That option worked great for me, a few years ago. Now I’m job hunting and have achild in school which means not answering is not a good choice.The phone network should be a useful system.
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I’ll believe it when I stop getting 5-10 a day. Almost all of them with the same local exchange code as I have. There is no legitimate reason to spoof phone numbers. I don’t care if it makes it harder for bill collectors to contact deadbeats or political pollsters to collect data. The phone companies can’t have their cake and eat it too.
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Me too. It worked twice in the last hour, in fact.
As for this… great. I hope it works. I expect it won’t. I’m a pessimist.
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It’s not that it’s easy to spoof. It’s that your phone number is self-reported. There’s literally no technological way the phone system is built to verify a caller actually has the number they say they have.
We really ought to just drop legacy support and go with a verified subscriber system where your phone company transmits callerID based on your subscriber identity.
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Naturally politicians always craft a loophole for themselves, polling companies, oh, and charities.
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i put my phone in airplane mode
That’s letting the scammers win
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Can’t hear you over the sound of my Netflix as I avoid my boss, family and friends. You telling me I’m not a winner?!~
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I think one legit reason is (for example) someone calling from a business, or call center etc., and the recipient’s caller ID shows the main number instead of the caller’s direct number. This isn’t “spoofing” in the sense of hiding the caller’s identity but I imagine that technically, it might work the same way. If so, that’s a pretty big loophole for robocallers to exploit.
Perhaps that’s the way to close the loophole… the caller ID doesn’t have to be the actual, originating number, but it does have to belong to the caller. Sort of like a multidomain SSL. (I think.)
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As far as I am personally concerned, there’s no legit reason for phone banking outgoing calls. Every instance I know of always is an inconvenience for regular subscribers. Nobody is happy they were called by a phonebank even if it’s legit.
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I made sure that groups in my contact list get their own custom ringtones. If I hear the default ringtone, it’s unlikely to be someone I’m interested in talking to.
Hmm, maybe I should make the default ringtone a .WAV of silence. As long as I don’t get sued by John Cage. 
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I really hope that this will really bring robocall to an end. They have been around for years, and they are super annoying! I even read about someone who sued Time Warner Cable because of so many robocalls that she gets at https://www.whycall.me/news/consumer-wins-massive-229500-robocall-lawsuit-against-time-warner-cable/. We really need government’s help in this fight.
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Plus they’re starting to lose a significant number of landline subscriptions because of these bottom-feeders. I know fewer and fewer people my age who still have a landline, and I’m trying to get my mother to cancel hers because of all the robocalls and scammers calling day in and day out.
The robocalls will move on to mobiles, of course, but it’s easier to screen those by refusing calls from numbers not in my contacts.
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I’ve considered killing my landline, but it’s nice to have as a backup in case my cell phone breaks down or runs out of minutes (overcharges are a pain.) I’d say the majority of calls I get on the landline are robocalls or spammers, despite the number being registered on the Do Not Call list for years.
My cell phone gets a few robocalls, but I block those numbers. I’ve reported several scammers to the Federal Trade Commission, but I’m not sure how much it accomplishes.
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Same, but I’ve longed for the ability to have it buzz silently unless it’s someone in my contacts. This would be a ridiculously easy feature to implement, but AFAIK no one has.
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(raises hand)
I wound up porting out my landline to a cheap VoIP service. Why pay $45/month for AT&T when they first wouldn’t even try to deal with spoofed Caller ID, and now want charge extra to block spoofed calls? Fuck them.
After trying it out for myself, I also got my parents to switch (they use an ATA hooked up to the house phones, and take it with them when they head southwest for the winter).
The VoIP service costs less per month than what AT&T was charging for Caller ID alone, and a quick-and-dirty CAPTCHA in Asterisk (“Press $DIGIT to ring my phone”) keeps my phone quiet, in spite of getting 8-10 robocalls a day. Numbers that I whitelist will ring through without the CAPTCHA.
Today’s AT&T: Everything that was bad about the Bell System made much worse, and none of what was good about it whatsoever.
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