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As a consumer who's cellphone and IP-based landline are effectively useless for incoming phone calls, what can I do to help report these robo calls? We just re
by jkubicek 4y ago
As a consumer who's cellphone and IP-based landline are effectively useless for incoming phone calls, what can I do to help report these robo calls?
We just recently purchased a landline and have told nobody our phone number, so 100% of incoming calls are spam (and we get a few every day). It's amazingly frustrating.
- gonehome 4y agoIf on an iPhone turn on silence unknown callers. It’s an incoming call whitelist, others go to voicemail. This makes this a non issue.
- brian_herman 4y agoYeah on android I saw my friend screen callers. It was built into android.
- Corrado 4y agoThat's one of the things I miss most about moving from a Google Pixel to an iPhone. The Pixel was configured to use Google's call screening service, which would filter unknown callers and make them state the reason for the call. It would then ring my phone and give me the opportunity to answer or send them to voicemail. Neat.
- wl 4y agoThose missed unknown callers still result in a missed call, a voicemail notification, and increase that red badged number, mixed in with missed calls from friends and family I actually care about. It solves the issue of spam callers immediately interrupting what I'm doing, but that's all. I still have to sort through the crap.
- excitom 4y agoTrouble is, some calls go to voicemail that you really wanted - like the doctor's office with your test results or the shop telling you your car is ready.
- junar 4y agoThe feature is to silence unknown callers. If you know the numbers that they're calling from, you can simply add them as contacts. As a whole, I think the feature is worth the tradeoffs.
- ceejayoz 4y agoThere are often important calls that come from unpredictable numbers, like a credit card fraud department.
- gonehome 4y agoYeah this is the complaint people often bring up, but in practice I’ve found it doesn’t matter in real world usage.
- jkubicek 4y agoBlocking unknown callers on my iPhone isn't an issue; I block everything. The issue is that legit callers can't get through. My uncle had a heart attack last year; I found out through an Instagram DM from a family friend; nobody in my family was answering a call from an unknown number (the hospital).
- gonehome 4y agoCouldn't they have left a message? Blocking unknown is strictly better than blocking everything. Automatically transcribed voicemails work in exceptional cases like you describe.
- jkubicek 4y agoThey did leave a message, but I also have all new-message notifications silenced (since all my missed calls are spam anyway)
- walrus01 4y agotelecom industry here, honestly, nothing. SS7/PSTN are horribly broken. only thing that will fix it is burning it to the ground. fcc regulations and penalties mean nothing to shady offshore grey market scam call centers in india using suspicious/unethical voip providers and methods of getting phone traffic to the US/Canada. shaken/stir is a joke set up a voip based system with IVR on your incoming DIDs that asks the caller to input a short series of digits to be connected, then have that series of digits ring your real line. it will filter out about 98% of the crap
- calvinmorrison 4y agoI want to use my old desk phone, but I want to screen all calls to basically "known" numbers. Is this something I can do fairly easily? I'd also like a traditional voicemail system with playback (does not have to be cassette)
- walrus01 4y agospoofing caller ID is too trivially easy to rely upon known numbers on the incoming side as a filter, unfortunately.
- calvinmorrison 4y agoThis is probably true... but I've never had a spoofed call that pretended to be my mom, dad, wife, or family. That's basically the entire list I care about...
- toast0 4y agoI've been looking at this lately as I setup new phone service for my MIL who's moving to a place with unreliable power. Some phone companies have whitelist services, although if your telco is like CenturyLink of Washington state, they don't appear to want to actually be in the phone business anymore and all the useful services are grandfathered, ordering a phone line is an ordeal and pricing is crazy (OTOH, the line quality seems to be good if you can get it). If you've got a voip line, you've got way more options though; I think most providers should give you options to whitelist. Assuming your telco won't help you with whitelisting, your options are maybe? getting a new cordless system with caller id whitelisting, it seems like maybe some of the newest panasonic dect systems can do it (that will take care of the answering machine needs as well). Or getting an external box, most likely inline with your phone. I don't have either yet, but it seems like reasonable options include the Digitone proseries II [1], or the Sentry call blocker[2]. Both are more expensive than they should be (IMHO), but offer some amount of whitelisting and blacklisting. The Digitone has a longer history in the industry, and what looks like a clumsier interface; the Sentry has a good, but slightly messy feature for handling inbound calls from numbers that aren't 'known', for those calls, it answers and plays an outgoing greeting (customizable in the 3.x device, prerecorded in 2.x), if the caller presses 0, their number is added to the white list and they can call back; from reviews, I gather on the 2.x series pressing 0 add you to the whitelist and then hangs up on you; on the 3.x series, pressing 0 generates a fake ringback, makes the device ring (but not phones on the line) and after 9 fake rings will let the caller leave a message on the sentry device (2 message capacity, FIFO). This is like not quite right; the recommendation from reviewers is to record a message asking people to press 0 and then hangup and call back, rather than having them go through the weird ringing stuff. There's some negative comments about recording quality. [1] https://digitone.com/ https://digitone.com/ [2] https://www.telsentry.com/ https://www.telsentry.com/
- behringer 4y agoThe only spam I get is from some insurance company out of Florida. For whatever reason they won't stop calling. Everybody else stopped calling because I would always pick up and always try and worm my way through the system, and once caught or bored, then start questioning their moral character and their family's opinions of their life choices, or my favorite, why they choose to scam people (they always say they don't!). The call volume went way down after a while.
