Here’s how to stop them for good! What methods have you tried to stop robocalls and how effective were they?
On iPhone, under settings, phone, you will find Silence unknown callers and Call Blocking & Identification. Turn those on. Helps a lot. Got to; I get about 2 dozen a day.
I also use a company called Jolly Roger Telco. They screen callers and sometimes entertain spam callers with a “pirate” bot. They record the interaction which is sometimes humorous when a live spammer rings you up and is a little slow to pick up on the fact that he is talking to a bot.
My landline robocalls are mostly gone. However, I get spam emails about things like Norton and Apple purchases with a phone number to call.
The Indian guy who answers the calls sounds like the same guy. I call his number from many of my numbers and within a few hours his number has been disconnected.
The guy and I trade a few profanities and things like “Norton does not have telephone numbers in Hawaii. Try again.”.
On my Voip service I have the ability to send telemarketers to Lenny or to a recording that says “This call requires a deposit of 25 cents. Please hang up, deposit 25 cents and place your call again”. Since they are not calling from a pay phone, the call ends 
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Robocalls tend to hang up ~20-25 seconds
My number must be everywhere. My Panasonic landline holds 250 blocked calls and it was filled in a month. Of course they just roll to another number.
I was busy cooking something complex when the phone rang and I ignored it. A little later, another one. Then another. My answering machine kicks in at 30 seconds and they all disconnected around 20-ish seconds.
In the past month, I have not blocked a single one because they click off.
Perhaps their calling computer realizes nobody is going to answer and hang up?
I solve that with my VOIP service. When the phone rings, the system ASKS THEM to press a particular digit to reach me; otherwise it hangs up or after hours it goes to voicemail. No ring to hear if they don’t press a button.
Try answering the phone, make sure you have a real person and politely say “no thank you” and hang up. Don’t wait for a response. A lot of the calls you are getting are likely the same organization calling over and over until they get a yes or no out of you.
Because I am retired I have “Do Not Disturb” set on my Android phone to accept calls only from people in my contacts.
I don’t get Robo calls.
If I am expecting a call from some one not in my contacts I can temporarily turn off Do Not Disturb.
Off Topic.
After dealing with my cable company I have decided on a new phone answering message:
“If oyu ant to speak to Rasputin press 1.
If you want to speak to his wife press 2.
If you want to speak to Jade, their cat press 3.
If you don’t like this message go to 1.”
Very sick of it. Got a google voice that I could move to a better service I suppose, but the one drawing the most is my cell phone. Have not gotten my head wrapped around how to move that and still have it work.
Meanwhile I usually keep it on Silence Unknown Callers and that works pretty well. Take it off and I may get 10 in an hour. I have taken to speaking only in grunts. Unknown how long, if ever, before they will give up. Blocking numbers is waste of time because they spoof another number every call…
I did something similar for years, but as I noted earlier on this thread, for the past month I just let it ring. They click off after 20 seconds or so, getting no response.
It seems to be working, as my robocall have dropped 75% in the last month.
I urge you to be VERY careful with these call blocking services. I work for a surgeon’s office and yesterday I had no less than 4 people that I could not contact because they had not put the office phone into their allow calls list. Meanwhile, one person phoned me three times screaming into the phone that no one was phoning her back. We were TRYING. When we phoned, her phone said that our calls were not allowed and it would disconnect. No option to even leave a voicemail. These are important calls! These same people had not even set up the electronic system so I could not send them a message through it to let them know that we cant phone them. My last resort is sending a snail mail letter letting them know that we cannot phone them, while their important information sits for days while they try to figure out how to allow our calls through.
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I have never agreed with the idea of blocking all calls not in my list. I’ve received so many first time important calls that would have been missed.
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Well I guess I was over thinking it. I was using Jolly Roger but after a few months don’t see it as beneficial. JR can be fun and entertaining, but really is not worth my time. It would collect several dozen a day, most with zero audio. Some had a little and very few were funny as some doofus would spend several minutes talking to a robot.
Of course you want callers to be able to reach you, but I think almost always a real caller will leave a message. There’s a difference between blocked and voice mail picks up!
On a modern iphone, Do Not Disturb is under something called Focus. Took a while to figure that out. In your DND you have notifications available from apps and from people. Put everyone you want to be able to ring you right now in there and voila! Everyone else friend or foe goes to voice mail. Out of 30 or 40 calls today I had about half a dozen bots that managed to record something.
How you do that on an android I don’t know as I gave up on android a couple of years ago.
On an android i can send known spam numbers directly to the trash. And/or i can send unknown numbers to voice mail or the trash. But much of the time i find myself expecting a call from someone not in my contacts…and even when the main number for a contact is in my phone, the numbers used for return calls frequently are NOT the main number.
I know it takes a little more effort, but I also put my default ringtone to silent, and assign ringtones to almost all of those in my contacts list. I have categories for Friend, Family, Businesses I frequent, and doctors, each with their own unique ringtone. So I know by the ringtone what category of caller is calling. Anyone else can leave me a voicemail message if they want a callback.
You never mention “Should I answer?” If the incoming call is not from a number in your contact list, the site will push it to voicemail. Most, if not all, robocalls will not react to a transfer to voicemail and will just drop. You can look in the app to see more about the caller and point of origination. You can alert the rest of the community what you know about the caller. My favorite response is to enter "I don’t know anyone in Guam, or Alaska or wherever. The service is free The do accept donations
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I used to click my ‘block’ button, but in no time [2-3 weeks] the memory is full. Now I just let it ring, and 99% of the time the robocall will click off after 20 seconds.
Yes trying to leave a message is a pain because apple likes to profit from cloud storage which means they accept a very minimal # of calls
Start a campaign to have the FCC require every phone system to verify the caller-id at the entry to the system. Alternatively (and much easier) remove the ability for the caller to enter the caller-id having the serving phone system enter it. The FCC should fine each phone system for every call whose caller-id is false – just 2cents each would stop this spam in a NYC nanosecond.