We have voIP phone/internet. All friends and family know to call us on our mobiles and not the house phone. All house phone calls go to voicemail and in the past 4 years there have not been more than a couple of dozen legitimate calls even though the phone rings several times a day.
I used to have fun with the Indian Microsoft scammers and learned some Hindu insults but after a while that boring .
I just ran a little test. I Googled ‘please text me. Scam?’ . Not one listing from Free Republic , even after digging thru a few pages of results. I went to ‘ GoDuckGo.com and this thread was the top result.
Even though land lines have been practically taxed to death I've been thinking of getting a landline. This is because there is device you can buy which requires a caller to enter a code to get the phone to ring. The rest go straight to voicemail.
I turned the ringer on my landline off ages ago because I usually only get robo calls on it. Spectrum blocks some of them, but not all. I have Verizon Wireless, and downloaded their Call Filter, and set it to only allow the calls of people who are in my contacts. If they consider a call to be spam, they automatically block it, but show the number that was blocked. I do get other unknown calls, but the filter silences them, and lists them in my recently received, and then I block them from there.