I genuinely don't understand why this is so hard to tackle.
Phone numbers are a scare resource and the telecommunications networks heavily regulated with numerous central points of control.
This bullshit is scaling because the companies which gate and sell that access have no obligations, legal or otherwise, to deny scammers access to their resources.
I no longer can answer my phone. I get at least 20-40 spam/scam calls per day, and many are legitimate companies calling for loans and refinancing offers, which started after I got a home loan. I cannot seem to stop them from calling, and even though my phone number is listed in National Do Not Call Registry for many years, it hasn't worked at all. The only relief is that on my iPhone, I was able to block all calls not found in my contacts (ie whitelist phone numbers only).
Now, my only worry is that I might get a call from someone who I need to talk to, but is blocked and I won't even know it. For example, what if I get an emergency call from police/fire/hospital and I won't even know it. I also tried using "Screen unknown caller" feature, but then, no one likes them and sometimes they think it is AI bot and they usually just hang up (which is great for spam caller but not for legitimate caller)
My only solution that I could think of is to have a dedicated phone line just for friends/family/work, and a second line for banking/shopping/utilities/everything else.
One of the biggest concerns I have with phone scams is that the people most vulnerable are the elderly, and they don’t have the knowledge on how to block these calls (if a technical solution is the only option).
And further to that, the elderly are also the ones who cannot block unknown numbers, because doctors’ offices seem to have random numbers they call you from (they may have a pool of numbers but it’s not reasonable to add all of them to contacts). Blocking all unknowns would block these important health related calls as well.
Yup. My doc's appointment reminders come from some service in another state. It's a pool of numbers, sometimes they come up as suspected spam. I suspect the dodgy guys deliberately offer very good rates for things like this so people won't block them.
The solution is accessible law, not better anti-fraud tooling. Introduce a spam / fraud button, using it requires your pin and costs $10, but obliges your telecom provider to record the call (preferably including a few minutes before you hit the button), email you a signed recording and if found to be spam deposit $100 onto your account. Your provider may then hand the fee +10% for himself to whatever network the call in question entered his own network from. The last cooperative network in the chain gets stuck with the fee, forcing them to either reclaim the money from the malicious customer, the next network in the chain (in court) or pony up the money themselves.
Result: All routes to non-cooperating networks get dropped within days to weeks and scam-calling stops being a lucrative business basically instantly.
Sounds like a great way to strongly incentivize a new form of fraud--fraud-reporting fraud! Imagine how much fraudsters could gain by reporting thousands or tens of thousands of "fraud" calls that they themselves both originate and report from existing SIM farm infrastructure. Any deployment weakness or hole in blocking malicious traffic in the global telecommunications network all of the sudden becomes akin to a weak smart contract that is ripe for exploitation on the order of millions of dollars of fines until it is patched, all due to this depositing requirement.
You're assuming the telecom operator of the SIM farm doesn't know his customers. That'll change very quickly after the first few have to cover the fines themselves.
After that that scam would result in the scammer paying the (e.g.) $10 upfront, the (up to; e.g.) 10% for every hop between networks and likely and transaction, processing and legal fees for the civil case (if he's not cooperating).
And he'll likely end up with criminal charges on top of that.
Also it's not like the scammer gets sued by some powerless private citizen authorities are likely to ignore. His opponent will be a telecom provider in his own jurisdiction.
I think a much better solution is to get rid of phone numbers (and email addresses), and instead only allow incoming phone calls, texts, email, ect, from people and companies you know.
"Cold calling" can either come from governmental organizations (IE, call from the police), or someone or some organization in your network can grant access to call, text, email, ect on their behalf.
The result is that SPAM has a chain of traceability, so you can then block people and organizations in your network who make unwanted calls.
Furthermore, regulation is needed so that your cable company can't pull dumb nonsense like saying "telemarking is required to use our service": This is where the SPAM button that you propose really comes in handy, because it holds accountable the fools who think that selling their customers' contact information is a good idea.
Commerce should never have been made possible to happen on the internet. The moment it became possible to send and receive money through the internet, the end times began.
Or phones, or telegraph, or mail, or roads, or ...
Commerce and crime go hand-in-hand.
The Greek and Roman gods of travel and communication were also the gods of tricksters (frauds) and thieves. The etymology of "Mercury" may be related to that of "merchant". (Hermes rather less so.)
I got an obviously-AI voice agent spam call yesterday. Had a bit of fun getting it to answer trivia questions (when was the treaty of westphalia ratified? answer in a rhyming couplet) as a precondition to handing over the keys to my bank accounts.
An ask: I'm trying to find out where substantive discussion by carriers AND other parties on mitigating phone spam (voice or text) is occurring. I'd very much appreciate replies here, email (see my profile), or hop on this Fediverse thread: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/116984051310517623>
Broadband Breakfast does seem to be one of those entities. ATIS (<https://atis.org/>) is another, though as a telco alliance I consider it highly suss.
dontscamgrandma.com is probably apropos to share here for the elderly / vulnerable affected by scam proliferation. It's a trainer that roleplays people through getting the confidence to hang up and call their loved ones back.
