonethundery 5y ago
    They switched this off for everyone at some point. Call customer service and they'll turn it back on.
  • bluedevil2k 5y ago
    Use the Authy app then
    • 5y ago
• everforward 5y ago
  Just your phone? Practically every means of contact I have is flooded with useless crap messages. My phone, email, and physical mail are all nearly useless. I barely bother to check them anymore, because for every 1 legitimate message I get, there are dozens of spam ones. > I honestly wish I could deny-all by default. Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now. I would love an information-lock based system. Basically those "What's your mother's maiden name?" security questions, but repurpose them so other people have to answer them before they contact me. I'm pretty sure even a basic "What is my name?" security question would eliminate most spam. For those more infuriated by spam, you could set it to something random and effectively have a password to contact you.
  • ianai 5y ago
    Maybe it’s time for a firewall for the phone/text systems?
    • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      If I understand correctly, SHAKEN/STIR is supposed to be this.
  • Forricide 5y ago
    > email Aside from using Gmail, which has quite good spam filtering, my solution to email spam is siloing: using a separate email account for different categories of account sign-ups, etc. I just checked my 'good' email's spam folder, and there's nothing there - I get maybe one spam email every few months. (In order to reduce friction, I have autoforwarding from other emails, which doesn't resend spam with gmail - but there are other solutions which would presumably work for any email provider). The only downside is, with paid email accounts, this could be monetarily problematic - which I don't really see a solution for, unfortunately. But, it's definitely way easier to filter email spam than physical/phone spam.
    • noasaservice 5y ago
      Even with siloing and owning your own domain... It doesnt stop the possibility that a legitimate other person with your contact details does the "share address book" with some shitty app. Its not you who has to fail - its ANYBODY in your contact network.
• hammock 5y ago
  Google phones have a great system of filtering out spam calls and texts (for free). Not sure why iPhone doesn't have something similar
  • 86J8oyZv 5y ago
    It does: I've used RoboKiller (who provided the data from the article) since I switched to iPhone in 2020 and missed the Google Assistant stuff from my Pixel. It has a free and a $40/year tier both of which are good compared to the alternatives like Truecaller, and it does both call and SMS filtering.
  • notjustanymike 5y ago
    I'm surprised this doesn't get mentioned higher. On the Pixel you can screen a call with text to speech and reject any spam calls. Most robo-dialers are smart enough to understand you're doing this and hang up automatically. It's win-win.
    • hammock 5y ago
      Yes and that's not even what I'm talking about. I'm referring to when a call comes in the phone has some logic that will make it show up "suspected spam call" - and spam texts it silences the notification and moves it into a spam folder.
      • jjoonathan 5y ago
        That's exactly what google phones do. They are far ahead on this front. I bought an iPhone this time around because I wanted to play with lidar and because google defaulted hard on the "free picture storage" promise. There's a lot to like about the iPhone, but anti-spam is a glaring exception. Holy shit, I assumed that Apple would at least have made an effort, even if wasn't their core expertise and the result wasn't quite as good as google's, but it's like they didn't even try. Meanwhile google put this into production years ago and they have iterated and tuned it to the point that the spam problem is almost completely buttoned down.
• personlurking 5y ago
  I'm in Brazil and right after I signed up for a new number, I was getting 15 spam calls per day, everyday. They recycle numbers here so some of those were "legit" but meant for previous owners. As an American with a US number too, the difference is night and day. My US number gets 1-2 spam calls per week or per two weeks. But yeah, I do the same. All set to auto ignore, even though it means one or two necessary calls are missed (ex. my cc company wanted to inform me they were cancelling their partnership and thus closing all cards).
  • ericbarrett 5y ago
    Hard to judge by region. My American number that I've had a while gets 4-5 spam calls a day and about five texts a week, and it's all trending up, despite whatever the phone companies say they're doing. The newest one seems to be group FaceTime calls (to about 20 numbers) that hang up after a couple seconds. Not sure what the angle is there; makes me wonder if there's an associated iPhone 0-day. Or maybe just probing phone type.
