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Comment by skh | Hacker News Reader

I suggest downloading a silent ring tone. I got one for a dollar. The silent ringtone is my default ringtone. I went into my contacts and changed the ringtone associated with them to be one that makes noise. I no longer am bothered by scam calls as a result.

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> I went into my contacts and changed the ringtone associated with them to be one that makes noise.

That gets the job done, but rather than modify each of your existing contacts (and each new one), consider just turning on Do No Disturb and setting your Do Not Disturb level to "Allow Calls From All Contacts" (or a particular Group or Favorites). These are iOS options but I assume there's an equivalent in Android.

That is probably a better solution. I have do not disturb for 10 pm to 8 am and have it set to not allow anyone to disturb me. But thinking about it now maybe I should allow calls from contacts during those times.

On my particular Android phone (Pixel) this is not a great solution because setting Do Not Disturb alters the behavior of other things like Calendar reminders or email alerts. You could make DND not do that, but sometimes I do want to mute other things. If you're using DND all the time, you essentially lose that feature on your phone.

The best solution I've found is to just go into the Google Dialer app and set the option to not ring on any call suspected to be spam. I still do get spam calls that haven't yet been reported, but it's down to only about 3-4 a month.

Not sure if Samsung phones / other android flavors have a similar feature or not.

Just wait. You will get scammers that can pass the "scam likely" threshold, and then your scam call volume will go up.

Just checked on my Samsung phone and there is a setting 'Caller ID and spam protection' apparently backed by Hiya.

A great improvement to that would be an option to silently reject all suspected spam calls and send them to the voicemail. This has been suggested many times on Google's product feedback and suggestion boards but for some reason they have not gotten around to doing it. The hard part of detecting spam calls is already there; all it should take is adding a couple of new check boxes.

There are apps like youmail and nomorerobo. I use youmail and it has the option to give a disconnected message when a scammer calls.

You can also (in Android, at any rate) set it to allow your favourites to by-pass it.

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