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Comment by tamalpais | Hacker News Reader

I enabled the Silence Unknown Callers feature [0] in iOS and haven’t answered a spam call since. The downside is that it sends every call from unknown numbers to voicemail, including legitimate ones. It’s a worthwhile trade-off.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207099

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The majority of spam calls come from the same area code as my phone number, but its not the area code that I live in. I'd love this feature to be area code specific - it would give the granularity I need to block spam but allow for unknown numbers from where I now live.

Number Shield on iOS will allow you to block all calls beginning in an area code, but lets through any numbers in your contact list.

I signed up with a SIP provider, Anveo, and set up an incoming call flow that’s very close to what Google Voice does - with one change, that being incoming callers who are unknown must press any key to be connected. Robocallers will never do this, humans will, so I’ve got a 100% reject rate on robots.

No familiarity with SIP.

Can it intercept calls to a cell phone with a carrier issued number?

Sssssorta. The cool thing is you need no familiarity with the SIP protocol.

What you'd do is port your cell number to the provider, get a new cell number, and then set up a call flow that answers the number, eventually forwarding to your real phone after the caller has a chance to record their name and hit a key.

Ah! Good to know. I was curious if I’d have to update all my friends, family, etc with my new number!

I really appreciate the info!

What about returning a call? do you dial your sip number and input the number you want to be connected to?

I think calling folks back from a number different than what they dialed to reach me.. might defeat the purpose. Thanks for sharing your setup.

That is an option - the other thing you can do is get a Softphone app on your phone and log into the service with it. They work with text messages as well.

That is the one downside of this is now having two numbers to deal with. I was getting so many garbage calls though, the trade off has been worth it.

Don't you get spam calls directly to your phone now (this is the problem I have with Google Voice)?

Yes, but once you've got this "call screening" set up on your formerly primary phone number, you can safely set your phone to discard all calls from people not on your contacts list.

This introduces two ways of working with the service - either you set the service to show "your" phone number as the calling party, and then listen to the name when picking up, or you ignore this and use the softphone app for all calls.

I tried it, and within a week I missed an important call. I was waiting by the phone, and it just never arrived. I realized too late that it had been silenced. It's very frustrating that we can't just get something like a spam filter, rather than a blanket "silence everything unknown."

T-Mobile does spam filtering; not sure about other carriers. The default configuration (or at least I think it is, because I don't remember changing it) is to tag the calls by setting the Caller-ID to the name "Scam Likely". You can then configure your phone to respond differently to calls from that ID (e.g. disable ringer). Alternately, if you trust their filtering enough, you can have those calls blocked so they don't ring through to the phone at all. I think it's been working fairly well for me, but I also rarely get legitimate calls from anyone other than a handful of friends/family who are in my contacts list, so I can't be too sure of the false-positive rate.

Info: https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-38784

Unfortunately when I use our conference system’s “call my phone” feature it almost always shows the number as “scam likely”. So I guess the scammers are using the same block of numbers as the conference system.

Is your outbound system spoofing a number so they all appear to be from the same one? If so, that might be why.

iOS also has a call blocking and identification interface apps can hook into. I haven't found a good spam call blocker app though.

Try Nomorobo - took robocalls down by at least 90% for me, and I gladly pay ~$20US / year to not have flow interrupts. Works on iOS, free for VOIP numbers.

Yeah part of the problem is there are tons of legitimate businesses out there that will do important things only over the phone, from obviously an unknown number, where if you miss the call it becomes a big hassle to get back in touch with them. Happens with banks and other financial institutions, doctors offices, deliveries and all kinds of other services.

It would kind of solve the problem if a norm emerged that these types of companies first send a confirmation email with the phone number they'll be calling from so you can add it to your caller id. But it's a lot of extra work for people and I think it's probably asking too much of the average non technical user.

Even better, why couldn't we have something like SSL certificates or DKIM for phone calls? People for the most part understand the lock icon and a verified flag in a user interface. Then a call could be signed to know that it's coming from a particular entity.

It seems like some other countries have solved this problem by moving away from regular sms and phone calls and instead letting a private company own all communication, like WeChat in China. Which obviously is quite problematic in other ways, but honestly at this point that would be an improvement in my opinion, if businesses started only contacting me through Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp so I could see who every message is associated with.

Business opportunity.

I agree there’s a business here, but will walled gardens let the solution work optimally? Apple locks down their phone and messaging apis so that nobody can use them.

Basically: selling the ability for a company to make phone calls from numerous systems all of which appear to originate at a single, designated, known, and generally callee-approved, number.

Needn't be a walled garden.

Though migrations from PSTN to various alternatives is also fairly likely. Much of the present "social media" / apps space is actually probably a jostling for supremacy / positioning in this regard.

I was working on a system like this years ago. I called it choicelist, and submitted a paper to the FTC spam forum.

It was a user configurable white list solution in which an entity can specify all the ways they may contact you (numbers, addresses, and optionally signing or encryption public keys), and you can white list the organization as a whole.

Messages purporting to come from one of these organizations that fails the self specified check can be safely ignored.

At the time, blockchains didn't exist, and the missing piece of the puzzle was a distributed database not controlled by any central organization.

I updated to the beta specifically for this feature. But, like anything else like this, was worried missing important calls. I get a notification immediately about a missed call (which I'll probably soon try and turn off), I'm a lot more aggressive about adding businesses to my address book (someone else said they whitelist phone numbers you've made calls to even if they're not in your address book), and I kind of expect important calls to leave a voicemail.

You don’t have voicemail setup?

Same here, I was so happy when I saw that they added that setting. It doesn't send unknown numbers to voicemail if you've called them in the past. It's a pretty good heuristic. It solved the problem for me. If some doctor's office really needs to reach me and I have never called them first, I guess they can leave a voicemail.

I use this too, and it's worth the trade off for me too.

I just wish that apps or services that might call you (Uber, your cell carrier etc) could/would use the iOS call identification API to allow known calls through.

No one worthwhile even calls me that is not in my contacts. If I have a new friend, I text them, we add as contacts, boom that person will always be a contact. For business related calls, I'm always fine with those going to Voicemail and responding when convenient.

Same. Honestly, I really like this as a permanent solution. I think what we need now is a plug-in that has a strict “safe list” as opposed to the way it was being treated before with block lists.

The only calls I worry about not getting are legitimate callers from callers who aren’t allowed to leave VMs.

Same here, and I believe the next natural step is for companies to switch to calling on Whatsapp etc.

I'm excited to see improvements and results to the Google Assistant's on-device call screening. It's a step up from voicemail but I'm not sure how willing people will be to participate. For example, someone calling from a doctor's office might only be able to speak to a specific person. For privacy reasons, they call from blocked number and won't specify who they are until they've at least asked that they're speaking with the right person.

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