Why not get a second sim? Most phones can have 2 sims active, and a phone / text only plan is dirt cheap (3-6$/m).
Offer the second number with much greater discretion.
Offer the second number with much greater discretion.
I've never had a single spam call on my main phone number, but friends who have got a new number get maybe 20 spam calls per day, with only having given their number to their closest friends and family.
I think one factor that weighs in heavily is if your contacts download thousands of spam apps onto their phones and click YES to every permission. Then your phone number is harvested from your contact's phone and sold. TikTok, for instance, will beg me multiple times on a frequent basis to see my contacts. I don't think you can even install WhatsApp without giving it your entire phone book, can you?
You can. It will cry and beg and nag every chance it gets (same as when you don’t allow notifications) but it will still function without these permissions (for now).
Tested with WA business on a “landline” voip number because I don’t want people to contact me via WA (and they would if I used my cell number for WA)
Some carriers do try to keep excessively dirty numbers inactive for a while after a customer cancels a plan and returns the number, in the hopes that the spam will fall off after to many "this number is disconnected" responses.
But sometimes they don't bother, and sometimes it just doesn't help all that much, because spammers are just running through the phone number space.
This is a long way of saying that even getting a new number doesn't always work. The number you end up with might already be inundated with spam.
But best I can tell, 80% of my spam calls are just war dialing; a new number would get war dialed just as much. Probably wouldn't get collections calls for my deadbeat cousin though.
I believe most reasonably modern phones should support at least one active eSIM in addition to the physical SIM now.
I got fed up, told the caller that I hadn't seen her in years and she could be dead in a ditch for all I knew, then asked if he could call me if he got a hold of her.
They never called again.
I switched to low population area codes and that helped a lot. Currently getting 0-3/mo.
308 is low pop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_code_308
It works like a charm though. I have three tiers of numbers - one that I'll keep and goes to only friends and family, one that I will likely keep for a couple years until it starts getting too much spam, and a third tier that I cycle regularly and use for one off things like online orders.
I was still living in Vancouver, Canada when I learned maybe six or so years ago AT&T has removed all roaming restrictions in North America. So a few of us banded together, one of us crossed over to New York picked up a group subscription of sorts and we had very cheap subscriptions. Only the last 1-2 years did Canadian providers caught up, somewhat.
But the real advantage was if anyone called from a "local" number, local to my SIM at least, I immediately knew it was spam. I do not know anyone in Buffalo, I do not do business in Buffalo, there's no authority which has anything to do with me there, nothing. It's spam.