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Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

Thank god, at least some sort of enforcement.

At least 90% of phone calls I get are robocalls or spam. But, as the head of a large household, I can't disable unknown callers; who knows if that urgent care I took my kid to 6 months ago needs to call because I put my email address in wrong and they couldn't bill me, and I don't want the account to go to collections. Or maybe some random clerk from the city needs to contact me about property taxes?

I just do not have a definitive contact list of every number that might call me with critical information, and I'm not confident they would leave a voicemail. Or even if they leave a voicemail, it's often impossible to return a call because the caller is originating from some complex web of VOIP systems and when I call back I get a machine asking for an extension, which the caller forgot to leave in the voicemail!

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I mean, a legitimate business will leave a voicemail, especially if they want money from you. I normally have unknown callers disabled and don't have any problems. I had to turn it off this week because we have a few maintenance things going on and need to answer calls about when people are going to be coming and going for repairs. But otherwise, I turn it off and have never had any issues with not getting critical calls. You can always turn it on if you know you'll be getting an unknown call in the next 24 hours.

I have indeed tried this turn it on, turn it off, strategy. Every time it has ended because I forgot to turn it off and I ended up missing a critical phone call; some service person called before coming for a home maintenance appointment to make sure we were present so they could enter the premises, and the call goes to voicemail which I only notice an hour later after they've decided to reschedule fixing my AC to 3 days later and now we have to endure the sweltering 98°F weather for 3 more days all to avoid the nuisance of robocallers.

If you have something that urgent it's better to preemptively turn it off. Yeah yeah, easier said than done, but as a habitual Do Not Disturb user, this has worked well for me.

What's the connection to Do Not Disturb? I still haven't explored that functionality fully, and it seems Apple has built it out significantly. I suspect I could benefit by using it better to establish a "at work mode" and a "at home mode", in addition to my current simple usage of "you sure as hell better not wake me up at 3 AM with a notification".

That’s exactly what they’ve been adding, actually. You can also set a schedule for which mode is active or trigger them with automations.

I do "Do Not Disturb" 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No calls, no texts, no notifications, no nothing. Yes, Apple has indeed built it out recently. At least on iOS, you can add exceptions if you want, like your favorites, or your contact list, or even specific people. You can also put it on a schedule if you think 24/7 is too extreme.

Honestly, I don't worry about the "urgent call from the doctor" scenario, and I have a family. If it's important, whoever is calling will leave a voicemail. For 99% of the calls I get, it's not even remotely important. I don't structure my life around outlier scenarios. Not having a phone constantly dinging and buzzing for my attention is worth missing the extremely rare emergency.

You can also have all numbers (calls) not in your contacts just go straight to voicemail via the "Silence Unknown Number," feature within the phone settings.

> If it's important, whoever is calling will leave a voicemail.

How do you test for this?

Why, if they don't leave a voicemail, it must not have been an important call!

I don't know if this is some sort of convention or just a lot of coincidences but it seems when it is an urgent call, everyone calls twice. And they leave voicemail on the second call. This includes stuff like people running late, calls from daycare, etc.

For non-urgent matters like payments, they call once and leave a voicemail.

I think that depends on the greeting. If it doesn't clearly say your name (and or the LLC you're owning), they might not be sure it's the right number and not leave a message for privacy reasons.

SPAM calls are annoying but not to the point where I'm willing to basically significantly reduce the utility of owning a phone. I get that some people basically don't take phone calls. But others have elderly relatives, service people for their house, etc. and "just make them leave a voicemail" isn't always a satisfactory solution.

I personally get 50+ spam calls on some days.

I’m not in the parent posting chain, but what other option do I have?

The law changed around a year ago with shaken/stir authentication being required. You can enable call filtering with your carrier to block most robocalls based on this data.

There are iphone and android app based solutions that will block more, based on previous reports, on information about the number, the timing. Like HIYA.

You can configure all unknown callers to go to voicemail. Setup an exception if the same number calls you twice.

If you are getting 50+ spam calls a day changing your number is another option. And if you change your number you can more easily block caller ID spoofers that use a very similar number that isn't really local.

While I agree that this might be a practical and effective step... changing my number costs me a lot of money in terms of lost revenue and expenses, I have business cards to reprint and contacts (business and personal) that I'll need to update. Considering phone companies could simply block these calls if they so desired I don't see why I, the customer, need to absorb such a large cost just to keep my life sane and, after absorbing such a cost the robo calls might just find me again.

