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Comment by dsmithn | Hacker News Reader

I really hope so. I stopped answering calls from unknown numbers until a year ago when I got a call from the same number twice and it was a paramedic calling to let me know my wife was in a car accident. She was awake enough to remember my number but her phone was lost.

So now I can't help but answer calls from unknown numbers even though I know 999 out of 1000 of them will be spam. It's abusive and an incredible waste of everyone's time and energy, not to mention in my case I wasted 10 minutes of critical time I should have been with her at the hospital.

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Missing an emergency call like that from a family member or close friend is one of my fears. I do hope these regulations come with teeth.

It's a popular scam for that reason.

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0204-family-emergency-...

I have a feeling the fake emergency calls are much more obvious than a real one, though. I will say, however, that emergency family calls are probably successful in the older generations.

Most of those services use a different network, or their devices are flagged as emergency numbers and get some priority. Why doesn't the call from a paramedic or other emergency number go through as a high-priority call and indicate as such? When I call 911 my cell goes all nuts telling me about how it's got priority service and the UI changes to an emergency-colored UI with some additional information, so when they call me when my wife is in the ER, why not have the phone go nuts and force me to answer it?

Good point - that would be awesome.

That nightmare scenario is the only thing that makes me answer unknown numbers. Also, a family member has a job in health and often calls from a withheld number so I end up answering a lot of spam.

In Australia a lot of it seems to target Chinese international students for some sort of visa-related scam ('Your visa is out of date, the police are coming, you need to pay your fees immediately in gift cards').

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