Poll of the Day > Anyone know how phone spam/harassment reporting works?

(+) Yeah! (+)

like, when you get a robocall and you hit the report spam button when you hang up?

Mainly asking cuz here there are a lot of robocalls who will instantly hangup, and then use your number to robocall someone else; I wanna know if reporting the spam reports the source number which the phone company would know or if it reports the spoofed number which would be unfair... or if the reporting feature is completely fake and it's only on your own phone and personal blocklist.

I assume a new scam centre in India opened because I saw a large uptick in calls

I put my number on the national do not call registry. Give it a couple months and then there's a feature on their website to report unsolicited calls.

VioletZer0 posted...

I put my number on the national do not call registry. Give it a couple months and then there's a feature on their website to report unsolicited calls.

Me too. Saw a noticable increase in calls after I did.
I think it's something like $50 or $100 to buy the list?

VioletZer0 posted...

I put my number on the national do not call registry.

...which has no legal weight whatsoever in India.

VioletZer0 posted...

I put my number on the national do not call registry. Give it a couple months and then there's a feature on their website to report unsolicited calls.

I remember seeing on the news years ago that the Canadian one ended up being counterproductive because the numbers on the list were somehow made available and overseas scammers purposely called those numbers.

The main advantage of the Do Not Call list is that you'll stop getting unsolicited calls from legal local businesses. Which makes it much easier to know for 100% sure that every unsolicited call you get from that point on is definitely a scammer who doesn't give a damn about the list.

From that point on, some form of robocall blocker or similar solution should block a lot of what's trying to get through. Or you can just safely ignore every number you don't recognize, and only return calls from valid callers you know.

Reminder that Kim Dotcom was worth invading New Zealand, but known scammer offices in India are somehow completely off limits.

Questionmarktarius posted...

...which has no legal weight whatsoever in India.

It should, their intelligence agency should kidnap the spam caller, bring them back home, and throw them in jail, and not regular jail, that costs too much money, but some off the books jail

again, does anyone know?

As far as I know, they don't flag a number as spam just because a single person reports it. There's presumably some sort of threshold for reports that is needed before the flag starts showing up, and I believe the point of number spoofing is that they can bounce between a bunch of non-suspicious-looking numbers without triggering that flag. Blocking it, however, will block the legitimate number as well, which is why I usually don't bother blocking unless the same number does call me multiple times (which I don't think I've ever had happen).

Press the call screen button.
They nearly always hang up.

Answer with anything but "hello", to confuse the autodialer pickup.

I just use Nomorobo for my home line with Vonage. Rarely get calls, only a few a day at the beginning of the month. If you report them they die off fast, with AI are making most the calls they try weeding out numbers who report early.

Questionmarktarius posted...

Answer with anything but "hello", to confuse the autodialer pickup.

That doesn't always work. I've sent a call to voice mail (which answers "The Google subscriber is not available") and the voice mail is the middle of some pre-recorded speech.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/e4f18c2b.png

(Except for the first word, which got cut off because the robocaller started speaking before Google started recording, that is an accurate transcription of the call.)

faramir77 posted...

I remember seeing on the news years ago that the Canadian one ended up being counterproductive because the numbers on the list were somehow made available and overseas scammers purposely called those numbers.

I could see that. Guy at the bank yesterday was complaining to me about all the spam he gets. I'm like I haven't had any.

If you have a Samsung phone, there should be an option to block potential spam calls.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/8/8332d102.png

The phone just ignores these calls and sends it to voice mail as if you pressed the ignore button on your phone.

Since Sunday I've had 6 calls automatically blocked. There were 2 calls from the same number, one right after the other, all the others were different numbers.