Doctors and dentists.

Most of the calls I get are spam, but then the MOST important calls I get are from doctors, labs, and dentists. I do as much as possible online of course, but not all of these professionals have good online systems and phone calls are often required.

Sometimes you know what number they're going to be calling from ahead of time, but often you don't... especially if you're in a large medical network that has different offices for different specialists, etc. It's a really sad situation if you get sick and you're trying not to miss these important calls, especially when it's a long wait for a specialist and then you miss their call when they get to your name on the waiting list.

This will literally cost some people their lives and legislators need to act on making spoof calls impossible -- there's no reason why anyone should be allowed to spoof a number that they can't receive calls at.

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.

Offer the second number with much greater discretion.

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?

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)

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.

I believe most reasonably modern phones should support at least one active eSIM in addition to the physical SIM now.

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.

They never called again.

I switched to low population area codes and that helped a lot. Currently getting 0-3/mo.

308 is low pop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_code_308

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.

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 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.

For doctors offices, it's a whole different bag and a true pain... you'll get voicemails with half a message that has none of the important details.

It’s absolutely ridiculous. I wish I would have used a different number than my personal one back when I had started.

That sounds like fax spam.

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.

Social services are another example. Many services are county-administered and thus don't have a centralized online platform. As always our most vulnerable populations suffer the most from techno-greed. Not the families of software engineers who built the system.

My phone is out of state due to my previous address, and 95% of spam i get is spoofed to that old town or the surrounding area.

No doctors office/etc calls me from that area. It works pretty nice

The problem with that idea is that when you make local calls, people think that you are the spammer.

I too have an out-of-state number after having moved, and I can definitely confirm that when I make a local call, some people will not pick up after seeing the unusual area code on their caller ID. They told me so.

There's another problem too: Even when I leave voicemail for a local business (plumber, dentist, replying to a "for sale" ad), some people will be thinking, Why does this guy need a plumber or want to buy my kayak if they live 1500 miles away?

I've resorted to leaving an explanation saying "Even though my area code is XYZ, I'm in the same city as you".

The area code wouldn’t be a red flag for me, but this absolutely would.

These people who don't pick up for an unusual area code: don't they know that spammers are more likely to call from a "usual" area code? Am I mistaken?

Everyone i know has kept their phone number for years. You'd think businesses would be used to people who moved from out of town but kept their number.

I don't call places much aside from doctors/etc tho, so i guess i just haven't had that issue personally.

I think a whole lot more people still make regular phone calls than the ones who don't. Anyone who runs a business for example is usually on the phone ALL the time.

Is it not this simple ? With dual SIMs any phone can serve 2 lines so employees officially switch to the hospital e-sim within the hospital premises.

1. Phone rings no matter what (doctors and other high profile contacts that I do not want to miss a call from)

2. Phone rings unless sleep mode active (family/friends). A second call within 3 minutes rings through in case of emergency.

3. Call goes straight to pre-recorded message (generic or unique to that identity) that tells them to text me their message/request (or when AI gets good enough, and it doesn't seem like it there yet for all accents, it transcribes their voicemail message).

4. Caller can leave a message but it is completely ignored by me and I don't know they left a message unless I go and check my spam folder.

I can change the call handling of any identity at any time, and there should also be an email and text message layer on top of this system so the same rules apply and I choose who can contact me with those methods as well.

Complain to your government.

I settled on never answering my phone if not in my contact list, if the caller is not a spammer they leave a voicemail.

The number in my main phone changes every 90 days.

I get a new starter SIM every month.

Or we may end up in a world when doctors send us important Tiktoks.

Even if they do want to call, they all have to support deaf people using TTYs, and phones all support RTT (TTY to cell). There's no need to take voice calls from legitimate businesses in the US.

However, my real problem is with what I call “The Google Strategy.” Basically, they take publicly funded infrastructure like HTTP and SMTP, capture the network by dumping “free” products on the market (with basically no advertising), kill off competitors, then monetize their market capture by removing the "free" part, packing these products with ads, making them worse and worse over time in the process. And everyone is trapped, since they captured the network of this public infrastructure. This is the story of Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.

It’s anti-competitive, anti-markets, and quite frankly should have been regulated away as a strategy a long time ago.