Full disclosure I'm the founder, and I've got a couple dogs in this fight
Maybe this is a pipe dream, but wouldn't it be better to retire the legacy phone voice and messaging system altogether.
If 99.9% of us have internet phones, why aren't we using PKI, decentralized protocols, crowd sourced reputation to communicate instead of POTS phone numbers, SMS/iChat and relying on the carriers to police spam.
The traditional (POTS-based, circuit-switched, fully-analogue system) has largely been retired. Even where existing POTS twisted-pair service exists, it's generally VOIP until the last few hundred metres, if that.
In much of the US, the push is on to retire the last twisted pair within a very few years, if not months. Utilisation rates are well into the single-digits and falling, which makes continued support quite expensive.
The problem for many holdouts is that alternatives fail to deliver reliability, or the equivalent of a site-centred service (as opposed to personal mobile devices). Residential VOIP is confusing from the subscriber's perspective, and the telcos aren't making choosing options much easier.
SMS itself is highly problematic, as it's grossly insecure, unreliable, and very subject to surveillance and other abuse. Secure chat alternatives tend to be proprietary (e.g., RCS, effectively specific to Apple and Google, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services>), or aren't supported on all devices (Signal would be excellent, but isn't supported on most Feature Phone / Dumbphone OSes, such as KaiOS/AOSP). And Signal too is ultimately a single provider.
It seems to be much worse in the US for now, though why is the subject of a great deal of speculation.
There's not much publicly-available research on the topic. One better source I've found is "Robocalls: A Worldwide or US-only Problem? Analyzing Spam and Fraud in International Phone Calls" (30 Jun 2026)
Even though robocalls are an international problem, our findings indicate that US citizens are substantially more affected than the rest of the world. The median number of phone numbers in our US honeypot was 11 751, compared to 101 913 international phone numbers. Despite an almost tenfold difference in the number of available phone lines, the US honeypot numbers received 8 314 813 calls (95.1%) compared to 432 538 calls (4.9%) received by the international numbers. On average, a single phone number in our US honeypot received 707.5 calls during a nine-month period, about 2.62 calls per day. Non-US numbers received, on average 4.24 calls during the same period, about 0.016 calls per day.
The paper does not break out calls per person by country, though it discusses general patterns.
Hiya has an accessible report which highlights "seven key countries", with calls per month in parenthesis: The US (22), UK (5), Canada (6), Spain (13), France (18), Germany (3), and Brazil (29, highest in the world).
Americas: Brazil (29), Mexico (26), Chile (23), and the US (22) lead.
In Asia: HK (23), Indonesia (16), the Philippines (12), and India (8) lead.
I get messages (and often don't answer my phone; my ringer is off) in which it's obviously this automated thing but they immediately dock it down to "press 1 if..."
'Kay. So you call people and just clearly have a tone the second you hear a voice which could well be someone's answering machine
(Of course most of it would be automated, I guess)
My Google Voice number got 37 calls from the same region in the past 2 days. All day, about every 50 minutes, rotating different 404 based numbers. It happens about twice a year from this area code (404). I know exactly where it is from. I had to park in Atlanta once and it required me to create an account on an app for that parking lot to pay. Of course I used my Google number. That service must have transferred or sold my number. Now my account gets bombed by them on a regular basis.
This is actually an easily solvable problem. In fact, most of the world has already solved it by not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors similar to the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.
The US has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to have no financial are regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.
Rather then actually solve the problem, the US prefers to turn it into a business opportunity with the telcos selling subscriptions to blocking software and an entire ecosystem of moderately effective apps.
This must be why every country is locking down the phone network. KYC or you don't get connected. You get a spam call? Good, caller ID is authenticated so it's easy for the police to find out who called you.
I've been using the Android app SpamBlocker off F-Droid for several years to block unwanted calls and SMS. It blocks entire area codes, individual numbers, names and any pattern using regular expressions. It can silence, pickup and hangup or just send to VM. The developer has a github page and has provided many updates. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/spam.blocker/
27 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 9.3 ms ] threadPhone numbers are a scare resource and the telecommunications networks heavily regulated with numerous central points of control.
This bullshit is scaling because the companies which gate and sell that access have no obligations, legal or otherwise, to deny scammers access to their resources.
Now, my only worry is that I might get a call from someone who I need to talk to, but is blocked and I won't even know it. For example, what if I get an emergency call from police/fire/hospital and I won't even know it. I also tried using "Screen unknown caller" feature, but then, no one likes them and sometimes they think it is AI bot and they usually just hang up (which is great for spam caller but not for legitimate caller)
My only solution that I could think of is to have a dedicated phone line just for friends/family/work, and a second line for banking/shopping/utilities/everything else.