I receive more spam calls than spam emails and, being familiar with the underlying technical details of each system, that is absolutely ridiculous. Email was built in a time of pure optimism, there is no central switching authority for emails and there is no cost to sending an email other than jiggling some electrons - telephone calls are highly metered and monitored, they generally pass through several organizations that have been endowed with a high measure of trust to police and shepard them to their final destination. There is no reason other than the monetization of the system that these spam calls are allowed to exist.

Yes, the change your number response is total BS. Not just for all of the reasons you mention which are totally valid, but for the simple fact it is just a cat&mouse game.

Phone numbers are not some cryptographically generated string that would take a while to randomly create. You can literally just start at a number and increment until you've reached them all, so that the spammer doesn't even need to know your number. Your number just got reached because it was the next one in the list.

There is definitely more to that - I'm on a pretty common 650 area code, and my spam calls have gone down from 1-2 / day a year ago to less than 1 every couple weeks.

The numbers they call are not necessarily random. I was torturing one “reduce your credit card fees” guy by giving him 3 wrong credit card numbers in a row. He got mad and started threatening me with terminating all my credit cards - which was hilarious because just the moment before he was asking their numbers. But then to substantiate the threat he disclosed what knows about me. My address, my phone, my car make… the only thing they got wrong was my name - they used my son’s name instead of mine.

And other callers called me my son’s name a couple other times. So there seems to be some database that some of them share.

Phone number often yields address, which often yields street view for the car make. Doesn’t sound like they had thaaaat much.

Well, I have 3 cars, 2 sons and 1 daughter (and me and my wife are still alive too, you know). But robocallers are stuck with the same car and the same person: 1/15 one occurrence, 0.0000013 five occurrences.

I would expect a phone company to throttle multiple failed dial attempts to nonexistent numbers. Otherwise you could DoS the system.

Shoot, in the old analog days, you could literally get the physical tumblers in the telco's switch to stick in an incomplete state and create a party line. DoS'ing the phone from too many wrong numbers is the least of the issues here.

Spammers have currently defeated SHAKEN/STIR. A signed call is more likely to be a robocall than not a robocall. This is thanks to shady phone companies that will sign calls for anyone or intentionally cater to scammers. https://transnexus.com/blog/2022/shaken-statistics-september... This is like when DKIM was first being deployed spammers adopted it first.

It significantly increases their costs though. As in the parent ruling here, a shady phone vendor that doesn't take steps to prevent spammers they will no longer be able to route calls to the US.

But once enough people lodge complaints about these calls the shady company will shape up or get their keys revoked, right?

I thought shaken/stir would help too. I receive a lot of spam calls- and now I receive backscatter calls from people who I “called” (my number is now being used as outgoing cid for robocalls- yay.)

It’s infuriating and undermines the utility of the phone system. Might as well give up and try again at this point.

I would change your phone number. I've had the same 650 area code since 2003, and I'll go a couple weeks, sometimes more without a spam call. (or any phone call for that matter - except for maybe the pizza delivery person?)

I don't believe I've received a single spam call in the last 45 days - so your phone number is on some horrible list, I feel for you.

If you are diligent in telling every single one of them “take me off your call list“ it does make a difference.

I started receiving spam calls again (after a very long time without a single one) because one of the weasels I had to deal with to buy a house apparently sold my information. I ignored them for a while, mostly because they call when I’m sleeping during the day, but then started answering to get off the lists and haven’t had one in a while. Seems like one company is responsible for the bulk of them and once you get off their list things get significantly better.

All of which I shouldn’t have to do because I’m on the (completely worthless) do not call list.

If by “it makes a difference” you mean more people will call you once someone has verified your number is real, sure.

Never pick up spam calls if you can help it.

They'll know your number is real as soon as it starts ringing. Tells them that the number not only exists, but your phone is switched on and accepting calls. If it goes straight to voicemail, they still know it exists.

Plenty of numbers that will ring and not be answered by a human

RoboKiller app! Works great for me.

You’re not in a sweet spot. When my dad had a stroke, the various medical providers and contractors sell/share your data which makes you a target.

My mom is a former investigator and is pretty organized. At peak she received over 80 calls a day, mostly for various Medicare scams followed by typical tech support and other grifts. Eventually political donation calls took over, and then slowed down in 2021 again.

Try to see if they can text you instead

So let’s not use a phone for calling anymore?

sure just not the old telephone system (especially for inbound calls) rather text me or audio or video chat with me through an app where I've added you as my contact.

