Rebelling against the robocallers

Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe reports:

I began by listing my number with the Federal Trade Commission’s National Do-Not-Call Registry. The crooks pay no attention to this list, of course. But at least legitimate telemarketing firms now know to leave me alone.

Next, I began adding the robocallers’ numbers to my phone’s blocked contacts list, a relatively easy task with Android and Apple iOS phones. Now all future calls from these specific numbers would be instantly dismissed. But the bad guys use Caller ID spoofing software to vary the incoming number seen by your phone, and they’ve got thousands of numbers to play with. Blocking just one or two didn’t provide much relief.

Things finally got better when I installed Mr. Number, a free app from the phone directory service Whitepages.com, on my Android phone. Mr. Number lets users report incoming robocalls, and the numbers are added to a blacklist. Calls from blacklisted numbers go straight to voicemail, or you can drop the calls altogether.

I’ve gotten at least five robocalls since I installed Mr. Number a couple of weeks ago. I only know because I checked the app’s log of incoming calls. The unwelcome ones were marked as “suspected spam.” Mr. Number had sent each of these calls to a silent grave; the phone didn’t even ring. The app doesn’t claim to be perfect; eventually I’ll get a robocall from a number that’s not already blacklisted. And it might someday blacklist a legitimate number. But so far, so good.

Good thing I’ve gotten no robocalls on my iPhone, because Apple’s software won’t work with call-blocking apps like Mr. Number. You must settle for products like Truecaller, which warns you that an incoming call is possibly spammy so you can manually hang up.

The miracle of technology.