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Comment by unlinked_dll | Hacker News Reader

the block button doesn’t do anything since most of the phone numbers are spoofed (someone pretending to be someone else).

Filtering out any number that shares my area code and first three digits and not in my phone book would go a long way to getting rid of spam.

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I agree, this only blocks legit numbers since they're spoofed anyway and next spam call will be an auto-generated number anyway (form a similar area code). My solution is to simply not pick up calls that are not in my phone's address book. I still get a lot of annoying calls, from a few a day to dozens. It's frustrating but I refuse to get annoyed, to keep my sanity. Most of the calls that I get are making an announcement in Chinese. I am not Asian and I do not understand Chinese. I've read somewhere that it's scam meant to swindle Chinese citizens in the US for money.

My wife received a call from a person who was angry at some phone scammer and started cursing her and telling her not to call anymore. My wife tried to explain that she did not make the call, that the number was spoofed, but to no avail, the curses continued until they hung up. I find this kind of breach quite problematic and don't really understand how it can proliferate to this extent.

I get more calls these days that are callbacks because the spammers have spoofed my number than I get actual incoming robocalls these days.

I used a bulk number blocking app to do exactly that, and the amount of spam calls I receive has dropped dramatically. You can also have it make exceptions for numbers in your contacts list. The one I used on IOS is called Wideprotect, but I'm sure there are ways to do it on Android as well.

> Filtering out any number that shares my area code and first three digits and not in my phone book would go a long way to getting rid of spam.

Filtering by number is a lot easier when you have a number with a small state's area code when you have not lived there for some time. All unknown callers from that state are then easily identified as spam with 99% probability.

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