Ask HN: Is it just me, or are fake callers getting out of control?

Yes overall I think numbers are up. What I find confusing is that people are allowed to phreak clid. I understand why hiding clid might be needed but randomly lying about it? What trip were the telcos on, allowing that?

I agree. It’s out of control. There is not much you can do that is effective. Some people have had success with various black list apps for mobile phones.

My favorite consequence of these phone calls is the rise of the “its Lenny” bot (more than once discussed on HN) https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/about

I no longer pick up the phone unless the caller is in my address book. But the ringing is still distracting.

iOS lets you suppress calls from all but contacts, but to do that you have to put your phone in “do not disturb” mode, which also suppresses all other notifications. So that’s a non-starter.

Any other ways to shut them up?

I'm getting a lot of robo calls with a foreign language speaker. Not sure what it is exactly, but it happens every day now.

Ideally there would be a way to setup a filter and whitelist. Some prompt and captcha for first time callers.

Just to give you all an additional data point, I am based in Europe. I do have business contacts and give out my number freely (on resumes, etc.) I think I've gotten 1 robot call in the past 5 years (my thought was - I knew this would happen sooner or later! I know it's a huge problem! But it didn't happen again.)

I use this phone every day and it's always on. So: if you don't want robot calls, get an international number in Europe.

People who need to contact you can pay the international surcharge.

I’m not sure this is new. Additionally, I get a spammy text message every day or at least every other and have been for the past few years. Even if the recorded message (either phone or SMS) is the same, they always use different numbers so number blocking doesn’t work.

Yeah, I had the same question lately, since I think about a month ago, there are a lot, 5 a day seems like it.

It's very annoying and distracting. Proper solution I think would be appreciated.

For the last 7 years I have had a callcentric account. I added telemarketer block to my calls, then callers have to press a number to get through to you which eliminates robocalls. You can assign friends into buckets which get different treatment such as dialing your cell number.

It’s worse if you’re older. My parents get 30-40 calls a day.

Namecheap offers free whois guard. So use that.

Or burner phone and po box address for the whois.

At the beginning of this year, I had a lot of fake calls. What helped was blocking the numbers when I discovered it was a fake. They tried several days while they were blocked and it stopped. Then they tried a new number and I blocked them again. After a few weeks, they stopped calling and they haven't done it since then. If you don't want to answer the calls where you don't know the number, just reject the call, google the number and have a look at the owner or if someone says it's a fake. If it's a real person you can call back.

Concur. >50% of incoming calls to my mobile phone are robocalls. Many of are sourced from numbers in the same exchange, aka (nnn) XXX-nnnn. After the first few months I started ignoring any number I didn't recognize.

Thankfully my carrier flags many calls with "Probable Spam" or similar messages.

Take a look at my project that I wrote exactly for this: https://phone.qnzl.co

The idea is to stop using your real number for things and use a number that gives control of who can ring the number (among a few other features)

Looking for feedback as well. :)

(And yes, I concur. Robo-calls are terrible and I hate them)

90% of my calls are spam. 10% are my mom. I use privacy protection (Contact Privacy Inc.) when registering domains but still get robocalls from numbers that are spoofed to look like mine (same area code and first three digits). One thing that seems to have helped reduce the incoming robocall volume is that I turned on Google Voice's call screening, which I think requires the caller to record their name before putting the call through.

Definitely a growing problem > https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-18/florida-m...

My boss started having his number get used as a spoofed number, so he was getting calls, voicemail and texts from other people asking why he was calling them. He was getting hundreds of calls a day when it started. His voicemail box was full. The carrier said wait it out or change your number. After about a week it has died down.

I qualify these calls as an attack. The economic toll of decreased phone system reliability cannot be allowed to continue.

The parties responsible must be destroyed... economically if possible, physically if necessary.

I started leaving my phone in airplane mode when not expecting a call, and that drastically reduced them. My friends all use Signal (which can use wifi) so I can go a week or more without turning on my cell. These bots mark people who don't pick up as bad prospects, so doing this will usually get you a couple months of peace.

I think it's best to just ignore them. Sometimes I also look up the numbers on Google or some sites like http://whycall.me and block their numbers. It would save a lot of our time rather than talking to them.

yes, 3-5 per day I get but less because I add each number via carrier blocklist. don't ever trust an app to do this, most of them sell your data anyway.

It's a quite common situation. I got a few calls from unknown number last week. I checked its phone code here https://areaphonecodes.com/india/ , it was someone from India. I never answer calls from unknown or private numbers, there are so many scam phone calls today.