this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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I really wish they could check phone numbers. I've been getting a TON of spam recently and it would be interesting to see where it's coming from.
There has likely been an evolution of war dialers. It's probably easier to blast through every possible number once a year, and sell a list of every valid number. Targeting specific area codes is probably faster and would avoid some legal problems.
Huh. You think read receipts via RCS could make it worse? Obviously Google would probably have to make an exception to allow for this but hey "~~Don't Be Evil~~"
I have no idea, unfortunately. Tinkering with phones and ways to exploit messaging is something I haven't done in a number of years.
My first guess would be yes? If you ever get a blank email with only the subject line of "Hi", "Hello" or similar, it is simply a test to see if your email address is valid. It's not a stretch to assume there are also simple ways to verify valid numbers that can also recieve text messages.
This is a really dumb fix that I started using several months ago when I was getting 5 or 6 spam calls a day.
I would answer, and if they asked for my name or whoever lives at my address I would tell them they have the wrong number, I'm not them, I don't have a house, whatever. Anything to make them positively sure that the person they are looking for does not exist here. Within 1 week the calls dropped off significantly. Now, about 5 months later I get maybe one call per month.
Another thing that helps is to answer and immediately mute your line so the caller only hears an empty line. Spam dialers hang up and eventually mark the number as invalid, and most people who are real callers will prompt with a hello or something. I did that for a while before I got the Google call screen, which cut it down even more.
You could in the past (until around 1-2 years ago). I don’t know why it changed, though.
I've gotten a lot less spam calls since I started using the Google assist call screener. I get legitimate calls that hang up because my idiot ops guys can't listen to the recording and say what they need to when they call me direct instead of my office redirect line, but it also seems to chase off the spammers if they know their AI has to get through my AI to even have a chance at trying to scam me, since I'm a harder target than average.