It's completely destroyed the phone for me... I get about 10 calls a day from scams. I don't answer my phone anymore unless it's from a number I already have programmed. Once the scammers get a hit on some of those numbers my phone is toast.

I do this too.. And then they started hitting my work number, which forwards to my phone, and only displays as my company's number so I have to check, just in case.

I suggest downloading a silent ring tone. I got one for a dollar. The silent ringtone is my default ringtone. I went into my contacts and changed the ringtone associated with them to be one that makes noise. I no longer am bothered by scam calls as a result.

> I went into my contacts and changed the ringtone associated with them to be one that makes noise.

That gets the job done, but rather than modify each of your existing contacts (and each new one), consider just turning on Do No Disturb and setting your Do Not Disturb level to "Allow Calls From All Contacts" (or a particular Group or Favorites). These are iOS options but I assume there's an equivalent in Android.

On my particular Android phone (Pixel) this is not a great solution because setting Do Not Disturb alters the behavior of other things like Calendar reminders or email alerts. You could make DND not do that, but sometimes I do want to mute other things. If you're using DND all the time, you essentially lose that feature on your phone.

The best solution I've found is to just go into the Google Dialer app and set the option to not ring on any call suspected to be spam. I still do get spam calls that haven't yet been reported, but it's down to only about 3-4 a month.

Not sure if Samsung phones / other android flavors have a similar feature or not.

A great improvement to that would be an option to silently reject all suspected spam calls and send them to the voicemail. This has been suggested many times on Google's product feedback and suggestion boards but for some reason they have not gotten around to doing it. The hard part of detecting spam calls is already there; all it should take is adding a couple of new check boxes.

There are apps like youmail and nomorerobo. I use youmail and it has the option to give a disconnected message when a scammer calls.

Just wait. You will get scammers that can pass the "scam likely" threshold, and then your scam call volume will go up.

Just checked on my Samsung phone and there is a setting 'Caller ID and spam protection' apparently backed by Hiya.

That is probably a better solution. I have do not disturb for 10 pm to 8 am and have it set to not allow anyone to disturb me. But thinking about it now maybe I should allow calls from contacts during those times.

You can also (in Android, at any rate) set it to allow your favourites to by-pass it.

I don't know the end game here. It's easy to say that phone calls as a medium just slides into oblivion and this all becomes academic. But I don't really believe that. There's a real and continuing place for voice conversations and that requires someone to initiate a call.

Eliminating spoofing is probably impossible without infrastructure revamps that aren't realistic even augmenting with spam filtering at the telco level. But the current situation is at the edge of the tolerable and people will just stop letting calls ring through.

If the implementation of voice calls over the traditional networks do not improve (as you suggest, via improvements and regulations), then people will route around it. My kids only call me via FaceTime ... and the only way they communicate with their friends with voice is either facetime, or by sending videos of them talking over snapchat.

Obviously, my kids (and their friends/school) are only one data point ... but yeah, for them, it's already dead.

Hiya looks interesting. How do they make money if the app is free? How does it work? The site doesn't really say how it does what it does.

They have a premium subscription detailed here: https://hiyahelp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000872947-...

Another typical problem with the American system of deregulating everything and anything. In Europe (at least the parts I know) this is never an issue.

This is regulated in the US. You're not allowed to spam calls nor fraudulently impersonate someone's bank, the IRS, a healthcare provider, a collections agency, etc. There are dedicated lines for reporting these types of calls to the FTC, a nation Do Not Call registry.

I can't speak to the manpower dedicated to nor the pursuit of these reports by the FTC, but this is definitely a regulated issue.