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Comment by fofoz | Hacker News Reader

I am also writing from Italy. In the last few months I have received so many spam calls from UK numbers that I have been forced to ban the whole of Britain from my phone. Good job Data Protection authority.

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Report from the UK. I'm a British prince. I have a business proposition for you. It could be financially very lucrative.

Having left the EU, we are finding it hard to make ends meet. If you send me £50k,I will be able to release £100m frozen in evil EU banks. I will give you 50%.

Chat GPT warms me that this is likely a scam.

The offer being presented sounds too good to be true and the request for money upfront is a common red flag for scams.

The British prince guy was a fraud. I'll be honest with you, I'm a bum but God be my witnesses, if you send me $100k, I'll unfreeze for you $50,000 in a Swiss Bank (not Credit Suisse).

The UK now replaces Nigeria. Bravo! It's come a long way.

Brexit has to be good for something.

For fuck's sake Harry.

Ohhhhh, reverse UNO cards are tight!

In the US, I used to receive multiple spam calls a day. A few years ago, I turned on the iOS setting that sends all phone numbers not in my contacts straight to voicemail and haven't looked back.

It's occasionally inconvenient—maybe once or twice a year I deal with a company that needs to call me. But if it's a call from a real person, I can always listen to the voicemail and call them back. Most spam calls either don't leave voicemail, or leave 1 second message that I can bulk delete every few months.

100%. I use this great strategy as well, but on Android. I just don't pick up any calls that's not in my contacts list. Works out great.

Google Assistant answers all my calls from unknown numbers and asks them to state what they're calling about. It transcribes the text in real time for me, and if I don't answer it saves that conversation for me to review later. Perfect.

> I turned on the iOS setting that sends all phone numbers not in my contacts straight to voicemail and haven't looked back.

And the real-life version of this: you're not morally required to open the front door (or even acknowledge) if you don't knock the person ringing your doorbell. You can actually just... ignore them.

"> I turned on the iOS setting that sends all phone numbers not in my contacts straight to voicemail and haven't looked back.

And the real-life version of this: you're not morally required to open the front door (or even acknowledge) if you don't knock the person ringing your doorbell. You can actually just... ignore them."

I do both and keep my phone on do not disturb with a few bypasses (starred contacts). Neither technology nor people should be able to demand my attention and unilaterally dictate the terms.

Yeah it is a shame that it is has come to this but I do the same.

Imagine my shock when I found out that in the year 2023 there's still only so much room in my voicemail box and I wasn't receiving new voicemails because I never deleted any...

Had no idea this setting existed despite being an iPhone user for years. Thank you!

Settings->General->Phone->Silence Unknown Callers

On my version it’s here

Settings->Phone->Silence Unknown Callers

For Android, it's directly in the Phone App. Then, the 3 dots menu top right > Settings > Blocked Numbers > Block calls from unidentified callers

I work part time at a pizzeria. If you do this try to remember when you order food for delivery. It has become a problem with our drivers. The customer doesn’t answer the phone and our drivers spend 10 minutes trying to contact the customer (delaying the next customers order). Eventually, our drivers give up and the customer (now angry) calls back an hour later demanding their food.

I suppose they could communicate through the app which was used to order the food and/or using whatsapp.

Who orders pizza through an overpriced app?

Some people still order by calling a regular phone number, and I don‘t think forcing more centralization in the industry is a good solution.

The industry stakeholders and FCC should get together and fix caller ID authentication; the rest will follow from there.

Allowing inbounds call from numbers with a recent outbound call sounds like a low-hanging fruit heuristic.

My pizzeria does not use an App. We have an online ordering webpage, or you can order through a traditional phone call.

If I silence calls from unknown numbers I would get most deliveries since the couriers often ask for help finding the house or just won't bother coming unless they verify somebody is at home

Report from Germany: Haven't received a spam call in years.

Also from Germany: I have. Please don't assume something does not happen because it doesn't happen to you.

He didn't assume that, though, just reported his situation.

From Poland: I have two numbers - one I use for various services, and it's constantly bombarded with spam (multiple calls a day), one I only use to contact family members, sometimes some small companies like when ordering firewood - got two phonecalls from an unknown number within a couple days (and I didn't care to answer), and that's it for almost a year now.

Sweden here.

I do the same thing. One phone number is just unusable and I don't answer any calls anymore, mostly UK callers recruiting, or other random spam.

The other, which I don't give to almost anyone except close friends/family, gets no spam. Not sure where my first phone number ended up to become spam target, but I remember I got a call once, when that was really uncommon, which an offer to change insurance companies... I was pissed off with my previous company so I actually did it, and it actually worked well, it was not malicious... but since then I think I was added to a list of "spam-friendly idiot" or something.

Report from Canada: I might receive something like three spam calls in the past year.

