I use Verizon's phone filter, and have it set for my phone to ring only for people in my Contacts. All other calls are either automatically blocked as spam, or silenced. The silenced calls I can then go in and check, and manually block myself. I get calls from all over the country each day, from numbers I don't know, and I've gotten voice mails for BS stuff. I block them all. Lately, I've been getting text messages from PayPal and other financial institutions telling me that access to my account has been blocked for possible fraud. I don't have a PayPal account, or any accounts at the banks the texts claim they are from. I block those as well. The problem is that these places will simply use a new number, and try again.
Our government has more important things to do than protecting Americans citizens from fraudsters...like making sure that Donald Trump can't ever run for office again.
/S
I started getting text messages on my ATT phone from email addresses that couldn’t be blocked.
I switched to straight talk.
This isn’t a texting plan.
I use an app on my Android cell phone called “should I answer”. It is free and funded only by user donations, has no ads. It is pretty impressive. It blocks 95% of all junk calls except the ones that spoof my local area code.
It works in multiple ways but the most interesting way and probably the most effective, is that they want you to answer junk calls to verify that they are indeed junk calls and then you punch in that it is a junk call and it goes into a National Database that they maintain and it blocks it from everybody who uses that app. So every time someone else gets a junk call the number that called them gets blocked for you also. It makes a huge difference in the number that can get through. It’s also got some other features of course