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Comment by dmckeon | Hacker News Reader

For $20 US a year for an app, robocalls are down to a few a month from several a day on each of a VOIP and cell line. Nomorobo, Robokiller, and several more - do some research, read some reviews, and pick one. I only wish it was as easy to filter email spam for a 25-year-old email address. Telephone service providers may offer robocall filtering as well. One can deal with the problem now, or wait for Shaken/Stir, whichever.

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Be super careful as you do that research - check the Terms of Service. Some, like Truecaller, are harvesting your call activity and network and reselling it.

It appears Hiya and Nomorobo have sensible policies.

However...

The problem is the completely randomized neighbor calls.

They are “calling from” real numbers belonging to real people.

Hiya Premium has neighbor blocking, but only prefix by prefix, and you can’t bulk add the prefixes.

It appears adding a prefix adds every individual number within that prefix to the phone’s block list, and each call block plugin can only block so many numbers, so the more prefixes you have, the more plugins have to be enabled.

“WideProtect” aims to simplify this, your mileage may vary:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wideprotect-spam-call-blocke...

WideProtect almost looks like what I want, I wish you could just do regex filtering on the incoming numbers instead of this individual number crap.

It sickens me that one must pay to have this problem fixed. The FCC needs to step in and either require a fix or require the providers to setup customers with these services out of their own pockets.

I use "Should I answer?" On android, it's free for me and I block everything.

(not affiliated)

I pay for RoboKiller and still get 7-10 calls per day that make it through. It’s not a panacea.

Hiya worked the best for me.

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