I recently had to help my father organize his medical visits.
Dealing with his healthcare providers was a bit of a pain, but it was way worse because he has stopped answering calls, primarily because of the call spam rate. I think because he owns his own business, he never fails to hand out his contact info when he is shopping, and he owns his own business (so his contact info is published by the city).
His phone provider has a feature to opt into spam filtering, his phone has another, and I downloaded a spam list filtering app for him. I disabled the ringer for numbers not in his contact list. I did similar actions to reduce spam in his text messages.
This was a good triage, but the damage is already done to his psyche. He doesn’t answer the phone anymore.
I have a business with a published phone number and I probably get 20 spam calls a day, at least half of which leave “voicemails,” some of which are just really loud high pitched noises for whatever reason.
It’s absolutely ridiculous. I wish I would have used a different number than my personal one back when I had started.
>I probably get 20 spam calls a day, at least half of which leave “voicemails,” some of which are just really loud high pitched noises for whatever reason.
Depending on his age the business may be a red herring.
Shady outbound call based operations purchase, trade, and mine data all day long. You can have Equifax directly sell you reams of demographic specific contact information. God help anyone who ordered from a catalog.
My grandparents received easily 30 scam/spam calls a day. Mostly from Medicare scammers and sketchy organizations that operate right at the edge of illegality. Not even counting the outright fraudulent “Microsoft Support” scams.
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?
> 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)
That doesn't always work. A lot of phone numbers out there are "dirty": they are on various marketing lists and will get spam calls and texts.
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.
I don't know about most phones supporting that, probably depends on the market.
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.
That's the worst! I had a collection agency keep calling consistently for a particular family member.
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.
Because the new Sim card is going to be assigned a phone number that’s been used by someone else in the past and will get even more spam. That’s been my experience on several new phone numbers I’ve gotten over the last few years.
I do basically this with a subscription to MySudo. I always get funny looks when giving out a number, living in a small town people are surprised when it isn't one of the two or three area codes around here.
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.
Reminds me of my parents... they live close enough to the US border that they just have a US cell phone plan. The plan is $50/mo/line USD and includes unlimited data/calling/text in Canada/US/Mexico. But because they live so close they're not actually roaming most of the time, and they're snow birds so they're in the US half the year anyway. They found the same thing as you... any calls from the same area code as their phone numbers was definitely not for them since it was somewhere very far away and they don't have any business there.
I haven't answered my phone for anyone not in my VIP list in a year or two.
I can see when someone is calling and in realtime see them leaving a voicemail via speech-to-text and pick up the call if I want but 99.999% of the time it's spam.
Th topic of this subthread is exactly that one cannot rely on the contact list method because doctors may call from any unknown number. Maybe you haven’t had to deal with that (yet), but once you do you’ll realize that your method doesn’t work for that.
Same with home repair contractors. The person coming over to do the work is unlikely to call from the same number the business hands out that rings an office manager or the owner. Same goes for the person calling me back with an estimate I requested.
Dealing with his healthcare providers was a bit of a pain, but it was way worse because he has stopped answering calls, primarily because of the call spam rate. I think because he owns his own business, he never fails to hand out his contact info when he is shopping, and he owns his own business (so his contact info is published by the city).
His phone provider has a feature to opt into spam filtering, his phone has another, and I downloaded a spam list filtering app for him. I disabled the ringer for numbers not in his contact list. I did similar actions to reduce spam in his text messages.
This was a good triage, but the damage is already done to his psyche. He doesn’t answer the phone anymore.