And further to that, the elderly are also the ones who cannot block unknown numbers, because doctors’ offices seem to have random numbers they call you from (they may have a pool of numbers but it’s not reasonable to add all of them to contacts). Blocking all unknowns would block these important health related calls as well.
Result: All routes to non-cooperating networks get dropped within days to weeks and scam-calling stops being a lucrative business basically instantly.
After that that scam would result in the scammer paying the (e.g.) $10 upfront, the (up to; e.g.) 10% for every hop between networks and likely and transaction, processing and legal fees for the civil case (if he's not cooperating).
And he'll likely end up with criminal charges on top of that.
Also it's not like the scammer gets sued by some powerless private citizen authorities are likely to ignore. His opponent will be a telecom provider in his own jurisdiction.
"Cold calling" can either come from governmental organizations (IE, call from the police), or someone or some organization in your network can grant access to call, text, email, ect on their behalf.
The result is that SPAM has a chain of traceability, so you can then block people and organizations in your network who make unwanted calls.
Furthermore, regulation is needed so that your cable company can't pull dumb nonsense like saying "telemarking is required to use our service": This is where the SPAM button that you propose really comes in handy, because it holds accountable the fools who think that selling their customers' contact information is a good idea.
Commerce and crime go hand-in-hand.
The Greek and Roman gods of travel and communication were also the gods of tricksters (frauds) and thieves. The etymology of "Mercury" may be related to that of "merchant". (Hermes rather less so.)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(mythology)>
Broadband Breakfast does seem to be one of those entities. ATIS (<https://atis.org/>) is another, though as a telco alliance I consider it highly suss.
(Submitter.)
Cheap messaging is as annoying now as calling. Ruining the phone experience overall. Soon Apple will have to do something.
Full disclosure I'm the founder, and I've got a couple dogs in this fight
If 99.9% of us have internet phones, why aren't we using PKI, decentralized protocols, crowd sourced reputation to communicate instead of POTS phone numbers, SMS/iChat and relying on the carriers to police spam.
In much of the US, the push is on to retire the last twisted pair within a very few years, if not months. Utilisation rates are well into the single-digits and falling, which makes continued support quite expensive.
The problem for many holdouts is that alternatives fail to deliver reliability, or the equivalent of a site-centred service (as opposed to personal mobile devices). Residential VOIP is confusing from the subscriber's perspective, and the telcos aren't making choosing options much easier.
SMS itself is highly problematic, as it's grossly insecure, unreliable, and very subject to surveillance and other abuse. Secure chat alternatives tend to be proprietary (e.g., RCS, effectively specific to Apple and Google, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services>), or aren't supported on all devices (Signal would be excellent, but isn't supported on most Feature Phone / Dumbphone OSes, such as KaiOS/AOSP). And Signal too is ultimately a single provider.
There's not much publicly-available research on the topic. One better source I've found is "Robocalls: A Worldwide or US-only Problem? Analyzing Spam and Fraud in International Phone Calls" (30 Jun 2026)
<https://arxiv.org/html/2606.31790>
On the magnitude in the US vs. elsewhere:
Even though robocalls are an international problem, our findings indicate that US citizens are substantially more affected than the rest of the world. The median number of phone numbers in our US honeypot was 11 751, compared to 101 913 international phone numbers. Despite an almost tenfold difference in the number of available phone lines, the US honeypot numbers received 8 314 813 calls (95.1%) compared to 432 538 calls (4.9%) received by the international numbers. On average, a single phone number in our US honeypot received 707.5 calls during a nine-month period, about 2.62 calls per day. Non-US numbers received, on average 4.24 calls during the same period, about 0.016 calls per day.
The paper does not break out calls per person by country, though it discusses general patterns.
Hiya has an accessible report which highlights "seven key countries", with calls per month in parenthesis: The US (22), UK (5), Canada (6), Spain (13), France (18), Germany (3), and Brazil (29, highest in the world).
Americas: Brazil (29), Mexico (26), Chile (23), and the US (22) lead.
In Asia: HK (23), Indonesia (16), the Philippines (12), and India (8) lead.
<https://work.hiya.com/hubfs/2025/Global%20Call%20Threat%20Re...>
'Kay. So you call people and just clearly have a tone the second you hear a voice which could well be someone's answering machine
(Of course most of it would be automated, I guess)
Special place in hell for these people
Instant messaging solved all this shit 700 years ago!
Let each number act as an "account" on the phone network/company, just like IM accounts, each with its list of contacts, and blocked numbers.
Shove incoming calls into "Strangers" with low-annoyance notifications (ringtones) by default unless they're from a "verified" company etc.
Oh and yeah as others said, a "Report Abuse" button.
The US has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to have no financial are regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.
Rather then actually solve the problem, the US prefers to turn it into a business opportunity with the telcos selling subscriptions to blocking software and an entire ecosystem of moderately effective apps.