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.
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.