I don't know why my spam dropped so significantly when I moved up to Canada but it was quite dramatic compared to the US. There are periodic waves but I tend to miss out of them - I suspect because Canada works hard to prevent dumb auto-dialers from working.

It used to be much, much worse here. The CRTC has done some work to address that, it seems like it helped. [0]

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/crtc-telecom-call-authentif...

Another data point from Canada. I've given up answering my phone or checking my voicemail after 10+ calls a week.

I feel the STIR/SHAKEN changes have made a difference with spam calls for me in the US.

I don't know, my wife gets spam calls almost daily, but i almost never get spam calls. on the otherhand I almost never actually give anyone my real phone number and just give everyone my Google Voice number instead. Google seems pretty good at detecting and filtering them out. the only people with my real phone number are family members, my employer, and a few friends from high-school that had it from before i signed up for google voice in the 2000s.

Google Voice indeed seems to be much better at spam call detection than anybody else. Most of them don’t even make it to the "spam" folder in the app for me; they must be rejected at some lower level due to very high confidence.

Lucky you, if you have a Vancouver number you'll definitely get calls from the "Chinese immigration department" which wants to get you deported unless you immediately wire $1000. How do I know that if they speak in Mandarin you say? I have great imagination B-)

I live in Vancouver and spam calls significantly dropped for me too. It's only a few calls a week now.

Report from Italy: i receive at least 3-4 spam calls and messages a week

Report from Norway.

I used to get perhaps 3-4 calls a week from the same Indian sounding scammers (a man and a woman). They call from UK numbers. However, since I got the pixel, it has a setting to block spam calls, I have not gotten any :)

I also have a Pixel! Maybe that is the reason. Anyway.. I used to get many spam calls but the government put up heavy fines for advertisement via phone, since then these disappeared.

I'm in the UK and I don't remember when I got a spam call last time.

Hi Helmut! Greetings from Austria.

> Haven't received a spam call in years.

Ditto.

And from Iceland, not a peep in years.

You never got a call from a mobile network provider? Incredible.

Yes, I've opted out to receiving calls from my provider and they are not allowed to call me.

Unfortunately it’s getting more common there too. I‘ve received a few spoofed caller ID calls by now informing me of my "identity theft case with Interpol".

It‘s not nearly the same extent as in the US, though.

The UK has left the EU. They appear to not be abiding by EU privacy laws as a result.

Italian phone number had to get there somehow, probably sold by X, an Italian company?

Probably phone numbers follow some numbering scheme etc. so it is relatively easy to spam everyone with automated dialing and handing the numbers that prove out to the scammer. Thus while it is possible sold by X, it is just as possible randomly pulled from limited pool of possible numbers.

Back in the good old days my mom worked for a short time for a marketing company making cold calls. Back when long distance phone rates were expensive the company would set up people locally and then just call every possible local number (eg. 678-XXXX). People with an unlisted number would get mad and ask where she found their number.

The fact that the call shows an origin number from UK does not mean that it actually comes from UK; source numbers can be spoofed in various ways, especially if it's not spam calls from legitimate companies but actual scam calls.

Unlikely. UK GDPR is pretty much identical to EU GDPR.

AIUI it's presently exactly identical.

However there is a proposal for some changes - it doesn't make any sense for me (make it less onerous yet also somehow maintain compatibility with EU GDPR?) but I don't have time for the actual legalese frankly and the press release was devoid of detail in favour of annoying quips, and completely confusing.

I honestly think politics would be better off without television and radio (again). If the only way lay people heard of stuff was through slower news (if at all) then surely they'd speak normally (not in pithy soundbites) and have better debates.

The UK abides by UK privacy laws, which are in many ways similar to the EU versions.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

The ICO, lol... about as useful as Ofgem.

But does it cover also EU citizens or only UK ones? AFAIK EU with GDPR doesn't care that much about data privacy in ie Zimbabwe

Report from Sweden, I'm receiving multiple spam calls per week from UK. WTF is up with this?

Answer them, but don't speak. They will soon tire of you wasting their time. And you will be flagged as 'a 'timewaster'.

Profit! But not for them.

Report from Greece. Our local privacy watchdog last year fined Clearview with €20Μ. Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether Clearview operates in Greece. They certainly have no office here. I seriously doubt the fine will ever be collected.

Report from Vietnam: I received scam calls pretty often before. It Vietnam trash SIMs were fairly common, and it bothered people so much that the goverment has to force every mobile company to "standardize" their consumer's data (i.e. fixing the incorrect data in trash SIMs). I have not received any scam calls since doing it.

What do you mean by "trash SIMs"?

Basically SIMs owned by previous owners that are brimmed with scam messages and calls. They are much cheaper than new legitimate SIMs so many people choose them. Sometimes people buy trash SIMs that has "good" or "lucky" numbers (something like 999 999 9999)

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