- RajT88 4y agoI have done the same. AFAICT it has made no difference in call volume. I did make some vacation package scammers feel bad and hang up a couple times. Claiming that I no longer travel because I lost my legs In a car accident years back. Family that can use the vacation package? Nope, they are all dead too. The last of them died in the same fiery crash.
- guelo 4y agoI use to do the same and then one vindictive scammer attacked me with nonstop hangup calls for weeks from random numbers. Now I'm more wary of interacting with them at all.
- behringer 4y agoyes that is always the risk when dealing with criminals :( They could just be mental.
- walrus01 4y agoone of the worst things you can do with them is engage and speak as a live human, even if all you're doing is taunting them, because then your number gets permanently marked as a live human in some grey/black market spam fuck's CSV file they sell to other people.
- ses1984 4y agoIt can't possibly result in more spam than I'm getting now.
- foodstances 4y agoWhat's the use case for purchasing a new landline in 2022?
- walrus01 4y agoelevator alarm line to connect to legacy POTS wiring going to the panel in an elevator? maybe
- pishpash 4y agoAn old elevator. If you were to design a new one you would route around the Faraday cage.
- toast0 4y agoAvailability when utility power isn't (at least theoretically), much lower latency (although everyone else has terrible latency, so kind of meh), desire to spend $60/month for $15 worth of service that the service provider doesn't really want to do anymore anyway. :P
- bombcar 4y agoBe aware that in some areas unless you specify a "burglar alarm" or "elevator emergency phone line" or similar, you may end up with a little powered box connected to fibre or similar. Some have battery backup and so kind of work the same as before ... for awhile.
- supertrope 4y agoBad cellular signal. Kids who aren’t old enough for their own cellphone. Heavy users appreciate the lower latency and audio glitches.
- jkubicek 4y agoKids who aren't old enough for their own cellphone is exactly it.
- jijji 4y agowhat I've heard from multiple sources is that landlines when you provision them, by default they get marked as a published number. if you provision the line and you mark it as a non-published number, usually you're not going to get these types of spam calls everyday. I think what's going on is that there's a automated campaign that's been going on for probably over a decade or two but where people are purchasing a daily list of published numbers from the telecom providers themselves and then they're using that in their spam campaigns.
- walrus01 4y agomore simply they're just robodialing every number in a NPA-NXX, there's no daily list of published numbers. what prefixes in blocks of 10000 numbers belong to what specific carrier is public info
- criddell 4y agoNow that you can port your number between carriers, what meaning does the prefix have anymore?
- walrus01 4y agoonly a little bit, older prefixes like in 206-xxx and 360-xxx that are assigned to legacy copper POTS ILEC carriers (like Centurylink for big parts of the seattle area, or Ziply for the suburbs) are more likely to be fixed landline phones and not ported out somewhere else. prefixes that are assigned to a carrier like tmobile or that were a metropcs prefix before its full integration into tmobile are highly likely to be cellphones, though people can of course port away their number to a voip service or something, but more often they would just move to verizon or att.
- Thetawaves 4y agoThe prefix is relevant for LEC ownership and management duties. Default routing is derived/provisioned by thousands block. Not all call lookups require a lookup into the number portability database. Telephone numbers are highly regulated; usage, growth, etc are tracked by prefix and reported by carriers to NANPA on a yearly basis.
- chrisseaton 4y ago> so 100% of incoming calls are spam How did they get your number?
- Syzygies 4y agoA few years ago I programmed my phone.com VoIP lines to route any call not on my whitelist through a virtual switchboard: Dial 7 to speak with me. I haven't had a robocall since. It's an inconvenience if a company wants to use automation to return my call. I can turn this off, temporarily. As I see it, it's stupid of any legitimate company to imitate a robocall for any reason. I don't walk up to cops carrying a fake gun; they shouldn't behave like spammers.