This showed up on our caller ID when the phone rang last night. (Land line - AT&T U-verse) I noticed a month or two ago that some calls started showing up on our Verizon Wireless mobile phones as “Potential Spam”. So it looks like the phone companies are actually starting to do something to actively combat phone spam, or at least warn users that something about the call looks fishy.
(As a general rule, I don’t answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize anyway, but every little bit helps!)
As a general rule, I do answer those…& immediately hang up. Ooops, my bad. :rolleyes:
I find that if you ignore them, a significant portion leave a VM, frequently starting before the beep, which I then need to go & listen to & delete. It’s less effort to answer & hang-up & if it really is a legitimate call they’ll call right back, in which case I will answer it; although that happens < 1% of the time.
For that specific reason I have a contact in my phone called ‘pick up/hang up’. Like most others, I don’t answer my phone if I don’t know who it is, but if they leave a (junk) message, I add them to that contact to make sure they can’t do it again.
I worry that just automatically doing that for every call will increase the amount of calls I get because some computer somewhere will register that I answered.
OTOH, it’s not like it can really get any worse.
Some do perhaps. Regular AT&T for landlines does not support NoMoRobo and I haven’t seen any of these more direct caller identifications. Mostly we get “out of area” but with a local area code, so we have a pretty good idea the number is spoofed and therefore not legitimate.
I’m on T-Mobile and these show up as “Scam Likely”. Ah, my old friend Scam Likely.
I’m curious how they do this. Is it just a blacklist of known scam numbers? Or is there something more sophisticated going on? I remember a lot of scam calls from numbers that were extremely close to mine, presumably spoofed to look more “legit”. That would suggest a blacklist isn’t enough.
Having an Atlanta area code still after having moved to Seattle is actually quite convenient. There is a 95% chance that an Atlanta number calling me is a scam. Conversely, an actual Seattle number calling me is almost always something I want to take.
I, too, get T-Mobile’s “Scam Likely”. Sometimes I answer the phone with “Is this Scam Likely calling? What are you trying to sell me today.” That usually rates a disconnect on their end and no more calls from that number. Instead they call from another number…
My iPhone is set to send any calls not from a contact straight to voicemail. Whenever I’m bored I’ll look through my voicemails (voice to text works great) and delete them all. This, combined with the fact that my contacts all know I do not answer my phone, preferring text communication, makes things work great.
With US Cellular as my mobile provider, I haven’t yet seen any change in CID practices. However, for some unknown reason, my phone doesn’t show ANY CID info unless the number is already in my database. This makes it easy to distinguish.
I think that is a myth. It’s all about volume and I don’t believe spam/scam boiler rooms give a shit about how often you might be bothered, and they don’t keep track of good/bad prospects or even activated/deactivated phone numbers. They just call every possible digit combination as frequently as possible, hoping for that one-in-a-million sucker. And there must be a lot of those out there, or the calls wouldn’t keep coming. This is not narrow-targeting, but broad-targeting.
One reason I think this – the experience, over the past oh-five years, when I have received about 5000 junk calls. If I were designing a calling system to maximize return, I would keep track of the successful responses; i.e., recipients who bought something or fell for the scam. I would minimize repeat calls to ones that never fell for it – those would cost me money, and be a bad risk.
If that were the way the system worked, my phone numbers would be on the worst possible return list. I have never transferred any money to them and I have wasted their time on occasion, so my numbers would be the first to delete from their database. But the calls keep coming, so I doubt that such info is of interest to scammers. Just fling the shit onto the wall and hope some of it sticks.
I find ** Spiderman** and Joey P’s responses interesting, because if we don’t answer, we rarely get a voicemail message. Most times we just get the disconnected line tone, or they hang up before our outgoing message completes. So for us it’s better to not answer, although that just means they’ll be calling back the next day, or later the same day.