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Comment by RandomWorker | Hacker News Reader

This really shows the importance of apples hide my email feature. I’ve been using it where ever possible. However, I think I might go back through my online accounts and make sure I’ve got it setup. Generally, my phone number has been with spam centres for a while now. I’m not changing it, because it’s so much friction to change it. Right now, I hardly ever take calls because of the massive spam influx. I’m not sure getting a new number will fix this because they cycle numbers and you may just get the spam from a different person. Right now my phone is pretty good at blocking most spam I get through the phone. Not sure how it does this..

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Unrelated, but I had no idea how bad spam calls were until moving to Canada I had a total of maybe 5 spam calls in 30 years in Belgium. Meanwhile I get 5 per week in Canada. Absolutely insane :/

Edit: wording

Move to the US and get 5 per day!

I don't get why this is the case, surely there must be a huge majority that hates those calls and wants them to stop? Is there some sort of political lobbying that prevents effective laws from being passed?

I'd also imagine spam calls getting less effective when you get used to them.

But maybe that's not the case?

It’s actually a positive feedback cycleZ those who still answer the phone are more likely To be easy victims.

There is lobbying indeed, the leverage being the call-center jobs.

In France for example, this activity was under scrutiny for decades (2014: https://www.lemonde.fr/vie-quotidienne/article/2014/02/12/de..., 2022: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/internet/telephonie/demarchage-t...), and even if the law is now more restrictive than before : - no week-end call - calls from 10am to 1pm and 2pm to 8pm - you can be included in bloctel, a "do not call me list" it still leave room for this activity.

Almost all these jobs will probably be replaced by AI in a near future, so the main leverage will disappear and ...

That doesn't help offshore call centers dialing to you over VOIP. Different jurisdiction and difficult trace means almost no accountability. That's the problem in the US, plus our congress is of course, the best one money can buy.

Doesn't the DoNotCall register work any more?

Most of these calls come from illegitimate call centers running scams overseas now.

That and all the damn politicians… who of course exempted themselves

Yes. I occasionally get one labeled as from China.

That has not worked since 10+ years ago.

But I did stop getting so many spam calls in recent months, so I assume ATT or other phone service providers in the US have enabled some type of anti spam measure.

Even better, outside of the illegitimate ones, if your role is at all applicable, Oracle sales reps will essentially love bomb you on a never ending basis and because their turnover is so high, you get a barrage of calls on any given day of irrelevant things. Honestly I wish the phone “app” didn’t exist. If it’s some you interact with a lot it’s very unlikely an unannounced phone call is what they’d go with.

Are you on the Do Not Call List? Have you tried asking Oracle to not call you again?

The DNC does not apply to companies you have a business relationship with - only cold calls.

I looked into using oracle cloud servers this year, but gave up after a day or so because the interface was bad.

They only called me once, because I hadn't used the account in a month.

They've only emailed me once since then.

Mine seem to come in waves. I haven't gotten any, or Google hasn't let any actually ring my phone, in a few days then there will be days with a half dozen.

Depending on your phone provider you can activate a feature that challenges the caller to solve a small problem before connecting the call.

TELUS calls it “Call Control”, and all its subsidiaries offer it. The major phone providers offer it too. It is the only thing I miss from my old TELUS plan.

Interesting solution! I’ve never heard of this but it makes sense, like a captcha for phone calls. I’m in the US and have had to stop answering my phone thanks to 2-3 spam calls per day.

The real answer is for the phone companies to use a protocol that doesn’t allow easy spoofing of any phone number (I believe one has been proposed but not adopted). Hilariously, I even have a medical provider app called Doximity that abuses this network ‘feature’ to disguise a doctor’s personal cell phone as the phone number of their medical clinic.

Some VoIP provider may offer IVR service and one can setup similar mechanism using IVR. I know voip.ms offers IVR.

Your experience in Belgium is similar to what people describe when living in Germany. Apparently, the fines for telcos are insane when spam calls occur. So there is a strong incentive to prevent. Is it similar in Belgium?

I don't know what the exact mechanism is in Germany, but it works. The only unwanted calls I get maybe once every couple months is random British headhunters who probably got my work number from an email signature or another professional contact some way or another. Otherwise, spam calls just aren't a thing here.

There is a do not call me register here in Belgium. Not using this list and calling someone on the list, results in heavy fines.

Yeah, but the problems isn't anymore local businesses spamming you. It's foreign people calling, most often with a spoofed local number that the telcos somehow "can't" figure out is not really calling from a different country when the sim was active just a minute ago locally.

Same in France. I never had a spam call from a French company

I get calls from abroad, the phishing kind. They are easy to block if you do not have business there.

