Receiving a spam call puts you in a bit of a dilemma, or at least it does for me: How do I deal with this call that doesn’t alert the spammers that this is an active number that they can call again? Answering the call is obviously the wrong choice, but I always assume that rejecting the call outright will also be detected as a deliberate action and therefore a person is on the other side. Some people have suggested answering the phone but not talking, so they think it’s a dead number, but I want something more definitive.
My idea is to have a “spam” button on the incoming call screen, that answers the call but doesn’t connect the microphone. Instead it plays either the standard “the number you’re dialing is not assigned, please check your number and try your call again” recording, or a fax/modem sound to make them think the phone number belongs to a machine and not a human.
Would this work? Or would they still be able to determine that the recording is spoofed by the phone itself? Does anything like this already exist?
A coworker of mine changed his voicemail message to start with the tri-tone that plays for a disconnected number (bah dah deet) followed by a normal voicemail greeting. The auto dialers delete the number from their list when they hear the tri-tone. It did confuse legitimate callers that were trying to reach him though.
Oh, I like that! I just use the dial tone so they think they disconnected, but they end up calling back a few times before they stop.
the voicemail app YouMail has that as an option
I used to answer unknown numbers, back in the age of human callers, “Michael Dorn, FCC” which usually ended the call tho one guy did reply “Mannnn you ain’t Worf!” Before hanging up.
I don’t think any of that matters in the age of robo dialing and computer calling. For example, I answer my work calls with my name and company. The robo calls don’t even recognize that as a response and say silent until I say “hello?” Which triggers the next part of the program’s responses.
What I want is a way to answer the phone like a fax machine. Just press a button and the call gets answered and immediately starts playing that fax machine sound.
I’ll bet that would stop calls. Surely they have something that can tell if they’re calling a fax machine over and over.
It’s kind of weird we don’t have the option to create multiple voicemail boxes. How hard would that be?
Google bought up GrandCentral years ago and turned it into Google Voice, where they could freeze the feature set and ignore the product and any possible innovation. Multiline autoringing and speech-to-text on voicemail was it, forever. If innovation had stayed on the table, we could have had rule-based personal phone trees, maybe with different greetings and options based on known/unknown/masked caller ID.
25 years ago, I pressed 7 and got to hear the duck quack. We didn’t know at the time that it was a golden age.
I think I still have my google voice number.
I use mine as my main number, though I ported away from GV (Project Fi, using GV as the backend) years ago
If i dont know the number i dont answer, if they ring again and its spam i block the number. I also only answer if its from my country.
It’s not what you’re looking for, but might be useful: https://github.com/aj3423/SpamBlocker