Ive never received a spam call through a chat app like Messenger before. I have to add them as a contact first. In 21st century the old telephone system doesnt work anymore.

That’s basically where we are at, with the exception of big businesses and institutions often refuse to deal with you except for in-person or over the phone.

Can we? Sometimes a conversation can be handled in a couple succinct texts without the need to be dragged out vocally.

Other times it can't and by all means call, but do I ever get tired of the awkward chit chat that some people insist on.

That was probably supposed to be sarcasm, but yes, absolutely, let's not use a phone for voice calls anymore. That nonsense should have sailed 10 years ago.

I personally have found interfacing with businesses dysfunctional at best today. Auto-mated prompts that send you in infinite loops, email and text services that create async communication making it 10x as long to address my query. The idea that speaking to someone on the phone should cease is laughable.

I wish you could apply it to specific area codes. The area code of my phone number is not an area I have lived in for several years now. 98% of my spam calls are from this area code but none of the important unknown callers are calling from this area code.

I tried to do this manually for a filter on the last four digits. Phones don’t really handle a 10,000 number blocklist well.

Switch to a SIP VoIP provider with a powerful control panel. Create a rule that same area code callers have to press a digit to ring through. Since spam comes from random area codes I have this applied to all non-contact list callers.

"A legitimate business will leave a voicemail, especially if they want money from you."

Unfortunately so do the scammers - both bots and actual people. At least my phone will sometimes text-transcribe the VM so I can quickly scan it and delete it w/o being forced to listen to it.

I’d like a calendar appointment feature where I specify when to disable/enable allowing unknown numbers to ring.

Approximately 100% of my voicemails are from spammers or scammers.

Not sure if your an iOS user but i'd love to be able to quickly toggle "Silence Unknown Callers," like i can with wifi, bluetooth, airplane mode, the flashlight and etc (swipe up from the bottom menu). Right now I have to drill down three to four steps (menus) to turn it on and off.

You can make a shortcut that takes you right to the screen, but you still have to toggle the setting. It’s a half measure but reduces the frustration a little.

This approach just doesn’t work when you have a significant number of outside parties and things to deal with. Doctors’ offices in particular often have calls coming from many different phone numbers and you just can’t rely on white listing them all. Once you get to an age where health issues happen more frequently than an annual checkup, it just doesn’t work.

I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean. My spouse has a very severe and very expensive chronic illness, and has several doctors visits a month with different doctors. We have had no problem with our doctors reaching us via phone. (And it works way better than any of their "healthcare portals" where nurses actually read your messages and deem all of them non-urgent and don't respond.) We absolutely do have their numbers in our contacts so their calls come through. On those rare occasions when they call from some general number behind a call switch, they leave an appropriate voicemail and we call back. They are sometimes vague with the details on voicemail because they can't be sure who will listen to it, but we are always able to get back to them. FWIW, we're in our 50s and have very frequent health issues, so this is not unknown to me by any means.

I’m glad this works out for you, but your experience is not universal.

I have a chronic condition I am stuck with a hospital system that seems to play PBX roulette. I have a dozen of their phone numbers white listed and still miss an important call coming from a new number from time to time.

I hate it, it’s completely out of touch, but it’s not something I have any control over.

If you are dealing with a doctor who won't leave a "This is Dr. So-and-so. Please call our office." voicemail, find a new doctor. Seriously.

This is not even in the top ten criteria for selecting a doctor. If I find a doctor who knows what they are talking about, actually listens, and actually lets me make an appointment, I'm not walking away from that unicorn just because their front office has trouble with voicemail.

Well sometimes it’s not just if they can get to you but when. For instance, I needed to see a cardiologist and the first appointment was three months out. The office offered to place me on a list where if someone cancelled, they go through this list and offer up that appointment. If they don’t reach you, however, they just keep on going through the list. Having my phone to filter calls meant I couldn’t take advantage of this as they had already moved on. These lists seem commonplace and maybe an example of what parent meant in their post as you can’t simply save the office number because the office has several outbound extensions.

My doctor's office has a privacy disclosure and preference section on their forms. Contacts who can be told info. Ok to leave voicemail Y/N. Full details in VM or brief.

Thats what I do, if I don't know the number I have voicemail and if they don't leave a message I just block the number. I have thousands of blocked numbers, to be fair the phone experience in 2022 is just horrible due to the FCC and telcos not doing their job in regulating these criminals.