Google basically ran Microsoft's classic anti-competitive B2B strategy to capture the consumer internet, and got away with it!

You should, honestly.

In old school economic terms its called "dumping." When international trade started becoming a major thing, aspiring monopolists would flood foreign markets with goods sold below-cost to push out local competitors, then ratchet up prices and reduce quality once they'd captured the market (basically the Google strategy).

Just like crypto people had to learn that financial regulation was in place for a reason, internet people have had to learn that industrial age anti-trust rules were also put in place for a reason. Now we just need to enforce them.

Any modern system is going to use IP as a transport. Even the traditional phone network is VoIP under the hood in modern networks. The replacement system should be kept as far from the influence of the last mile providers as possible.

The thing that definitely shouldn't happen is that you get your phone number from them. Let it be "user@host" like email or otherwise assigned via DNS.

I wind-up using the phone because so many organizations malevolently misfeature they websites - doing what you want to (pay basic bill or whatever) is hard but upselling and new features, those you can do instantly.

Yes, I'm exaggerating. No, it's not by much.

Sure there probably is some regulatory capture but if anything at all can be regulated it’s spam calls / messages. If the government can’t regulate spam then what could it be expected to regulate.

The general population is increasing worried about scam calls for their elderly relatives, it’s already a big deal.

In fact there are really only two groups that are pro-spam: spammers, obviously, and the entities that provide them services from which they may spam.

Oh sure basically any provider of any service be it phone, web hosting, email, etc. will say they don't want spammers, and the email providers may actually mean it what with them not wanting their server's scores trashed and be unable to get email to anyone (though plenty others don't give a shit), but website hosts, telephone companies, and SMS providers? They utterly do not care and in fact go out of their way to not know when spammers are (mis)using their services.

Meanwhile like that other commenter said, everyone is incentivized to enter walled garden services that actually do the barest minimum of enforcement for spam activity. I doubt they're conspiring in a dark room somewhere, but neither side is going to upset at the other in that situation.

you forgot the entire marketing industry

> everyone is incentivized to enter walled garden services that actually do the barest minimum of enforcement for spam activity

These walled gardens actively spam you—that's how they make money. They only act against competing advertisers.

For there to be an incentive to avoid spam, we would need a social network not funded by it. To my knowledge this is essentially ActivityPub. In order for ActivityPub to be useful, we need an incentive to drag celebrities away from private paychecks that benefit from manipulation of other social networks (twitter, ig, tt). I don't believe there is any such entity or incentivization right now.

The (US) government does an excellent job of regulating many things, such as commercial airplane design and construction. Oh wait...

If the US government wanted a healthy industry, they would have bought one or otherwise directed actual competition. Instead we only have Boeing, which taxpayers also subsidized, which seems incompetent and unwilling to acknowledge fault, which seems to be generally a gargantuan waste of taxpayer dollars compared to a properly efficient and reliable no-profit outfit.

I don't understand what this has to do with spam.

It would be highly improbable that the people making those kinds of decisions could successfully regulate an airline industry, or even the much easier task of spam.

The US government has also gone to great lengths to protect Boeing from competition by boxing out concord, canadian aircraft, and embraer . I think such companies like Boeing should be considered for-profit arms of the government instead of independent corporations.

They are if you point out ads are just spam by another name

And it's not like there's no technical means for the phones either. Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam. Like in our great Red Tape Europe, even with uptick in recent years we have a tiny fraction of spam calls compared to the United States.

If this were true we wouldn't have spam

> And it's not like there's no technical means for the phones either. Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam.

A) this is insanely naïve given the international treaties that make up telecommunication agreements. B) "Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam." telecoms don't have any clue who is calling, see above comments about treaties.

I was replying to the comment asserting that dealing with email spam is easier, which it most resolutely wasn't until the advent of statistical filters.

> A) this is insanely naïve given the international treaties that make up telecommunication agreements.

Fun thing about treaties and agreements is they are not laws of nature and can be entered, abandoned and amended at will. A lot of regulation is getting constantly updated.

Absolutely disagree, email is the spam king. Just the fact that you can contact someone without consent breaks the entire system.

