The FTC - yet another federal alphabet agency and parent of the Do Not Call registry - is equally worthless.
Robodialers and spoofed caller IDs make it a two-front war. In addition, the robocallers are often using your local area code to convince you that maybe, just maybe, it’s a legitimate call. But it’s not.
For iPhone (and landlines) the Nomorobo app and service is well worth the $2 per month. It compiles and updates a list of junk callers and/or spoofed numbers and identifies same when the call rings. It’s a bit of a pain to regularly open the app to allow it to update.
Robodialers’ volume of calls becomes a Chinese finger trap for them - since they make so many calls in such a short space of time they can’t avoid identifying themselves as spammers. Some people demand perfection from Nomorobo but an 80-90% reduction is certainly acceptable.
Philosophical types always tell us that if robocalls didn’t make money they would stop tomorrow but have any of us ever met someone who agreed to pay money to a total stranger with an accent who randomly called?
My mother in law.
I’ve been disappointed that NoMoRobo doesn’t put numbers I’ve reported into their system (on our old landline, not mobile). There are several numbers I’ve added to NMR multiple times, but the calls keep coming from those numbers. Nuisance calls to my mobile aren’t too bad, maybe one or two a week. The old landline gets ten a day. I got it under control with a multi prong defense - NMR + call block on Comcast + call block on our Panasonic cordless phone. The Panasonic makes it easy to block entire area codes or area codes plus entire prefixes which I no where do more frequently. The big problem with the Panasonic system is that you cannot connect it to your computer for easy management and backup — it’s all on the cordless base station and handsets. I don’t think I can transfer all the blocks I’ve set up to a new, replacement phone when this one gets old or breaks.