Comment by commoner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by commoner | Hacker News Reader

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My voicemail gets plenty of robocalls, many of them threatening me about some "expired warranty" for a product that I never bought. If you are in the US, here are some ways to reduce robocalls or at least make them less annoying:

- Enroll all of your phone numbers into the National Do Not Call Registry: https://www.donotcall.gov. This lets you report robocalls immediately after registration, and forbids sales calls (including ones that are not robocalls) to your number starting 31 days after registration. Report all robocalls to https://www.donotcall.gov/report.html after registering your numbers. When the FTC receives enough reports about a robocaller, they will file a class action lawsuit and you can get reimbursed.

- If you have a postpaid plan with a major US carrier, you may be able to use a free app that blocks calls identified as spam. Postpaid customers of AT&T, T-Mobile/Sprint, and Verizon all qualify. The Verge has a summary: https://www.theverge.com/21327304/spam-calls-how-to-stop-blo...

- Both Android and iOS have APIs for call blocking, which third-party apps can use. If you are on Android, Yet Another Call Blocker is a free and open source app that uses an offline database to show you the reputation of incoming callers, and optionally lets you block them automatically: https://gitlab.com/xynngh/YetAnotherCallBlocker

- If you don't need to receive calls from phone numbers outside of your contact list, you can set your phone to send all calls from numbers not on your contact list to voicemail. Instructions for Android vary by phone manufacturer, but Yet Another Call Blocker can do this on any Android phone (use "*" in the blacklist to block all calls, and whitelist all contacts). iOS has the Silence Unknown Callers feature: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207099

These are all great, but I've done none of them and get maybe 1 spam call a month. It's easy... just answer the calls and talk to them.

Have a bookmark to https://www.getcreditcardnumbers.com, go along with their script and feed them all the fake CC numbers they want. After a couple, they'll cuss you out, hang up, and put you on the real do-not-call list. You're hurting them by tying up a phone line, a "representative's" time, and making them give bad credit card numbers to their payment processor.

Like I said, my spam calls are down to one a month. I get excited when one calls. At first I was doing a call every day or so, but it fizzled out really fast.

Spammers are a business; if you make it hideously unprofitable to call you they'll quit calling you.

I've heard hearsay that the list you get put on is the list where they call you then connect you to someone else on the list. Game theory suggests the spammers wouldn't want to give spammees a winning scenario.

I bet some of them out there do that, but so far mine haven’t. My spammers usually threaten to kill me, then hang up, then I never hear from them again. If they were using me to slow down competitors, I’d expect more call volume than I get.

How would that work?

    Spammer: Hello?  
    Trickster: Yes hello?  
    Spammer -> *redirects to another list member*  
    Member: Hello?  
    Trickster: Yes, hello?  
    Member: Hello? How can I help?  
    Trickster: You called me?  
    Member: No? You called me?  
    Trickster: No no, you called me?  
    Member: No no no, you called me?  
    [etc ad infinitum]

When this happened to me, the spammer remained on the line and attempted their spiel to the other person, giving me the opportunity to intervene to some extent.

Why do they let you stay on the line? It seems detrimental to them successfully scamming the new person they called.

I think their metrics are tracked and thus they want to avoid short calls or hanging up on someone who calls in.

Yeah this has happened to me. I wrote a simple script that spams spammers from a pool of phone numbers I rent. At one point my calls were starting to get connected to other targets of the spammers. When I noticed this I actually got on the phone and tried to tell the other person that they were being scammed and they seemed appreciative.

In my experience, none of these are sufficient. Robocallers/spammers rotate numbers, so the only solution I've found is to ignore all unknown callers. But, that falls apart when you're expecting a call from a doctor, or potential employer, or similar - they can never get through.

The majority of my robocalls come from a spoofed number with my same area code. Luckily, I happen to have an area code from several states away, so all my fake calls have out of state numbers. The odds that spammers spoof my local code is nearly 1:1000, so I am able to answer local numbers without issue. It is a less effective system post-covid because more people are using personal cells and VOIP to WFH.

Depending on the logistics, others might have similar success with a google voice number or the equivalent from a unique area code.

I just ignore unknown callers and tell anyone trying to call me to text instead or send me the number they're going to call from ahead of time. I've never had anyone try to tell me they can't do that and have to call from an unknown number.

I want to install a captcha/menu into my phone (like "press 1 to speak to the owner of this phone") but my phone doesn't allow my software to interact with my phone calls. I can't even record them!

My pixel does something similar. It will answer calls and prompt them to basically identify themselves. You can see what they are saying in real time.

I don't remember the last time I had a spam call make it past it. They almost always just disconnect.

https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en

Could port your number to a voip provider which supports IVR (e.g. voip.ms) and then use a softphone for it.

You’d have to disable inbound POTS though.

> You’d have to disable inbound POTS though.

Why would that be? POTS calls are gated to VoIP above the end-users system.

I’m imagining a cell phine where it’s associated to a phone number no matter what. A lot of consumer providers are incapable/unwilling to provide data-only services. Maybe you can get a machine to machine plan, but that reduced feature set is going to cost you.

For anyone considering this approach, anveo.com has a really nice drag/drop IVR.

I didn't see much of an improvement when using do not call many years ago. Enabling an iPhone app dedicated to it helped greatly. And by default on iOS I have all unknown calls sent to voicemail, and I just make sure to have anyone I know who expect to call my in my phone book already. So most all calls in voicemail are spam. And if I know I will be getting a call from an unknown number like to schedule a delivery I disable the feature temporarily. Process works well.

My buddy does all that, and still gets calls every day. They rotate the caller-id numbers they report. His phone has a blocking list and he adds to it every time but that means he still gets the robocall once a day anyway. There's no perfect solution?

I'm always hesitant to add numbers to my phone's block list because they spoof numbers often and I'm worried that I'll block a number that legitimately needs to reach me in the future. I know the chances are tiny but it would be a huge PITA to debug that issue and if they do reach me through some other means I doubt I'd remember to check my block list to see if I happened to block them in the past.

I just added the fourth point about blocking unknown numbers. If your buddy is in a situation (e.g. certain type of job) that makes this impractical, then I'm afraid there's no better solution yet.

Edit: Actually, Google Pixel phones have an automatic call screening feature using the Google Assistant: https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWap-nPQUO0. The privacy trade-off is that Google screens all of your calls, and the feature does not work with custom OSes, but some people might find this to be worth the added convenience. I'd love to see a FOSS implementation of this after a free voice recognition solution becomes available.

I thought the whole SHAKEN/STIR[1] push would help. I think what happened is that it pushed out the amateurs. So the pros just amped up their volume.

It's still pretty new though. So maybe it will start working better soon.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN

Apparently I signed up for this 10 years ago. It's nice to see something be maintained that long, even if it has done absolutely nothing.

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