I try to use voicemail. The reason it doesn't work is that although my phone has 128Gb of storage, for some reason my provider's voicemail system can only store like 10 seconds of audio before it runs out of space and asks me to delete messages. My landline's answering machine is like this too.

Apparently there's a special kind of memory just for recording telephone messages and it's as precious as a diamond.

The calls that I did not answer all go to https://jollyrogertelephone.com/ They’ll send email notification immediately after recording a voice message.

(The main reason I’ve subscribed to Jolly Roger was to torture robocallers with roboanswers. They had a collection of rather hilarious conversations on their web page. In real life robocallers seem smarter now and drop much sooner, but voicemail feature works ok and I have not noticed any limits - messages are attached to emails and my gmail account is still at 5% or so.

I was thinking of implementing the same idea with better technology, like on the fly voice recognition, which seems possible and should lead to tons of funny results, but I’m too lazy now).

Callers with blocked caller ID get screened by Google for me, and I rarely ever hear from them -- but I get a ton of calls from people who either have spoofed numbers or who have temporarily picked up a "source" number based in my area code.

It's gotten to the point where if it's a local call I almost always assume it's spam, but I still need to answer.

If it's a doctor's office trying to make an appointment, for instance, then getting through to the same person who knows why you're trying to make the appointment so you don't need to give them 100x as much information yet again? Yeah, at that point it's much better to just answer a few spam calls instead of ignoring all of the unfamiliar numbers.

I have a kid in college and another in high school. A dead phone could mean I could be getting a call from one of them from any number. I just can't ignore them all.

I'm happy for you that your life is simple enough that you can just ignore anything you don't recognize, but try not to act as if the rest of us are doing something wrong because we're happy that the FCC is attacking the underlying problem and ignoring the pain we need to deal with.

You can disable unknown callers? Which countries support this?

I’m Australia, some government agencies hide caller ID, it’s incredibly frustrating.

I ignore all calls I don't know. I've never had a billing issue that didn't go into physical mail first. I don't have any plans to take time to receive calls from the government, they will absolutely mail you. They want 100% of the money if they can get it, they don't want to send you to collections; where they're only going to get a cut of the original sum.

It might just be me.. but phones are the ultimate in "false urgency" that our society foists on people.

Meanwhile.. it's 2022 and there's no way for me to give an "emergency code" or authorization to people I know which gives them the ability to ring me directly with some kind of emergency flag or icon showing on the call screen itself. That's baffling.

My physical mail situation is far worse than my phone situation. I missed one bill apparently and got sent to collections. It was from some place that demands that payment be made in full during the visit, so I probably thought it was just junk at the time.

My desk phone is logged into a SIP VoIP provider that does allow very powerful rules. I can create a phone menu and provide each contact with an extension that must be dialed to ring through. But nothing like that is available for my cellphone. So I ignore all unknown callers.

We'd be better off with only text communication allowed between unknown parties. It's much easier for us, as humans, to quickly parse text and it's far less disruptive to our lives. I'd like it if calls only occurred between parties who already agreed to that form of communication.

Everyone else, leave a fucking note.

In my family, text communication is difficult for the elderly and/or English as a second language people.

I feel like the doctors office scenario should be handled like we do with TLS. They apply for a certificate, and that’s signed and offered in their outgoing calls. Their verified name shows up in Caller ID, and the nature of their business is burned into the certificate (medical, government, auto repair, etc.).

"secure" phone could be done relatively easily, the phone companies don't want to because it would cost them money and reduce revenue.

Would it cost them though? hardly any bill per call anymore. Lump sum billing would mean they have to support less volume for the same money.

There is a lot of effort going into this sort of thing: https://www.bandwidth.com/regulations/stir-shaken/

I’m aware, but I don’t think it quite goes far enough. It’s not enough to merely know it’s not a spoofed number. I’d like classification, so I can let any medical practice punch through do not disturb overnight (emergencies involving loved ones), allow others to call during normal business hours (voicemail otherwise), etc., etc.

A great many Dr’s offices can’t even provide a billing estimate or handle the mess of insurance. Do you think they’ll handle something like that on top of it?

I happen to have an obscure health condition, and good insurance. I have a cardiologist, a rheumatologist, a pulmonologist, and a urologist whose offices all tend to periodically call me from unknown numbers. They have a clear economic incentive to periodically poke and prod at me, and bill my insurance.

