In the mean time anyone who can’t just whitelist phone numbers loses. Being a business must suck.
I usually ignore calls from abroad at least, but even those I can't block; I'm constantly spam called by different anonymous numbers from the UK, but I also have colleagues in the UK whom I want to be able to accept calls from. I once got an unsolicited call from a French number which I ignored, only to find out that it was the phone number of a food delivery person who was there with my food. Just last week I got a call from an unknown German number; in that case, it was a call from a colleague in Germany.
I don't think a whitelist of phone numbers is a workable solution for most people.
Which is frustrating! Because it might seem like that's a low enough frequency to make whitelisting a viable solution. But it's not—for the reasons you outlined.
2 calls a month are important enough to me that I must receive every spam call that comes in. I'm still pretty good at sniffing out most of them. A lot are still matching my area-code and exchange numbers on the spoofed ID—a huge red flag. Many others show rural cities that I'm certain no legit caller would call me from. But then there are the in-betweens: calls I can't make heads or tails of unless I answer.
Whenever I do get one of these legit-but-unrecognized calls, I immediately add them to my contacts in some vain attempt to reach whitelist nirvana. But I don't think I'll ever get there.
I'm having trouble understanding how 2 phonecalls, poses such a big problem. Please help me understand.
My voicemail box is about 2/3 spam voicemails.
It doesn't really fix anything, just shifts it to another place that I then have to check to weed out spam calls and find the legitimate ones.
> I'm having trouble understanding how 2 phonecalls, poses such a big problem. Please help me understand.
Okay, so it's not a "big problem". I'm being a little hyperbolic in my previous comment. It's an annoyance, and a galling one. Like email spam was back in the day. I could still find the legitimate emails among that crap, but it sucked and I would've rather not.
The 2 phone calls themselves aren't the problem. The spam is. But the 2 phone calls each month are enough that I don't want to just ignore all non-whitelisted calls. Doing that will cause its own annoyance, as I miss calls that I didn't want to, and have to check voicemail each time a spammer calls me.
All of my incoming calls go to my VOIP provider, which in turn routes to my cellphone if someone has my 'extension'. Anyone who doesn't, has their message go to voicemail, which is transcribed to email (and the audio file attached). Prior to transcription audio plays telling the caller to enter a specific code, to leave a voicemail. Turns out this eliminates 100% of fake foreigners, and locals. They can't be arsed.
I ignore SMS. I receive nothing of value other than registered numbers (as in, a registration with the state) so I actively block them and add on an as needed basis.
My spam has reduced to zero.
Watch their terror as you open their text or email app and get snippets of their private communications.
I'm not sure about your plan, tbh.
Probably 90% of people under 40 years old. I've blocked unknown callers for over a decade, with no issues. Honestly, I'd be fine to lose the voice call and texting features entirely and just go entirely to email. Seems to be heading in that direction anyway.
I assume most "whitelist" approaches don't actually send the messages nowhere, they just remove notifications so they don't interrupt you. For colleagues / etc, you can just use Signal (or whatever company-imposed collaboration tool exists) to hold the conversation completely, or barring that you can at least schedule a phone conversation in advance (so you can whitelist the requisite number).
I'm sure if you're client-facing / in sales you don't have this luxury, and you'd rather be interrupted at any time even if it's spam, but I doubt that describes most people.
Same is true for food delivery etc... if you're expecting something that might require your attention, you can disable the whitelist and let any call through during that window.
My local hospital telephones with private numbers, which is the only reason I cannot completely block them and thus cannot use a whitelist. Outside of working hours I do not answer them. I told them it is a problem and they placed a note in my record to call me from a public phone which is nice of them (not their own desk but from a service desk which has a number displayed) but I imagine they sadly sometimes forget.
The UK number is a hassle too, all kinds of +44 numbers spoofing or reusing existing non-fixed location numbers to seem legitimate since some phones provide direct listing of the name of the company. They are actually foreign redirects which cost insane amounts of money if you call them back.
I would also like a native way of blacklisting number blocks (like +44), my phone currently can't unfortunately.
Can anyone with more context explain to me why a rational person decided on this? It's Biblically frustrating for me because 9/10 withheld numbers are spammers or scammers and I don't want to pick up the phone to them but 1/10 it's my local doctor's surgery who I can't ignore. It's such an antisocial thing for doctors of all people to do, but it seems to be common enough people across the world have to deal with it.
The other problem is privacy... imagine a woman consulting her ob/gyn about an abortion. The ob/gyn calls the woman back, and suddenly the abusive husband sees the phone number of the ob/gyn practice on the incoming call log.
Domestic violence is far from hypothetical [1], it is the sad reality we live in. Medicine in particular has a responsibility by the Hippocratic Oath to avoid causing harm, and the laws (e.g. HIPAA) reflect that responsibility.
[1] https://www.socialsolutions.com/blog/domestic-violence-stati...
No, precisely because random calls from suppressed numbers are so common for spam.
Then they should understand why people ignore calls coming from unverified numbers.
In my country, you only incur normal minutes when you call an ordinary non-overseas number. By ordinary, these numbers have a normal number of digits, and a known prefix. Paid call always have shorter or longer phone number.
It's regulated by the UK regulator OFCOM. They publish a list of number prefixes and the maximum costs that can be incurred:
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/advice...
Some of those costs are high, but they are published, and capped. There are no surprises here.
There are a couple of myths that circulate endlessly in this country that:
i) You can receive a call from a scammer who prompts you to 'press 1' to be connected to an agent, and if you press 1 you're dialing a premium number and can incur large costs. This is impossible, inbound calls in the UK are not billable, nor can inbound calls count against any inclusive minutes on a contract.
ii) You can dial a cheap-looking number but the call is forwarded to an international or premium-rate destination and you can incur large costs. This is impossible, you can only be billed for the number you dialed, any onward forwarding costs would be incurred by the owner of the number you initally dialed.
I'd be interested to see if an entirely new business model rises up out of this. Some kind of verified business network of phone numbers people pay a small fee per month (per call?) to get assurance that it's a legit business call. A sort of for-pay group whitelisting.
At the very least, when it comes to my private number, I decline any call I do not recognize and I figure that if they are legit, they will either:
1) Call back immediately
2) Leave a voice mail and I can call them back in a minute.
It's tedious, but a sort of call/re-call seems to be like a kind of workaround to this. It's just a very tedious thing when it comes to stuff like doctors offices calling form a new number, 2FA from some website, or anyone I might not have saved in my contacts list.
It still doesn’t solve the problem of someone unexpected calling you though, or someone for whom you don’t know the number..
Carriers are milking it as much as they can now, as they don't have leverage to otherwise stop any progress that would make phone numbers finally irrelevant.
However, I have been getting 20+ spam calls a day for the last week and I am ready to get rid of the landline forever.
The generational decay would be much much slower if telecoms did their job.
Our elderly parents stopped calling us and moved to Line the moment they had an iPhone (then an iPad), and even with their friends they seem to just hit the call button from the messaging threads. They still say they had someone on the phone, though they’re on third party services, so it seems it kinda just switched in their mind.
Perhaps the same way we were switching between local calls, long distance calls, special operator calls in the offline days, but we’d still just think of it as phoning people whatever the actual service we were using behind.
I mean, who wants to run a phone company anymore? Selling data is where it's at, and old-school phone calls are for grandpas.