(Picture alt text: a screenshot of my phone’s call log, with numbers redacted (just in case). The phone numbers (except for one) are all spam calls)
I’m not sure if this is the correct place for this, but I am at my limit with these.
Constantly throughout the day I get spam call after spam call. I constantly report them to Google (I’ve got a Pixel 5, if it matters), yet nothing changes. This has been happening for months.
These calls will also leave the exact same, completely silent, 4-second voicemails. I will block and report spam, but you know how it is. There’s no way to turn voice mail notifications off, and I wouldn’t necessarily want to, because I know I’d miss something genuine or important.
What do I do? Is there anything I can do, beyond changing numbers? Even then, I’m sure a new number would exist in some database somewhere and be victim to more spam calls. This is heinous.
Thanks for reading. I’m just so frustrated.
Edit: this got a lot more attention than I anticipated. I appreciate the suggestions for different spam blockers and settings! It’s also nice knowing I’m not alone. Hopefully, at least in the US, we’ll get some real legislation eventually that will kill these spam calls once and for all.
This is a tactic that worked for me, but your mileage may vary. I used to get dozens of spam calls a day on both my work and personal numbers. I did all the things that you’re supposed to do and they just kept coming. I also needed to answer unknown numbers on my work phone so I couldn’t just block them.
So after a while, I started answering the calls and calling them back when I got silence. I made sure I could talk to a person/scammer as often as possible. In the beginning I would just ask them if they felt good about themselves trying to scam people out of their money. They would generally just hang up but one guy gave this long speech about how if you were that dumb you didn’t deserve that much money and how he was living the American dream (although I did ask him if he was in American at which point he hung up on me). After that, I would just start trying to keep them on the phone as long as possible. My job is such that I can work and talk on the phone at the same time, so I made a word document that had a fake name, birth day, social security number, address, a fake person basically. Then I would put on my “old man” voice and just act stupid to keep them on the phone. I kept one guy on the phone for four hours as I pretended to be too inept to turn on my laptop to give him my IP address. He was quite upset when I told him I knew he was scamming me.
Anyway, I haven’t gotten a scam call in like 6 months. I think scammers put me on their do not call list. Maybe worth a shot?
I do love the idea of wasting their time! I’ve done it a couple of times, but nothing quite so extensive as what you do. Usually when I call robo call numbers back, I get “this number is disconnected,” so I can’t even annoy the hell out of them like they do to me. :/
Four hour guy I had a lot of clerical work to do at work that day and didn’t need to talk on the phone at all so I just kept him going. Would go off on long made up stories related to what he was saying. Told him about my kids and their kids and my deceased wife. They guy told me that my card was used to purchase (among other expensive things) “$3,000 worth of Bitcoin” and I kept being like “what’s a bite coin?” and he COULD. NOT. GET. PAST. me calling it bite coin instead of Bitcoin. He would correct me every time. Then I asked what that was and he told me it was a digital currency and I told him about my coin collection for like 8 minutes before he steered me back on topic. I only told him I was wasting his time because I was done with work.
I will say, one guy asked if I lived alone and I told him I do now because my wife of 47 years died two months ago and he said “Ahhh…that’s sad…” and hung up on me. So at least that guy wasn’t completely evil.