Whenever I visit, I switch to my US SIM card and am immediately bombarded with spam texts (mostly from political parties) and scam calls. In my experience, Android is pretty good at marking calls and texts as "potential scams," but they're still there. In the Netherlands, I've gotten a few scam attempts via WhatsApp. Other than that, I think I've received one phone call soliciting donations to the Red Cross, and nothing else.

Personally, the only “spam” I get is flagged by the cellular provider and 99% of the time the calls are silenced. Not really an issue for me. The only people that “call” me are in my contacts list anyways. Everyone else can leave a VM or text message.

Luckily at the moment, there's still a delay after you answer the call as (I assume) you're being connected to a human. How long will this last....?

Currently, when I don't hear a voice within 1s or so, I hang up. A legitimate caller will (hopefully) call back pretty quick.

I had issue with Vodafone here - they were pestering me with calls/messages... even after I switched to Digi they were calling me for a week to try to convince me to stay (it just confirmed my decission to switch ;) )

They target the US, and to some extent the UK, Gulf countries like UAE where English is the de facto language.

This is why I have my own mail server and domain. Full control over mail, and access to features that you pay for (ie, unlimited e-mail aliases, control over mailbox size). No more worrying about “google decided to shut your free account down for whatever reason. Bye bye decades of emails and loss to services that use email based OTP or magic link login.

I really don't get that. I don't get these, on neither of my phones (I've got two numbers). When it rings, it's virtually always friends or family. Sometimes the bank/insurance/doctor. Very exceptionally do I get a commercial or scam call.

I think it's not an argument good enough to excuse to excuse Authy here: "my phone already leaked, so what's one more leak!?".

> Which isn’t great because those aforementioned platforms are all proprietary walled gardens with terrible incentives

Oh I fully agree. I'm using Telegram for chat but zero FaceTime/meet/WhatsApp here. People want to call me, they usually phone me. Once in a rare while Telegram.

I don’t understand what they are calling for either. I’ve answered a few and most of the time it’s a dead line when I answer. Just silence.

The primary operating goal of a predictive dialing system is minimizing agent downtime. Ideally, when an agent transitions into being ready to talk, they want as little time as possible before they're connected to a live lead.

In above-board telemarketing, where there's a finite list of leads instead of 000-000-0000 through 999-999-9999, the administrator will adjust dialing aggressiveness to minimize the chance that a lead picks up the phone but no agent is available to take the call. Because when that happens, the answering party experiences nothing but dead air, followed by a timeout, and a hangup.

The one nice consequence from this, though, is that if you do answer a spam call and get connected to a live person, chances are very high that several other potential marks got dead air instead. Maybe you saved grandma for another day.

Almost all spam is instantly recognisable. Mostly visa and parcel delivery scams.

In do not block unknown numbers because lots of organisations use them here (UK) This includes people I really do want to be able to contact me if they want to such as the police.

I think it's mostly just an issue in the US/North America

Doctors, dentists, moving companies, home improvement contractors, recruiters, etc. These are some of the most important phone calls I've received in recent memory.

I don't know what world you live in, but I religiously block phone numbers after just one spam call. And I usually don't give out my phone number. (I'm much happier giving out email addresses since I have an infinite supply of addresses.) I never get enough spam calls that I feel like the phone system is going the way of the fax machine.

Which will definitely end up in some data breach at some point.

Spam callers are likely the most lucrative customer of the telephone network for the telephone companies.

I don't see how that could be correct. Once you pay your monthly fee, the fewer minutes you tie up the company's resources the better for them. That's true too for pay-ahead plans.

This is very valuable data to have, not only for advertisers, but also criminals and other bad actors.

Also, the fact that nobody ever questions the authenticity of leaked data should be VERY alarming. Imagine what power someone can hold over someone with manipulated leak data.

I would rather not have my own life intertwined with either of them but undoubtedly it already is to some degree.

I used to get a couple of cold calls per year for surveys, but I got unlisted via GDPR requests and now its down to zero.

Companies do try collecting your phone number, but then I answer NO to the obligatory "do you want the latest offers" question (in the EU, this is opt-in not opt-out). And it doesn't matter if my phone number leaks.

