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.

Why not get a second sim? Most phones can have 2 sims active, and a phone / text only plan is dirt cheap (3-6$/m).

Offer the second number with much greater discretion.

From experience it seems to be semi-random.

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)

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.

Physical dual-SIM support is very market based (Popular in Asia).

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

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.

They never called again.

> a new number would get war dialed just as much.

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

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.

Distant area code SIMs do wonders.

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.

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.

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 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.

For contractors, this is where SMS tends to come in a lot as they'll usually text if they cannot get a voice call through, which helps.

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.

Which app did you use ( I seem to have similar issue with my other parent )?

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.

If our government can’t protect us from spam calls, how can they can protect us from anything else?

>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.

That sounds like fax spam.

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 can’t remember the last time I talked on the traditional phone network or received a legitimate call

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.

Getting a new, out of state number can sometimes help.

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

> Getting a new, out of state number

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".

> 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.

I moved from British Columbia (250 area code) to the Montreal suburbs (450 area code). The one digit difference was a huge issue: the number of times businesses and government agencies would helpfully "correct" my phone number when I gave it to them or when they tried to call it meant I missed a substantial number of important phone calls. I get it, my French isn't the greatest and I have a thick Anglo accent, but "deux cinq zéro" sounds very different from "quatre cinq zéro." Eventually I just gave up and got a local number (I ported my old one to VOIP.ms and forwarded it so I wouldn't miss calls).

Wow that seems crazy to me. I grew up in the northeastern US where even 3 decades ago, before a large expansion, we had 7 area codes within an hour drive. It would be bizarre to make such an assumption about someone, even then. When I lived in Boston, there was tons. Eastern Massachusetts alone has 339, 351, 508, 617, 774, 781, 857, and 978 as local area codes.

Almost all of the spam calls I receive have the same area code as my phone, which is in a different state from where I currently live.

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?

Exactly, and not just the same area code, the spammers often have the same prefix as my phone number too... so it looks like someone "just around the corner".

That's weird to me, honestly. Does everyone expect you to get a new phone number anytime you move long distances?

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 can’t remember the last time I talked on the traditional phone network or received a legitimate call

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.

It's high time someone disrupted the damn desk phone network of these hospitals. It's definitely not a technical hurdle in 2024. All calls go on the data network. You route your calls out of the main router and any call that gets routed in such manner will have the ID of the router. Tag the router id to the hospital or hotel and be done with.

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.

Or maybe telecommunications in general need disruption. Instead of having a number that anyone in the world can call, I should provide an abstract identity to a contact. When I approve that entity to contact me, and they get a unique identifier that only their identity can use to contact me, I decide how important their calls are to me:

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.

It's an american problem. Spam calls aren't a big issue in Germany.

Complain to your government.

It’s a huge problem in India. 10 times worse than US.

Not sure, I get them in france at the very least twice a week. Other people I know complain about the same thing.

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

I never get spam calls, but I do get a lot of spam SMS messages - also in Germany. (They're almost always fake 2FA activation messages from some bank I'm not a customer of)

I have a dedicated phone I use solely for healthcare.

The number in my main phone changes every 90 days.

> The number in my main phone changes every 90 days.

I get a new starter SIM every month.

Where I live, they moved to Whatsapp (dentist) and dedicated app (public hospitals) for messaging and notification.

Doctors and dentists are shifting to apps with integrated VoIP calls and dropping PSTN.

And I really like that. Instead of having to use some social network product just to receive my lab results.

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

My dentist texts me. My doctor uses MyChart, so I get notifications. Neither one calls me on the phone.

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.