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Comment by kodis | Hacker News Reader

It seems as though at least for smart phones this could be easily solved through technological means similar to those used for screening email, something along the lines of a spam classification system.

I envision my phone having a white list of known good numbers, which would be allowed to cause my phone to ring like it does now; a black list of known bad numbers, which would be immediately dropped; and a catch-all handler for all other numbers, which would send the call to voice mail for easy manual classification into either of the other categories.

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Why go for the technical option is the legal one is far more effective?

In my country hospitals (and so on call) from an "unknown" number. So blocking that is a bit dangerous. There's a general "do not cold call" list and if you get a cold call while being on that the company behind it can get a hefty fine per call that they make.

There's an government organization which checks if companies abide to this (and a few other things). They seem to enjoy going after companies and fining them. Which is probably why I don't get any cold calls.

Note: Obviously there are all kinds of rules, etc. E.g. once you add yourself to the cold call list, there's 6 week grace period (as companies are allowed to only update their do-not-call list every so often). Though at the same time, even if you're not on the country's do not call list you can still ask to be put on the list for the company calling you. It is mandatory for a company to do that. Else the company will get a fine. There's different rules for companies which have or had a business relationship with you.

While this will vary from country to country, at least here in the US there are several situations where the legal means are not more effective. The main one is scammers who just don't care, either because they're running a "hit and run" type of operation or because they're operating from overseas. Then there are classes of phone calls which are (again, at least in the US) exempt from the legal "do not call" rules: politicians making campaign calls, and survey firms, which the politicians use to determine who to bother calling. It's a nice loophole that they've constructed for themselves. Luckily it's only a problem for a few month every other year.

The US regulators are working hard at it, but it's a challenging problem. The robocalls I all get now are very good at masking where they are from; the humans you talk to know not to give away the name or location of the company.

For those interested in learning more, the FTC had a robocall summit a few years back and they recorded the webcast: http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events-calendar/2012/10/roboc...

There was a lot of good technical detail on why it's now hard to track these people down.

I use Mr Number Blocker for this on android. You can whitelist / blacklist specific numbers, and set it to hang up or go to voicemail. There's also a crowdsourcing aspect, where after a certain number of people flag a number as spam, it shows up as "likely spam" when the phone rings. I believe you can have those go straight to voicemail as well.

You don't need an app. Just add a contact called "SPAM", and set it to go straight to voicemail. Then any spam numbers who call you, just add their number to your SPAM contact.

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