(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?
Pretty similar for me, almost disappointed I haven’t gotten one in a while. It’s funny to waste their time, and get them all worked up lol.
Yeah it was kinda fun. I figured ever minute I had them on the phone was a minute they weren’t scamming old people with dementia out of their money, so at the very least I was doing something mildly good too.
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.
If you’re not getting calls it’s just coincidence. Scammers don’t have a unified do not call register.
You’re just wasting your time.
Arguably what he is doing is for good, because he is also wasting their time, not being able to scam actual victims.
Not really. If you really wanted to help your time would be better spent volunteering for an organisation that teaches tech literacy to people.
Also I don’t really believe OPs claims. Sure OK occasionally you might get a scammer to talk for more than a few minutes but not often.
One spam call I asked the guy to stay on the line while I verify his number by running a route trace. He hung up and I stopped getting spam calls almost completely. Now I get a few that are auto-blocked but I still get robo-voicemails.
This has been effective for me, too, though I haven’t put that much effort towards it. I lose interest and change my mind about wanting to be on the phone for very long, but I’ll engage with them. Like question why they are asking for my name if they called claiming there was a warrant for me, or similar situations where they are asking for information that they should have if the call was legit. Their goal isn’t to call people and annoy them, they want easy money from stupid people (and tbh, I don’t have much sympathy for those dumb enough to fall for it).
If you slow them down in their system, they seem to have another system to help filter people like you out.
Yeah I’ve started doing the same and its almost like they maintain a list of us time wasters 😅 I’ll typically play along as long as I can so they think I’m all game. After they rage quit I immediately call the number back from a second phone and attempt to play dumb like I got disconnected, typically with some other dumbass that just resets and starts the script over, so I get a free two-fer 😂
It has become a fun little ride every once in a while!
It’s probably a coincidence. Systems like that would mark your number as active as soon as you called back, and therefore either valid for spam calls directly, or ready to resell to other spammers, so they get their money in either case.