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Comment by mtmail | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to mute those numbers? Set a silent ring tone for any contact in a group maybe? Of course an app for this scenario would be better.

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Cyanogenmod lets you blacklist any number with 2 or 3 button presses from call history. It's actually the main reason I switched to Cyanogen - turns out the previous owner of my new number very abruptly changed numbers because of debt collection calls. Those 5am calls, as well as a multitude of other annoying callers like payday loan companies, made it well worth the switch. Today I'm up to 21 blocked numbers.

You can also whitelist just your contacts list, block area codes with wildcards, or block private numbers.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/07/31/cyanogenmod-10-2-to-...

For stock Android I recall being able to add the numbers to a contact and make them go to voicemail, but that was an annoyingly unusable workaround. There may be better options these days.

Try this if you are on Android - working great for me: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mrnumber.b...

Doesn't work on Android 5 / Lollipop.

Working fine on my Nexus 4 with Lollipop - not had any issues lately, and still blocking calls for me since I've upgraded.

On Android 4.4 (Moto X, fairly stock Android), specific contacts have a setting to avoid ringing the phone. I add spammers to a contact called Asshole with that setting set. Works nicely, and doesn't require installing an application.

iOS give the user the ability to block a phone number, which I usually do when an unknown number calls. Like a commenter above, my process is reject and google, with the last step almost always being to block the number. I don't know how much good that does, though, because it's pretty easy for a company to work with a pool of numbers, so if I block one I can't necessarily block them all.

Android also lets you block numbers.

You can also register them as spam numbers, so any unsolicited SMS messages go into a spam folder. Not sure how much of a problem this is in the US, but here in the UK I almost daily get texts from PPI claim companies, dodgy law firms and the like.

I think spammy text messages have become a significant issue for consumers in the US -- at least on T-Mobile (my carrier). Around the holidays, I was getting half a dozen obviously junk/spammy/malicious text messages with links to .rus. It's died down considerably over the last couple of weeks, but I still receive them every few days. At least in TMO's case, part of the problem was that the messages weren't coming from reportable phone numbers, they were being sent via TMO's antiquated email infrastructure.

>because it's pretty easy for a company to work with a pool of numbers, so if I block one I can't necessarily block them all.

My experience with implementing this is most spammers are pretty dumb or aiming at dumb targets, so a VOIP asterisk rule will get hit hundreds of time over the years by the same company.

There are a few Call Blockers that manage spam out there that do this. How well they do this is up for debate.

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