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Phone Carrier Apps Can Help Fight Robocalls -- Sometimes, Even For Free (cnn.com)
Friday CNN reported on "what you can do right now to stop robocalls."
"Short of throwing your phone in the garbage, there's no way to avoid them altogether. But wireless providers and smartphone developers offer tools to filter out at least some unwanted calls." - Verizon's Call Filter app is free to download on iPhones and Android devices. The company announced Thursday the app will offer some free features -- including auto-blocking calls from known fraudsters, showing warning banners for suspicious calls, and a spam reporting tool. For $2.99 a month per line, the Call Filter app can use a phonebook feature to look up the names of unknown callers, and it can show a "risk meter" for spam calls.
- AT&T's Call Protect has similar free features and add-ons with a $3.99 per month subscription. (iOS and Android)
- T-Mobile phones come loaded with Scam ID, which warns customers about suspicious phone numbers. It's also free to activate Scam Block, which automatically rejects calls from those numbers. An additional app called Name ID offers premium caller identification for $4 per line monthly. (iOS and Android)
- Sprint's Premium Caller ID , which comes pre-installed, looks up unknown numbers and filters and blocks robocalls for $2.99 per line.
- Google's Pixel phones also give you the option to have your voice assistant answer suspicious calls for you. The phone can transcribe the conversation and lets you decide whether to answer.
"Short of throwing your phone in the garbage, there's no way to avoid them altogether. But wireless providers and smartphone developers offer tools to filter out at least some unwanted calls." - Verizon's Call Filter app is free to download on iPhones and Android devices. The company announced Thursday the app will offer some free features -- including auto-blocking calls from known fraudsters, showing warning banners for suspicious calls, and a spam reporting tool. For $2.99 a month per line, the Call Filter app can use a phonebook feature to look up the names of unknown callers, and it can show a "risk meter" for spam calls.
- AT&T's Call Protect has similar free features and add-ons with a $3.99 per month subscription. (iOS and Android)
- T-Mobile phones come loaded with Scam ID, which warns customers about suspicious phone numbers. It's also free to activate Scam Block, which automatically rejects calls from those numbers. An additional app called Name ID offers premium caller identification for $4 per line monthly. (iOS and Android)
- Sprint's Premium Caller ID , which comes pre-installed, looks up unknown numbers and filters and blocks robocalls for $2.99 per line.
- Google's Pixel phones also give you the option to have your voice assistant answer suspicious calls for you. The phone can transcribe the conversation and lets you decide whether to answer.
I have T-Mobile, and currently use Hiya and NoMoRobo for hobocalls (left amusing typo in there).
They both work pretty well, but it seems like an app tied to a carrier might be able to work better in some ways, and reporting calls from multiple people in the network might cause a system-wide block on T-Mobile's behalf sooner than if they didn't know a particular caller was bothering a lot of people with unwanted calls.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So, they charge your for caller ID which is a known defective product. Now they want to charge you again for an application that tries to make up for that known defective product.
Isn't it time TO SUE THE TELLY COMPANIES????
my Samsung Galaxy S9 has it built in from the factory , plus there is an app at Google playstore for phones that dont come with it from the factory https://play.google.com/store/...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Dear carriers, charging your customers even more money for a service that tries to solve this problem from their side isn't how this works.
You should know the traffic that crosses your network. You already know your paying customers, and you should know your network peers. The problem you are having is that you don't know the traffic that is coming from your peers. You should be able to trust your network peer and their traffic, and your network peer should be able to do the same for you. If that's not true, drop that peer link. Over a few iterations, the shitty untrustable peers will be readily identifiable by name, and no one will work with them. Spam calls solved. You're welcome.
Charging people to protect them from the problem that they help create? Brilliant. Some one should find the executives from these companies and punch them in the face.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
A silent ringtone as the default also works, if you don't mind having to maintain your own "white-list" by assigning a differnt ringtone for those you want to hear from. Best of all, this approach is free.
Nuke them from orbit.
Or, in real life, don't have a phone number to begin with. They can't annoy you if they can't fucking call you. In short, fuck them all.
All my contacts are on iPhone, so I do 100% of my communications via iMessage or Facetime audio.
#DeleteFacebook
did the phone companies allow robocallers to overwhelm their customers in order to sell protection?
So, Mobile Phone carriers are profiting from robocalls? What's next, buying a door for your house and for an extra $4.99 a month they'll come to your home and prevent any unwanted intruders?
Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Wife: I don't want ANY spam!
Man: Why can't she have egg bacon spam and sausage?
Wife: THAT'S got spam in it!
Man: Hasn't got as much spam in it as spam egg sausage and spam, has it?
#DeleteFacebook
Tried on three different browsers, get a 404 "Oh Snap" that page doesn't exist, when trying to activate the Scam Block.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Because once everyone has paid for it, the carriers will approach the telemarketers and say "We'll let you bypass the spam blocking tool we sold to our customers if you pay us $x/mo." What's that saying about the only winner in a war being the guy who sells weapons to both sides?
The fireman is the arsonist?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That's great you have that. As others here have said, carriers should be held responsible to clean up their house. Charging to block spam calls is quite possibly an extortion lawsuit.
Um. Jolly Roger doesn't do any checking/verification. You're basically filtering out any numbers you don't reckognize and sending them into the abyss.
I use Jolly Roger too, but I would never do it that indiscriminately. Insteas I've switched to using a VoIP service, and set it up so that it presents all callers with an IVR by default. Phone numbers which I reckognize get filtered to bypass the IVR, while everyone else gets a "press 1 to be connected" message. Human callers press 1 and pass through, while robocalls get stuck there so I never hear them. Every once in a while I check the call log and look for any numbers which keep calling repeatedly without actually getting through; those get added to a filter that forwards them to Jolly Roger on future attempts, for my amusement.
I found an app on the play store called Calls Block. It is free and has allowed me to block all calls that are not on my contacts list. The calls are still able to leave a voice mail but most robo calls dont do that. I have been running it for about 3 weeks now and have not had any robo calls and without it I would get 3-4 a day.
If they know who the robocallers are, why should we have to pay to block them? Why are they even allowing their calls to connect at all?
Set up a ringtone that is silence. Set the default ringtone as silence. Assign everyone in your contacts list a ringtone that makes noise. When friends and family call your phone will ring. When unknown callers call no interruption. Your screen flashes but no noise. People who need to get in touch will leave a voicemail. Few spam callers do leave voicemail. If you are expecting a call from an unknown number look at the screen if it lights up from the expected area code you can risk answering. Works well for me.
How can app help with junk calls on my landline phone?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Uh, isn't it already caller pays?
I'm in Australia, it's caller pays. We don't have an issue with robocalls, at least, I hear no-one complaining about them and we all have mobile phones.
Now that spam calls have become a profit center, we'll be stuck with them forever.
I've got a couple different auto-blockers installed, including Hiya and AT&T's blocker. They still seem to let two-three calls through per day. But the worst part is that, even with the calls they block, the robocallers will still leave voicemails (sometimes launching into their spiel, but other times, around three seconds of silence), so even though I don't get the annoying rings, I still get the annoying alerts. I understand that the former may be tough to block, since they seem like legitimate voicemail, but there really should be something to automatically delete the latter. There should be no reason ever to deliver a silent couple-second voicemail.
I don't use a smartphone of any type. But the free service, Nomorobo, provided by my cable-based Spectrum server works very nicely.
https://newsroom.charter.com/p...
I don't like the idea of having all my calls listened to by a third party (NSA excluded).
There's still the free "It's Lenny" service though; you can add Lenny to the conversation manually. I think he's still the best spammer/scammer time-waster out there.