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Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see the FCC begin to pay attention to this garbage in the US. I get about 4x more spam calls than from humans I actually want to hear from on my cell. I no longer pick up any call I don't recognize, which has caused problems. I also am in on-call rotation for my day job, so I can't just turn the ringer off at night when "on".

And these assholes call constantly. I'm not at all a violent person, but meeting someone with a financial stake in one of these operations would seriously test me. I find them utterly enraging.

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Same, pretty much all phone calls I get these days are spam. And yes, very frustrating to constantly get calls offering small business loans for my non existent company.

Can anything be done to combat this?

Only communicate inside a walled garden. Forgo public anything. For example, do all your communication in Facebook Messenger. It's not because Facebook Messenger is the best messenger ever, but instead, it is because there are so many hoops for the person to jump through ( for example getting accepted into your social network and meeting all the security requirements that are managed by Facebook for you - SSL, 2FA, etc ) that you end up with 100% signal and no noise.

I'm using Google Fi as my voice provider. It's not an awesome solution and requires a very specific phone, but I do get three things that really help with the spam calls:

* I can manage a list of spam and blocked callers online in addition to on the phone. This lets me move blocked call management off the phone and onto the carrier.

* I never have to answer my phone or listen to my voicemail: the transcripts have gotten to be very good, and appear relatively quickly after a call is received.

* Calls are flagged when I receive them, and probable spam calls are marked as such when the phone rings.

>I also am in on-call rotation for my day job, so I can't just turn the ringer off at night when "on".

Android has a Do Not Disturb mode which can filter calls which are in your contacts, if you know that you should generally get on-call calls from a few numbers.

Thanks for the suggestion. So does the IPhone, which I use. But due to particulars, that doesn't work for my situation.

I present to you, this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/smarter-living/stop-roboc... . The following excerpt was particularly interesting:

Download apps such as Truecaller, RoboKiller, Mr. Number, Nomorobo and Hiya, which will block the calls. YouMail will stop your phone from ringing with calls from suspected robocallers and deliver a message that your number is out of service.

Mr. Quilici said phone companies, such as T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T, also have tools to combat robocalls. They work by blocking calls from numbers known to be problematic. ... And then there is the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, which turns the tables on telemarketers. This program allows a customer to put the phone on mute and patch telemarketing calls to a robot, which understands speech patterns and inflections and works to keep the caller engaged.

The Jolly Roger solution looks delightful to me. It doesn't have an app as such but the solutions it offers are not bad and the price is good.

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