You’re not the only one who jumps out of their skin when their phone rings (isn’t that what texting is for?). To be fair, one of the reasons you may seriously dislike getting a random phone call in the middle of the day is because spam callers have pretty much ruined phone calls forever. Few things will make you feel more foolish than falling for that trick where the smartest of spammers make an incoming number look exactly like it could be coming from your BFF — same area code and all — and you pick it up to hear that all-too-familiar silence followed by a robotic voice letting you know you’ve just won a cruise to Florida.
For the sake of phone callers who mean well and really want you to answer your phone (like your parents), it’s time to get spam calls under control once and for all. Tech Expert Darius Belejevas, head of Incogni.com, explains how to block the worst of the worst numbers: the ones you get that have no call ID.
Set Yourself Up For No-Spam Success
The first thing you need to do is make sure some spammers can’t find you.
“To stop spam calls getting through to your house (landline), you can register your number with the FTC’s National Do Not Call Registry,” Belejevas says. “This will stop law-abiding companies from calling you, but the most irritating spam calls often come from individuals and companies that ignore this registry.”
You could purchase a call-blocking device, Belejevas says, but these can be expensive and are only as good as the blacklists on which they depend to filter calls.
“Instead, there are settings you can use to block individual numbers from calling you on your iPhone as well as a setting that allows you to send all calls from unknown numbers straight to voicemail,” Belejevas reveals. “Both of these approaches can be useful, but both have serious drawbacks.”
Blocking Numbers
Blocking individual numbers sounds like a great idea, but it only makes sense if you’re getting spam calls from the same numbers time and again, according to Belejevas. “Silencing all unknown callers will affect legitimate calls as much as it does spam calls, leaving you to frequently check and listen to your voicemails to make sure you don’t miss anything important, he adds.
The better approach, even though it doesn’t lead to instant effects like those above, is to keep your personal information (name, number, and other details) out of spammers’ hands in the first place, Belejevas says. “You can do this by targeting the companies that supply your personal information to the spammers. These companies, called data brokers, are obliged by various state laws to remove your personal information when asked. They don’t make submitting these removal requests easy, though — each has their own opt-out procedure and there’s no shortage of hoops to jump through.”
An automated personal information removal service like Incogni will track down the data brokers that have your personal data, send them opt-out requests on your behalf, and even deal with data-broker interactions like rejection appeals, Belejevas says, and it could be an option if you don’t want to do all of this leg work yourself. “Once your personal information is no longer being offered up for sale or trade by data brokers, it’s just a matter of time until spam callers update their databases,” he says. “When they do, your data won’t be there, and you’ll find the number of spam calls you get plummeting.”
How To Block Individual Numbers On Your Phone
If you opt to block individual numbers on your iPhone, here are the steps Belejevas says to take:
- Open the Phone app and tap “recents.”
- Find the number from which you received a robocall.
- Tap on the blue information icon to the right of the number.
- Scroll down and tap on “block this caller.”
- Tap on “block contact” in the pop-up message that appears.
How to redirect calls from all unknown numbers straight to voicemail:
- Open the Settings app and tap on “phone.”
- Scroll down and toggle “silence unknown callers.”
