By India McCarty
Sick and tired of your phone buzzing with endless spam calls? Here’s a quick fix that will put an end to all of that.
“Unwanted calls — including illegal and spoofed robocalls — are the FCC’s top consumer complaint and our top consumer protection priority,” the Federal Communications Commission stated on its website.
These complaint calls range from receiving endless calls from bots to people whose own numbers are “spoofed” for spam.
It might seem like there’s no escape, but there are a few ways to cut these annoying calls out of your life.
Apple’s “Silence Unknown Callers” is the simplest way to block spam calls. It’s available on phones with iOS 13 or newer.
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“Utilizing the ‘Silence Unknown Callers’ function simply blocks phone numbers that you’ve never communicated with before, it also blocks numbers that aren’t included in your contacts,” the Daily Express reported.
Calls from unknown numbers will be automatically sent to voicemail, so it’s important that, if you put this feature in place, you have all important phone numbers saved in your contacts.
Another way to get rid of spam callers is to simply block the numbers that you are receiving calls from. You can do this directly through your phone, or you can see if your service carrier provides blocking software.
AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile all provide customers with blocking tools, from AT&T’s free app that “filters out potential fraud and spam calls, labels telemarketers as ‘nuisance calls,’ and sends unknown callers to voicemail,” per PC Mag, to T-Mobile’s Scam Shield, which “features enhanced Caller ID; legitimate calls get a Number Verified tag, and spam shows a warning.”
Want to make things more official? The Federal Trade Commission allows people to sign up for the National Do Not Call Registry for free. This registry is more for traditional telemarketer calls, but it still keeps you from receiving unwanted cold calls from salespeople.
If you’re still getting spam calls, the FTC recommends keeping these three rules in mind — “don’t trust your caller ID, hang up on robocalls [and] use call blocking.”
It might seem silly to go to these lengths to avoid spam calls, but scammers are getting better and better. There’s a risk, particularly to older people, that they will be tricked into thinking they are talking to the Social Security Administration, Medicare, the IRS, Apple or credit card companies.
Spam calls are a nuisance to everyone, but with a little bit of work, you can start cutting them out — and stop cringing whenever you hear the phone ring.
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