This is similar to my email address use. I used to get emails from recruiters, but after a couple of replies informing them that whatever profile they have is illegal, with my email address not being public, asking them to delete it, the emails stopped. I still get spam, but it's mostly fraud and US companies. Fastmail's spam filters are good enough, BTW.

My phone number works just fine, and the phone network is valuable given the better signal 2G can have, or the fact that not everyone is on the app du jour. And I find it odd when people call me on WhatsApp.

I frequently see US folks criticising GDPR, so I'm guessing this is one of those "the US mind can't comprehend" moments.

Given that you're European, do you not have any friends/family outside your country, in neighboring EU countries? Wouldn't they have to pay high per-minute rates to call you?

Example from one provider: nope with 100 countries. Including the US, Canada, China etc.

National calls and calls to nordic and Baltic countries are typically included in the subscription. But once you have to call to let's say central Europe per minute rates are exorbitant compared to today's data volume pricing.

Right now my plan, with Orange, costs 7.5 EUR / month with unlimited 5G (for real), 16 GB of data when roaming, unlimited minutes when roaming in EU/EES, and 600 international minutes in EU/EES. We do have great deals here, BTW, I'm sure it's more expensive in other EU countries.

I'd have to upgrade for another 100 minutes with US / Canada, however, I have another plan from Digi that charges per minute but that's dirt cheap.

I do have acquaintances from US with which I communicate primarily via WhatsApp, but I don't need it for my family within EU.

Nowadays... but not so long ago it wasn't like that and the prices were abysmal. And considering that EU is somewhat smaller and there is higher chance of having international contacts make the IMs so popular (especially whatsapp)...

> EU is somewhat smaller

By area? The EU's population is larger than that of the US.

WhatsApp is indeed very popular for IM, and nowadays, SMS is basically just for 2FA (I hoped RCS would change that, but it's too little too late unfortunately).

Yes, by area, which second part of the sentence implied when I mentioned it's easier to end-up in different country without driving miles on end :)

Giving your phone number out to all these services also means that it can be used as a single identifier to track you and your behavior across all those services.

I'm not sure that GDPR is helping us a lot there.

Yes, and this is the slope that we keep sliding down with these data breaches not being taken seriously. First it was your name and email. Now phone numbers. What's the next bit of our private info that we'll normalize leaking?

I still don't recommend to do that and just toss those that demand your phone number away. Get a business phone if your work demands it.

It sounds like a lot of work, but when I started doing this about two years ago it took about two weeks for the calls to just... stop. Now I get a spam call maybe once a month. It's glorious.

My theory is this is the only route to get put on the _real_ do-not-call lists - the ones that spam companies in India have labelled "unprofitable numbers.txt". Seems like once you're on those, you're good.

Every minute they're listening to you use them for rubber-duck debugging is a minute they're not scamming Granny out of her 401k. Be prepared to get called bad names in foreign languages. Bonus points if you learn some phrases in their language to really get under their skin.

I started doing this as well.

I mimic the Jolly Roger call service and they usually hang up in less than a minute.

Ex…

- Act like you can’t hear them

- Ask them to restart what they were saying

- Start a conversation with a fictional person in the background

It’s fun and makes getting spam calls enjoyable.

https://jollyrogertelephone.com/

While I do get a few regular phone calls a week, they're all in my contacts and I don't answer if the number isn't... at least 2/3 the time if I decide to answer as I'm expecting an out of band call, it's spam. On the flip side, I am wanting to setup for "your code is XXXXXX" as a verification on a personal website I'm working on to allow for public users. I know it doesn't add too much, but it's enough to reduce the noise. I'm not even sure what more hoops I need to jump through with Twilio to get to send said messages. I'm not a company, and not sending any kind of marketing campaign.

Doing it the opposite way - tying all outbound school/camp calls to a single callerID - risks blending the important with the automated reminders. LAUSD abuses their automated calling system to the extent that my wife and I have both screened calls from the front office involving an injured child, more than once.

The real issue here is getting to the root cause, which is carriers and their intermediary aggregators having incentives to carry large volumes of spam.

In a number of markets, operators have increased the cost of SMS messages to deter spam, only to find a massive increase in traffic pumping fraud that mysteriously appears in the system of trusted intermediaries. Everyone's making a goddamn fortune off it, and no one actually cares to fix it.