I get between 5 and 20 per day in Brazil.

In Canada, sometimes 5 per day.

One trigger here was creating an account in a particular bank. Seems to be breached. Unfortunately Canada is a captive market, we don't have much choice.

Which bank

Unrelated but related: I live in the U.S. and get about 1/week now, down from about 1-2/day a year ago. Using iPhone XS Max (2018) & latest iOS (always promptly updated).

I always hit "Block this number" option before deleting.

Phone company (AT&T) labels some in red as Spam; Apple does the same.

Mandated SHAKEN/STIR seems to have been huge. I also used to get about 1/day, now it's 1/week and it doesn't even ring - my Pixel just gives a notification that I missed a call from a known shady number.

I know no news site will ever get clicks from "Competent Government Helps Solve Real Problem", and I know we're not 100% there, but it was genuinely a leap forward and people should talk about it more.

Hi fellow Canadian resident!

Yes, also from Canada it’s absolutely the worst. I came from the Netherlands, and it’s absolute world of difference. The telcos need to resolve this at a system level and get rid of these call centre software solutions. However, I’m sure Telus/Bell/Rodger are all get lots of money from all these calls so no incentive to stop them.

Can’t help but think that at some point people made the wrong decision along the way.

I would not put any faith in the Canadian telcos at this point. They feel quite outdated, charging insane prices for subpar quality service. (From my experience with Bell and limited Rodger experience).

There are many things they could improve on and I think dealing with spam is probably low on their list.

They used to have the concept of 'airtime' that you paid for, is that still the case?

The effect was that spam calls directly benefited the telcos at the expense of the person called if they answered the call.

I've lived and worked in Canada for many years, the longer I was there the more the outward shine wore off and eventually I just saw it as a loosely collected set of monopolies with the state backing them filtering every dollar from Canadians that they could get their hands on.

Canadian and can confirm. It is insane, Insanity.

My strategy is to answer every call but remain silent. 9/10 times they hang up after 2 seconds. The remainder are 50/50 real calls and manual spam calls. My assumption is that the robo dialers are recording the success or failure, and if you answer quickly but stay silent, that's some kind of failure. I've done this for a few years and I feel like I get less spam than I used to. Looking at my call log, it looks like I've had less than 5 spam calls in December.

More effective would be to have a button I can tap in the phone app labeled "waste this person's time", which would automatically attach the caller to an AI designed to maximize the amount of time the caller wastes on each call.

I once made a website where you could enter two phone numbers on. It would call A with B’s caller ID and B with A’s caller ID. After the call it would send an sms/call from the service explaining what happened and they could consent to release the recording for the pranker to listen to.

It was funny to have Pizza Hutt and McDonald’s both think they’d called each other. Or two people standing right next to each other.

I nearly got in quite a bit of trouble when someone pranked two high level people in the military, and they decided to have a conversation they probably shouldn’t have had on personal cell phones.

It was fun while it lasted… but I wonder if something like this could work for spam calls. Basically instead of forwarding to voicemail, have it route to some pre recorded messages you make “yeah” “hello” “I didn’t hear that, can you say that again” and loud background noises playing. Then it can send you the recording as your “voicemail”. Could be fun.

You’ve described Lenny (well, without the AI)

https://www.lennytroll.com/

1 (347) 514-7296

If you hide your email but can't hide your phone number and companies like twitter or google will not let you create an account without, that does nothing to your privacy.

We need a phone number v6 as well, with vastly more possible entries. Having hide my phone number would be a great service.

You just described what email addresses have turned into

For anyone not using Apple devices, DDG has email generation built into their browser plugin. I'm not sure if it's in their broswer app, but I'm sure they will add the feature.

> Right now, I hardly ever take calls because of the massive spam influx.

Perhaps Apple ought to follow Google into the AI-assistant-powered call screening business.

I feel like it’s already doing this but I’ve set it up in a weird way. I’ve changed my notifications to make a sound when it’s from my contact list ( or can be found in a footer in an email inlever received) and else it will be silent.

I hardly ever get an unknown important call that doesn’t fall in those categories. This has me not picking up the phone for spam calls, but I hardly ever miss an important call.

There are other things I’ve setup that I don’t want to go into because they can be solved by the spam callers and I’d like to keep it a secret ;)

> This really shows the importance of apples hide my email feature

But what if Apple gets hacked? They still know your real email, right?

So you’re saying Apple AND dozens of other companies, most of those with worse security, having my email address is JUST AS BAD as ONLY Apple having my email address?

Technically I could setup my email on apple as another fake email that redirects to the real email, and build a wild system of multiple proxies.

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