My cell phone's the same way now. Maybe one in ten calls, at best, isn't phone-spam. And that's with being on the Do Not Call list. I've been trying to figure out a way to do without an actual phone (except maybe a burner on the off chance I need to call 911) as a result. Text is by far the more valuable side of my phone plan, but mostly because everyone wants to use it for auth these days (I could switch to another messaging service for actual communication with people I know)
Protip: I moved my legacy phone number (the number you get for customer service calls, that I hand out publicly, etc) over to google voice years ago. It follows me from phone to phone as I move carriers, everybody can reach me, and their "Press one to connect to the phone" feature throws off robodialers very effectively.
The only downside is that google voice smells like the kind of service that google doesn't regard as a needle mover and it's probably a question of when it gets axed, not if.
Google Voice has been rolled into Fi now (when you transfer your number into Fi, it becomes a google voice number). I think Google Voice has a few more years in it at the very least.
Mine as well. I even get fake vocal messages on my voicemail, starting with a first name I might or might not know asking me to call back like it's an emergency and obviously the number is a premium-rate one. I was like wow, that's a whole new level of spamming. I can't imagine the future of spamming : data mining personnal infos on social media + customized fake messages just to make you call back a number.
I have important numbers set to come through, everyone else just rings out silently (and I disabled voicemail), either you are a contact and I'll ring back or I just delete the call notification.
1) there's little way of figureing out who is actually contacting you.
2) If you file the number with the FCC you don't get a response.
3) it's not always obvious there's a commercial entity on the other side. I've gotten a number of calls that appear to try and keep me on the line while preventing from Turing test esque conversation from taking place.
4) some of the spam is legal--technically they aren't for profit, but they serve as a funnel for commercial services. These have been the most persistent with me.
We need a service that will collect complaints, sue on our behalf and send a check, taking their cut.
Have an app that allows you to report a phone call quickly, automatically recording and uploading the entire call (it should record all calls and delete recordings after a few hours if not reported). Then for numbers that have been reported by multiple people, have someone investigate, and if the source is located, file lawsuits.
It's $500 per violation, so if there's enough people lawsuits can work, and the company making the app can reduce investigation costs by distributing it among many different complainers (so even if a private investigator costs several thousand to get contact info, if they called 100 people and they end up getting a 50k judgement it works out).
For #3, I no longer answer the phone with "Hello" from an unknown number. I wait for the person to say "Hello?" or if the person starts talking I just hang up.
It does actually work to ask to be put on the do not call list maintained by the caller (not the national registry), even for scammers. Nobody wants to waste resources.
Yes. It's a federal criminal law. That means you have to get federal attorneys' offices interested if you want the miscreants stopped. But shutting down telemarketers isn't nearly as much fun as driving people like Aaron Swartz to suicide, or as profitable as seizing airplanes from drug smugglers.
