After repeated data breaches that no company really seems to give a s— about my phone is blowing up with literally hundreds of spam calls and texts month. I get and make MAAAAYBE 2 or 3 important calls per month, 180-200 of the rest are literally all spam. Anyone have any suggestions, apps ect that they have found refuge with? I really don’t use SMS that much either, mostly it’s via signal, discord whats app, ect…
Just to put it out there I run CalyxOS on a Pixel 5a.
On my cell phone, I used to receive 3 to 5 calls a day. I started answering them on mute about two years ago. I’m down to fewer than one a month. Your claim that this practice will only increase calls is not supported by my observations.
Their “business model” expects people to not answer. They don’t get charged for a call until someone or something answers, and they hang up before your voicemail picks up. There is no incentive for them to purge your number from their lists.
Answering, and remaining silent starts costing them money, without any indication or expectation that they will speak to a human.
I installed a PBX with an automated attendant on my family’s business line, which immediately answers on the first ring. The incoming call logs initially showed the system was intercepting 2-4 scam calls per hour, with none of them getting through to a person. Within a couple months, I was logging only a handful a day.
They don’t care about numbers that don’t answer; those numbers don’t cost them anything. They might not have been answered today, but a human might answer one tomorrow.
What they don’t want are numbers that are known to be answered by non-humans. They don’t want to pay for their autodialer to talk to fax machines, IVRs, or other machines they can’t scam.
When you answer on mute, they can’t determine that you are human. To them, you are a machine, and they have the tiniest incentive (a fraction of a cent per minute, multiplied by the total number of every machine they reach) to purge your number.
You’re mentioning facts not in evidence. Most people answer the phone and say hello. I’ve heard this silent advice before but was not in the mood to add another paragraph and start splitting those hairs.
Most people do not answer the phone and stay silent, that’s why I said what I said the way I said it. I presumed that OP and others here were answering the phone as most people do. So yes, my advice is accurate. And yes you added to the discussion. Maybe you should have put this top level so maybe OP and others see it.
Then you were completely off topic from your first comment, because that was the explicitly stated condition specified in the top level comment: “Pick up the phone, say nothing, and mute it.”
The person who needed to see it was you.
Who needed to see what? Advice telling people that are getting a ton of spam calls to waste time answering and trying to be crypt silent instead of just not answering?
I think it’s you who needed to see your own advice for the nonsense it is. If you think that the systems in place these days can’t tell when a phone is answered even if you stay silent, which isn’t always possible because mics these days can pick up noise from across the room, I’ve got no more words which honestly is a feat worth celebrating, good job.
Where did I suggest they could? Of course they know the call was answered. But they don’t know whether the answer is a “who” or a “what”. They don’t want to be dialing “whats”, they only want to be calling a “who”.
When you dial a number, you could be connected to a person, an interactive voice response attendant (“Press one for English”), a fax machine, voicemail, and old answering machine, a modem, or many other kinds of machines configured to answer that call.
The trick isn’t to “not answer” (especially since your voicemail is going to answer for you if you don’t, and immediately tell them that you’re a human and capable of receiving calls.)
The trick is to convince their autodialer that you’re an unknown machine, not a human. To do that, you don’t have to be silent as the crypt. You just can’t make any human-sounding noises: don’t say “hello”.
Pick up the phone, press the “answer” button, press “mute”, and put the phone down. Let their machine listen to dead air for awhile, before deciding to hang up.
So that enough times, and they will start purging your number from their lists, along with every other non-responsive machine number that costs them money to dial.