
Nuisance Calls - reachyou
https://medium.com/@harry.p/nuisance-calls-adf1e5f8937c#
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nkurz
I filled out the survey because I was thinking about the same question today.
I've gotten two nuisance calls today, which is about the norm.
Uncharacteristically, I answered both because I was expecting another call,
and worried that the person might be calling from an unexpected number. One
was an IRS scam, the other was a garbled voice followed by a hangup.

My guess is that most of the calls I get are not "targeted" in any particular
way, but are pure Robocalls, systematically dialing through blocks of valid
numbers. As such, I don't know that trying to maintain greater secrecy about
the phone number is a good strategy. What I think we need is some structure
whereby carriers are incentivized to stop them --- maybe there's a way to hold
them responsible for the illegal ones?

Until then, what I'd like to have (but haven't really found) would be a simple
Android app that sends known spam numbers to a blackhole (like
[http://www.jollyrogertelco.com](http://www.jollyrogertelco.com)), that sends
unknown numbers to a screening system, that sends known numbers to voicemail,
and rings the phone only for calls from a whitelisted subset of known numbers.
Is there one of these out there?

~~~
reachyou
nkurz, thanks a bunch for taking the survey!

The problem of nuisance calls is a real one, indeed. To be honest, I hadn't
realized how many I receive myself until I started taking count of them. And
as you rightly pointed out, we answer them because we think that they might be
important. Subsequently, I've missed some important calls because I thought
that they might be spam (sigh!).

I've some research experience where carriers were involved and realized that
they have a huge sway with the politicos. So practically, I have doubts that
getting them to be held accountable is gonna happen.

The National Do Not Call registry works, but telemarketers and other such
'callers' always find a way around it. One slick feature I found in Android
lately is that it asked (after I received a call from an unknown number) if
the call was a spam. So it kind of blacklists some numbers locally. Regarding
what you seek, doesn't Google Voice kind of does that?

