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Comment by jjav | Hacker News Reader

With some numbers it is absolutely unbearable. I have a landline I've had for a very long time and it gets the infamous "extend car warranty" spam call about every other week. On my ~15 year old cell phone# I get that same call also about every other week on average.

But last year I got a new phone with a new number.. wow! It is completely unusable as a phone. Relentless nonstop spam calls every hour as well as continuous SMS spam. I've had to mute everything and send everything straight to spam except for a couple known numbers that I allow through. Nobody except family will ever be able to call me on the new phone because there's no way to enable unknown calls on it without having it ring nonstop.

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Personally I am most offended by the calls offering website and SEO services for the domain I purchased a decade ago without masking the registration, because I've professionally worked on (a) making a website, (b) search ranking and (c) SEO.

It's the one call that makes me want to shout, "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?", but since there is no reason anyone would know who I am, I'd just feel silly, and I'm not the sort of person who shouts into telephones anyway.

This is terrible especially when you're applying for jobs. All calls from unknown numbers have to be answered because you never know who's calling you back.

Fortunately people calling from companies almost always leave a voice mail, while robocalls almost never do.

Blocking rings doesn't block voice mails, right?

I almost always get voicemails from the robots. Often enough they don't actually say anything but they stay on the line long enough for it to happen. I just get an empty voicemail with static. Fills up my voicemail too so I have to go clear it

Agreed. While talking to companies about a new role last year, I'd only unblock the phone at the specific time I was expecting a call.

I did miss a few calls when recruiters called me without scheduling it first. I made it clear they needed to email me first with a call time, or I wouldn't be reachable. Sad, but that's how terrible the spam problem is on phones these days.

Every other week? I get "extended warranty" spam calls a dozen times a day on average. Like many commenters here I don't answer my phone unless I know the number.

Every other week on the old phone numbers. On the new phone# it is relentless all day, I stopped tracking and just block everything except known family numbers.

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