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Comment by nemesisj | Hacker News Reader

I have lived in the U.K. for more than 8 years. I receive spam calls daily from a combination of London and blocked numbers. Everyone I know here also receives them frequently. I’m on the U.K. do not call list. It’s endless PPI, “your recent accident”, and just normal phishing attempts. When I’m in the Middle East it’s endless spam texts. I guess Germany has it figured out but by no means is this an American only problem, or a solved problem in the Western world.

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I'm in the UK and have had the same number for a decade or so, I probably get one a year? They are mainly from foreign companies. If said countries also had our regulations, and a sharing agreement in place, it wouldn't be an issue.

A fair number of them are foreign companies, but the “our records show you were in an accident” calls are very much from the UK.

The foreign companies are basically criminal operations and countries like the US have taken action against them in the past by working with local law enforcement[1].

[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-asia/article/2179175/mo...

I am in the same situation yet I know people who are plagued by such calls. There must be something that triggers this off?

Having said that, these people will also give their phone number and email address to anyone who asks whereas I do not. If I have to enter a phone number on a form and it's isn't immediately obvious why I should do that then I'll make-up a number.

If you're not doing so already, please pick numbers that will never end up in use by someone else. E.g. for UK: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/inform... (expand the Notes section)

That's a useful list I never knew existed. Thanks.

I'm in the US and I almost never get spam/scam calls, yet people here say they get them multiple times a day. I don't know why some people have such an issue and some people just don't.

I think it's a combination of

- people giving their phone number out to companies that share this data, and

- people answering spam calls. Even if you hang up immediately, they probably have an internal metric that says call that number back more frequently.

I don't do either of those, and last week I had more spam/unknown calls than usual: 4

For online forms that require a phone number, I just insert that company's own number.

As a counterpoint, I've lived in the U.K. most of my life and very rarely get spam calls (maybe ~5 a year). When I do it's almost always people trying to sell stuff / services to my startup.

Yeah, I get robocalls to my mobile almost daily. My late grandfather would also get calls once a week from the scum running those "Windows security issue" calls. Luckily we were about to give them a right good talking to - it's illegal, but they still do it.

Do you own domain names? I began getting this after I was silly enough to leave my mobile number on a WHOIS register. Most of the calls I receive though aren't from legitimate companies and if you call back the number, it'll fail

The problem in the UK is that the regulations here are toothless.

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