Taken to an extreme, an incompetent medical practice isn't entitled to stay in business. Not that I am in favor of making businesses more complicated to operate, but I sure would appreciate fewer spam phone calls.

That would require a critical mass of customers to accept some standard ‘good’ call and deny all ‘not good’ calls. Which with all the chaos right now, good luck without some kind of central action at least as strong as that required to kill the spammers normally.

No, I don’t. But when you order phone services for your business, they’re more than capable of acting on your behalf.

The whole reason HIPAA grandfathers fax machines is that it was (and still is) too expensive for the medical industry to purchase, deploy, and train employees on modern telecom.

This exists but is not widely supported. https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/09/08/google-phone-will-s...

The trick, which I only implemented by mistake, is to have a phone number from an area where you have no business. I live in Boulder but have a number from North Dakota because I got to pick my phone number and liked the look of one.

Now, if I get a call from a 303(Denver/Boulder), I'm almost sure it is real. If I get a call from 701, it is almost certainly a fake.

I have this same problem and concern, and it doesn't work to use voicemail because the robocallers end up filling my voicemail within hours of clearing it out.

The most effective way I have found for dealing with it is horrible but it seems to work. A lot of the robocaller people that I actually end up talking to often sound like they are from a particular nation, not naming any names here. I also happen to know many people from the aforementioned country are quite prejudiced against those of another country that shares a border with them, so when I get a call I do my best accent of a person belonging to the other country and start rambling nonsense about how I just immigrated to America, and I own a shop that sales a particular ethnic food and start offering it to them. Usually I get about 3 minutes in and they hang up. So far of everything I've tried, including using the "Remove me from the list" button this has been the most effective way I've experienced of reducing calls.

It may be terrible but it works, and here's the thing every minute they are spending speaking to an irate man of a particular ethnicity is a minute of their time wasted not speaking to someone who is going to talk to them.

P.S

For those who are really curious the countries anonymized about are Scotland and England. ;)

> robocallers end up filling my voicemail within hours of clearing it out.

This does not match my experience at all. For me, I get a robo call to voicemail maybe once every 2-3 weeks.

This is compared to the maybe 3-5 per day I receive (but don’t make it to me, since I have non-contacts silenced).

> I'm not confident they would leave a voicemail

> the caller is originating from some complex web of VOIP systems

> when I call back I get a machine asking for an extension, which the caller forgot to leave in the voicemail!

Is this really a risk? If it’s that important, they’ll leave a proper VM.

I’ve had my phone set to silence non-contacts, and aside from the occasional call where I prefer they didn’t have to leave a VM, I almost never have problems.

The few times it’s caused me problems, it’s been just an inconvenience. But about 0.1% the inconvenience of dealing with all the robo calls making it through.

For home users, there is a simple solution to spam...

Anyone not in your contacts gets sent to voicemail. The voicemail 'greeting' message says "Hi, if you need to contact me, send me an email to [your email address] and I'll call back. If it's urgent, put 'urgent' in the subject and I'll call back immediately.". Set a rule so that urgent emails make your phone vibrate/make noise.

Robocallers won't do that. Most real humans will. Marketers usually won't. Collections agencies usually will.

It's the perfect filter.

I gave up - family of 5, but I do the following: my iPhone auto-silences unknown callers (system setting) and I only share my Google Voice account publicly (ie, only friends/family have my direct line). I also have scam-block from my carrier.

It seems to work quite well. I miss an occasional call but have progressively whitelisted (add as contacts) all numbers from school/doc/programs as well.

It does take some diligence but it feels better than getting sideswiped by some rando.

Perhaps there are some fundamental problems here if it's legal for you to be extorted by debt collectors because some office worker decided to not leave a voicemail. And O The Irony! that one reason you're forced to make yourself available at a publicly known phone because of the threat of someone extorting you who is themselves not available at a publicly known phone number.

Any legit person or company will leave a voice mail. I only allow my contacts list through. Anything else goes straight to email.

This sounds like a good opportunity for a start-up that uses AI/ML to answer your calls and screen them using a human-sounding voice.

What the US really needs is enormous fines and strict enforcement, similar to Germany. I have read so many posts on HN by people who live in Germany that say their robo-calls are almost zero. And plenty of stories about enormous fines to companies for robo-calls.

> This sounds like a good opportunity for a start-up that uses AI/ML to answer your calls and screen them using a human-sounding voice.

I think for 95% of incoming callers, this is functionally equivalent to just not picking up. If I call someone and suspect I'm talking to a robot, I'll just hang up.

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