Ask HN: I'm Being Spammed by Sequential Phone Numbers. What Can I Do About It?

  • On iPhone, enable “Silence unknown callers” and add the callers you care about to your contacts. The calls will go straight to voicemail.

    If you’re expecting a call from some random person, just disable it temporarily.

  • Depends what telephone you use, maybe. Can you block an entire range of numbers?

    For a land line, maybe something in between to intercept and block the calls, try to make up such thing; for a cell phone, to try to modify the software to add such a capability.

  • Turning on Google phone screen (if you're on Android) has been helpful for me. It doesn't block everything, but a decent number of spam calls get picked up by the Google bot and then hang up.

  • On an Android phone (or at least on mine), you can use wildcards. So just block 470-220-xxxx or 470-220-2xxx.

  • What is the exact spam? Can it be reported to the police or to the telecom selling those numbers?

  • Stop using your phone number. It's a drastic solution, but the sooner we stop and find alternatives, the better position we will be in. You don't get spam called on Signal, Facebook Messenger nearly as much, do you?

    Of course there are problems with this, but these can be solved. Phone spam can't.