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Comment by Huhty | Hacker News Reader

I get 2-3 calls like these every week. It's getting really bad.

Its doubly frustrating for me because I'm on a kidney transplant list and there is a small change I might get a call out of the blue even thought there is still some wait time. So I end up answering the phone most of the time...

what a nightmare. My very best to you and yours.

Pick up the phone and stay silent until they speak. It should also help reduce incidence of scam calls.

I bought a secondary phone (for the house, kids), and within 10 minutes of activating it ... spam calls.

For more than a year wife had calls from both the IRS and FBI, and some unknown lawsuit threatening to come after her.

We must be really good at hiding because the FBI never found us and just gave up calling!

Until about a month ago, I used to get 2-3 a day on my work phone. I gave up answering, and there's about 200 voicemails in there in a language I don't speak.

I was getting two calls every day from a number without any name. Every single day morning and evening even on weekends.

After months I answered and it was obviously a call center but it was from my bank. I'm in Canada and TD spammed me with phone calls for months every day just to ask if I wanted a travel credit card.

Even supposedly legitimate calls can be annoying and stupid.

3 a day? Last week I got six in the span of 93 MINUTES.

They all matched the area code and prefix of my number but the last four were always different. Block one another calls 12 minutes later.

I’ve had this number for 13 years, have ported it across carriers and it’s long been known by friends and family as the default way to find me. This problem was a mild nuisance years ago. It’s a plague now.

It may be time to finally give it up.

I block just about every number from the area code my phone number is in. I haven’t lived there in that area for a long time and 100% of the calls were spam. One day the spammers will wise up and use the area code where I live rather than where my phone is based but so far Number Shield has worked out great for blocking entire prefixes.

Number Shield looks brilliant! I get a lot of spam calls from my area code and three number prefix. I don’t have any legitimate contacts with a phone number like that, so blocking the whole range looks like a good solution.

However, I don’t expect any urgent calls from anyone outside of my contacts so I was able to fix the problem by enabling iOS’s Silence Unknown Callers feature.

I use Hiya, with "Scam and fraud calls" set to "Block (send to voicemail)" in Call Settings. It's very effective in my experience: it's rare that a scammer makes it through, and I haven't noticed any false positives.

Are they a real person? For me I've only had an automated voice and that will leave voicemail if I don't pickup; 2-3 times per month all during a condensed period.

2-3 A WEEK? Want to trade phone numbers? That sounds like heaven. I get at minimum that per day, sometimes per hour.

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