I’ve solved the problem with my landline phone. I switched from Verizon phone to Anveo PBX in the cloud ($7/month). I set up a phone flow so if a phone number isn’t in my phone book they are sent to voicemail. Now my phone rings perhaps once a week. Much more pleasant. At some point I’ll start forwarding calls to my iPhone rather than have a landline phone ring, I’m the only one who answers the landline anyway. This did mean buying a Ubi200 Voip adapter for my landline phone.
I have to disagree entirely with that.
This is a very American problem. In none of the countries I have worked or lived abroad has this ever been such an issue. I’m sure if others can figure this out, there’s no inherent technical problem, just a lack of will. It’s not about laws criminals have to adhere to, it’s regulations US telcos would have to adhere to if they want to stay in business. Technically, they are in a position to decide whose calls they terminate. Laws and regulations need to require them to leverage that. That is how you get this done.
And finally, AT&T having to bill Verizon somehow constitutes a “great inconvenience”? Seriously? 
Let me ROTFLMAO 
for a moment while I compare the severity of tens of millions of customers getting bugged to death by spam calls they can do virtually nothing about, to two multi-billion $ companies having to figure out how direct deposit works. I see only one “great inconvenience” there. Again, if telcos around the world can figure this out, it’s high time the American telcos get a clue. And if they can’t or won’t, I’m sure the FCC—assuming they are willing—would have the appropriate cattle prodder in their toolkit. This really only boils down to lack of willpower. So to the politicians I’d say, if keeping telco shareholders happy is more important than the sanity of tens of millions of American phone users, then at least have the decency to just admit your priorities.
Step 1 is to prevent the spoofing of phone numbers that you don’t own. I believe that a technical solution is on the way. You have to get all phone companies on the same page and this needs to be mandated by law.
This doesn’t solve everything. At work I believe many of the unwanted calls aren’t spoofed but are from sales companies with phone numbers all over the US so I am still stuck with playing whack-a-mole. I will find that a few calls will come from the same number which is why I don’t think they are being spoofed.
Preventing the spoofing of phone numbers through technological means is impossible because you need to interoperate with the global phone system, including countless VoIP providers. Calls may enter your network from anywhere, making it impossible to verify or even determine the actual origin of a call unless it originates on your own network.
I have friends who work for telcos and trust me, they would love to eliminate all of these spoofed/hacked calls from their networks, but they haven’t been able to determine a way to reliably identify them that won’t block a lot of legitimate calls as well.
We see, in the anti-spam world, that the effective filters all end up catching legitimate mail. It’s OK over there because you can find the message in your spam folder. It would be quite another for this to happen to your phone calls, where you won’t even know if there was a blocked call in order to find out if should or should not have been blocked.
It’s been my experience that legitimate marketing companies do honor requests when you ask them to stop calling. I haven’t received a non-scam telemarketing call for nearly 20 years because I am on the national do-not-call list and I explicitly tell the companies I do business with me that it’s not OK to call.
The robocalls we all get every day are entirely from scammers. These people are already operating in violation of many laws and are not going to suddenly decide to stop operation because a few new laws are passed.
The STIR/SHAKEN protocols have great promise to do a significant amount to prevent presentation of fraudulent callerID when they are implemented by carriers (scheduled later this year). It is extendable to international calls as well.
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FWIW, the Verizon Call Filter app (which is extending paid tier features during the pandemic to all customers if I recall correctly) is working well for me. Every once in a while I get a call from what is obviously same exchange spoofed caller ID (e.g., if my number is (abc) def-ghij, the calls show from (abc) def-xxxx), but it is pretty rare - it happens once or twice a month at most. I also get the occasional call from a NY city exchange that will leave a voicemail in Chinese, but, again, this doesn’t happen all that often - maybe two or three times a year.
I use Robokiller on my landline number and that seems to work pretty well, too; it seems to intercept a pretty good percentage of these calls.
We never answer a call unless I know the caller definitively from caller ID or I am expecting a call from someone else (customer service calling back, etc.).
I do look forward, though, to a time when spoofed calls don’t happen anymore. That will improve things.
Old thread I know, but I’ve noticed a sharp decline in the number of scam calls recently. When this thread first came out, I was getting a dozen or so calls on my cellphone per day, and maybe a dozen calls on my land line.
Maybe its becasue I’ve retired, but my landline barely rings with almost any callls (even from my grandkids 
). I turned off Block Unknown Callers on my iPhone because I was expecting a call from someone, and it took me days to realize I had this switched off because it took that long for a scammer to ring my cellphone.
Is anyone else experiencing this drop? If so, is there a logical explanation?
I think it’s just a momentary lull. The robocalls seem to come in waves. Sometimes getting 5-6 a day, and at other times, only 1-2 per week.
If it’s not just coincidence, then it may be the result of recent law enforcement actions. These articles aren’t about telemarketing, but they are takedowns of major international criminal groups. It wouldn’t surprise me if they use robocalls as a part of their criminal activities
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A technological solution is not “impossible”—it’s actually the only path that might actually eliminate the problem. It’s long been clear that the law alone will not stop the calls, because the callers are simply too difficult to find to charge and prosecute.
The problem is a technological one: the Caller ID protocol has effectively zero security and authentication. The technological solution is to replace it with a new protocol that authenticates the originating number in a way that cannot be easily spoofed. If it becomes difficult or expensive to obfuscate where a call is coming from, there will be a lot fewer groups doing it. This has a twofold benefit: fewer groups making calls means fewer calls overall, and it means that every group tracked and taken down represents a larger fraction of the total spam volume.
This is something that cannot be entirely implemented via a free market process, because the phone infrastructure in the US is split among competing companies who have little incentive to adopt another’s solution over their own. It would have to be implemented via regulation from the FCC or Congress, even if that regulation is simply providing incentive for companies to adopt a single protocol.
As a minarchist, I am suspect of too much regulation. But there are too many common goods that a free market has no incentive to protect, even if we had a genuine free market in the US (which we don’t have now and have never actually had). There are places where society, usually via government, has to act without a profit motive getting in the way. This is clearly one of them.
Did anybody look at the STIR/SHAKEN protocols I referenced above? This is the solution to CallerID spoofing, and it is coming soon. Google search provides much more information, if you’re adverse to Wikipedia articles.
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I think Stir/Shaken can’t happen fast enough. We just replaced our perfectly good landline phone with one that has more and better call blocking options, and it has helped though it’s not perfect. And what I have noticed is that we have been getting some Covid 19 related spam calls.
We’ve been getting calls every day for weeks from people we don’t know, asking us why we had called them – some jerk has been using our home phone number in his spam voicemail’s caller-ID. Nothing we can do about it but politely explain that caller-ID gets falsified and ours did. Fortunately most of the people afflicted have been decent about the annoyance.
STIR/SHAKEN will help by preventing fake caller IDs. But many of the unwanted calls I get, especially at work, don’t seem to be faking their caller IDs. The call centers have large blocks of phone numbers so they just have to rotate through them, making blocking each unwanted number a losing game of wack-a-mile.
I moved my landline to a PBX in the cloud to block all calls not in my address book. That phone now rarely rings. Unfortunately I cannot do this with my cell phone, too much chance of an emergency call that is not in my phone book, but I will now give out my landline to all businesses so if they sell, rent, or leak my phone number the new caller will get my voice mail.
For Android users, installing a third-party call filter app will also be worthwhile. Namely, among a wide selection of available options, my personal choice would be Nize by Cube Apps. The app does its job of blocking robocalls really well.