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Comment by MagicPropmaker | Hacker News Reader

A little trick that will work for "geeks" but won't scale is:

- My personal phone number is in a remote area code, of a sparsely populated state, from where I don't know anybody.

- Any phone calls that come from this area code are blocked (well, actually, they have a silent ring tone.)

This gets rid of about 90% of the spam/robocalls because these days, 90% of them spoof a local areacode/exchange.

Of course, if everyone did this, they'd stop doing it. But it works for now and makes my personal cell phone useful. I did have to do some finagling to get my carrier (T-Mobile) to give me a phone with an area-code of a different state.

I don't have a lot of faith that STIR/SHAKEN will help in any real way. They'll just have to rent numbers from people who don't care about the law, and/or registered with bogus information so it won't be worth anyone's while to find them.

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I've noticed in the past year or two that spammers have begun using area codes from the handful of friends & family I receive the most calls from, and not just my own area code. It stands out because at least a couple of those area codes aren't from major metropolitan areas.

I don't use social media like Facebook or Twitter, but most likely an app on my phone or others' phones sold my contact info. I try to avoid installing third-party apps. Since I began using smart phones, I could count the number on two hands. But it only takes one bad app, and there are plenty out there.

I don't doubt telco call logs are available on the black market, but apps are the simplest and most likely vector.

I'm rather skeptical of going after Google and other big tech companies for anti-trust violations. The web is a big place. But it's much easier to distinguish Google's control of Android and the Android app market, both from a technical and legal perspective. And Google has deliberately made it difficult to limit app data access. I remember the brief period where Android by default provided a prompt of requested permissions and the ability to uncheck them before installing. They removed it because few people made use of it, few apps worked correctly without all their requested permissions, and most importantly Google was no longer worried about privacy concerns hindering Android adoption. But with the current attention being given to data privacy I believe the public is finally prepared to make effective use of such a capability. But now Google has even less incentive to provide such a simple and transparent opt-out prompt, so fat chance they'll bring it back without being legally forced. Tripe fat chance they'll make any of those permissions opt-in.

> I've noticed in the past year or two that spammers have begun using area codes from the handful of friends & family I receive the most calls from

I got a spam call the other day FROM MY OWN NUMBER. How's that for subtlety?

I was very confused when I saw my phone ringing - I'm sure that was the spammer's intent though.

one of the weirder numbers I got a call from was 000000000000

it made my old phone kind of glitch out because the number was a bit too long.

That's a tried-and-true technique for getting into a person's voicemail mailbox, if you don't have a password set. For years, until carriers started forcing people to set passwords, this is how a lot of phone messages were obtained by unscrupulous tabloid reporters, etc.

How did you set the ring tone for this entire prefix? I’ve been looking for some easy way to do this on iOS, I also have a phone number from an area code + prefix where I don’t know anyone and all calls from there are spam.

You can do it on Android with "tasker"

You can block with wildcard in some android phones.

How do you get a number for a specific area code?

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