• loudmax 5y ago
  I feel like there's an analogy with fake news and deliberate disinformation campaigns. Universally blocking access to information is difficult or impossible, but it's relatively easy to generate lies and nonsense in such quantities that people don't know who to believe.
• dan-robertson 5y ago
  Email had similarly wide-open protocols to phone systems so it can be interesting to ask how spam was tackled. One thing with email is that big webmail providers got to be gatekeepers so could e.g. - require signatures/other things to prove which hostname the email came from - do wide-scale analysis of senders/email contents to filter out spam There are still issues (eg people typically will be more mad if they see spam emails than if unexpected legitimate emails get marked as spam because they won’t know if the latter is happening unless they frequently check their spam folder), and the popularity of some webmail systems means that it can be hard to tick all the boxes to not have your own legitimate emails binned. Similarly the ‘marked as spam’ signal is very strong so if you send out a newsletter that people mostly read and want and can easily unsubscribe to, you can still end up being sent to spam for all users because some people use ‘mark as spam’ to mean ‘please unsubscribe me from this newsletter’. It seems the phone system is still at the stage where they don’t know who phone calls are actually coming from (except somehow they manage to bill these people).
  • ghaff 5y ago
    >if you send out a newsletter that people mostly read and want and can easily unsubscribe to, you can still end up being sent to spam for all users because some people use ‘mark as spam’ to mean ‘please unsubscribe me from this newsletter’. My Gmail SPAM folder is filled with a ton of stuff that isn't really spam. There are newsletters I probably signed up for at some point or at least downloaded a document/watched a webinar where getting periodic emails was part of the deal. Because, yes, rather than clicking the unsubscribe button which legitimate marketers will honor, a lot of people just hit report spam which at some point puts it into the spam bucket for everyone.
    • eloisius 5y ago
      One of those people is me. I don’t take the time to determine whether it’s ‘legitimate marketing.’ I would never ever sign up for a marketing email, even if I am a customer of the company that sends them. Until companies stop dumping every single email address the get their hands on into their marketing list I will continue to mark every one of them as spam. I even use rules to flag emails including the word ‘unsubscribe’ so I can do it more easily.
• CTDOCodebases 5y ago
  This could be achieved if the phones supported a whitelist that would redirect any unauthorised senders to a non existent number.
• maram 5y ago
  >> Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now. I’ve been using Hey for two years now, and while it solved the spam problem, the UIUX makes it just so hard to use. I’m keeping for one reason, it’s the shortest email I have.
  • benhurmarcel 5y ago
    Out of curiosity, what bothers you with the UI/UX? I tested it for a while and liked it, but the price is too high for my low volume of personal email.
• 86J8oyZv 5y ago
  I've paid $40/year for RoboKiller (the source of the data in this article) since 2020, and consider it worth every penny. For reference, I was a long-time Pixel user before then who enjoyed the Google Assistant call filter. It's not quite as good as Google Assistant (it's based on call forwarding) but by far the best solution on iPhone, and it filters SMS spam as well as calls.
• elliekelly 5y ago
  Even setting your phone to auto-ignore anyone not in your contacts is infuriating... apparently my iPhone considers any number marked as Spam Risk a "known" number and allows it to ring right through. So if you're a spam caller then you're actually more likely to get me to answer the phone by spam calling enough people to get Apple(?)/AT&T(?) to mark you as a spam caller. It's craziness.
• gjs278 5y ago
• fallingknife 5y ago
  Email did solve the spam problem, but only for strict spam. I still am drowning in the pseudo-spam of constant promotions and inane notifications that are from companies who I do business with and legitimately do need to contact me from time to time. It's at the point where maybe 5% of my inbox is anything I would ever be interested in reading. And I have noticed an uptick in this kind of think in my text messages. I hope it doesn't become the next email.
• Consultant32452 5y ago
  I never had this problem on my Android phone because it had a Google Voice related service where I could block known spammers. Almost no one got through. Since switching to iPhone I've noticed a significant uptick. This might be coincidental, maybe Android would have been letting more through also.
• rambojazz 5y ago
  Time's ready for a phone firewall!