While this has surely been a problem for tons of years, only after COVID it has become an absolute pain (and a legal void, should be said). And any attempts to stop it have been absolutely futile, leaving people absolutely defenseless against this persistent bulls***.

In Spain, where I live, this has become a major issue. In the span of a single day, or even just 8 hours, you can easily get 8-10 calls from numbers all over the country, sometimes only changing a few digits though some are truly persistent and attempt to test how much they can bother you before engrossing your blocked list. There were times a single number would call half a dozen times in less than 48 hours.

Most only keep the call going for a few seconds, which allowed to monitor them because somebody actually trying to call you would hold for longer or even until the call was cut. Some didn't follow this pattern, letting the call drag on until it was cut and even leaving a message, of course confirming it was some bulls***. Be it offers from other companies you didn't ask for, products you don't even need, scams of any possible kind... Everything was possible with these numbers.

Why do they survive? Where I live, they stated it's in the customer's legitimate interest to be informed of better offers or services. At first they could even call from other cellphones, in an attempt to catch you off guard, but a relatively recent law change disabled that. Some still attempted it, despite the possible denouncing and legal action against them by consumers, but eventually they stopped. However, the calls didn't end.

Networks are starting attempts to filter those calls, but I can tell you they don't work. They may block numbers, but only after they've already tried to contact you so in a sense it's fairly useless. The community also attempts to help, but once again only through tags that won't stop them from calling you over and over.

The last attempt by the government is to force these spam calls to use a specific prefix so everybody knows the caller's intentions. This will mitigate the fact you might ignore calls from numbers of your zone and will also make it easier for networks to block numbers used specifically for scamming, but we all know this will do little to actually free us from this bulls*** and we'll still receive dozens of calls a week. Hopefully I'm wrong and we actually can do more with these changes coming later this year, but I'm not very confident.

Not sure how this problem affects the rest of the world. I haven't read anything of the European Union passing any laws against this, which means its either a local issue of ours or at least it's worse here than in the rest of the Union. As for the States, you guys will know a lot more than me about that, and if there's any law preventing them you think we could adapt here.

I want to end saying that I just received another spam call as I was typing this. It's the fourth of the day so far, between 9:40 AM and 5:46 PM, the tenth of the week and it's just Tuesday... They've called me from up to 6 different regions since yesterday and I even got calls past 9:30 PM or even on saturdays and holidays. This is just how big and disgusting this problem is, and the main reason why youngsters refuse more and more to answer the phone even when the caller is legitimate.

I am not looking forward to the robocalls. This year is an election year in Winnipeg, civic (mostly Mayoral) elections to be exact, frankly our current mayor hasn't really done anything to tick me off, but people here are mad about the transit system that got changed last summer (almost a year later and I'm not really having problems with it)

Robocalls have only become more prevalent and more convincing nowadays, what with generative AI making it even easier to run convincing robocalls that can easily respond to people. Makes it that much easier not just to advertise to people, but to convincingly scam them without having to lift a finger. There's only so much that can be done about it - here's hoping someone finds a way to deal with it as time goes on. It's not a critical problem, but it is a very annoying one.

Four more calls this morning in the span of just 4 hours, one of them directly labelled as fraud by my phone/network. I'm getting tired of having to erase the call logs every so often due to more than half of it belonging to this kind of bulls***.

It's been less than a month since I got my new phone, so as far back as my log goes, I've had 30-ish different numbers spam calling me (no exact number since I've already deleted the repetitive or reported ones). I sometimes even wonder why I have my phone on because I truly want it to be off so I can live peacefully.

classgame : Robocalls and robot-answering machines are the worst. Not only is the voice painful to hear, their limited answers and programming make them absolutely useless. I sincerely don't know when we started to allow this, but it definitely has to end for the best of society.

NovemberJoy : I guess that the only thing you can do is as our government suggested, all calls related to offering any kind of marketing or service must use a specific prefix or face legal action. It doesn't stop it, but allows to filter incoming calls as well as making it easier to pursue those non-complying with the law.

There's literally no way of stopping it, sadly. What I'm afraid is that, just like hackers steal personal data from major sites, networks may be targeted to steal numbers to be used for scams and when the number is blocked then the user will have a hard time proving it was not them to recover the usual functioning of their phone. And that's considering it's not happening as we type this, wouldn't be surprising nowadays.

I still remember one I got in 2014 when the councilor in my riding was running for re-election and he had an NHL player record a robocall (the councilor was a former NHL player by the way) and I thought it was kind of stupid and classless. Needless to say he didn't win....and the guy that beat him died last year

Even with block spam calls or whatever feature Verizon offers I still be getting spam calls and messages every day and it gets irritating. Most of the time it’s about “check your borrow power” or anything related to financing like okay granted was close to make a loan deal but backed out but now each day I be getting like 8 messages from bots and spam calls like is there a way to truly get rid of them?

I swear a couple a months ago I had to drive a family member to a doctors appointment and they were getting spam calls almost literally ever 15-30 minutes. I think it because one time they fell for a PC support scam to they are now a target.

I don't know if anyone has mentioned the Do Not Call list in the US but that doesn't work if the people making the calls aren't based in the US.

Once in a blue moon I will get one but since I have a out of state number of where I live I know not to answer. If it is actually important they will leave a voicemail and they never do.

I think my current phone number used to belong to a legitimate business owner before they got a different number because I get texts and calls all the damn time - like, 5+ a day - about business loans, trying to buy the property that the business is located on, etc etc. I am sure not all of these are legitimate companies and are just trying to make a quick buck off a struggling business owner.

I do find it a little humorous because it's about a property in a state where I don't live anymore... obviously the solution would be to get a new phone number distributed to me, but as most Miami natives will probably agree, I'll deal with the inconvenience before forfeiting the 305 area code lol

I don't know if it is the same in Europe, but here in the US we get absolutely FLOODED with spam calls in election season.

Somebody sold my phone number and said I live in Ohio, which has very important elections in two weeks, so I get spam calls and texts pretty much all day every day. It has gotten to the point where if someone is actually trying to reach me, it is unlikely I will pick up unless I have their number saved.

Its such a shame this is the way phones have turned out, just another way to try and get money/votes from people. Its disappointing.

I get them daily, so annoying, that is why I use dnd, otherwise my phone would be buzzing all day long.

My new phone gets lots of them because I never had a chance to set it up to block them. I usually get like 2 or 3 every day that I just ignore and wait to see if a voicemail pops up. On my old phone, I used to get 1 or 2 every month.

A few months ago i started getting like 5 spam calls per day around the same time and started anticipating them every since. I have blocked a good chunk of the numbers and it helped a bit. Now i get like 1 spam call every other day.

We recently got a regulation change here, and now all commercial calls need to have a specific prefix as redacted by law. Therefore, it's much easier to identify these and not mistake them for real numbers,.

Most of those calls are still fraudulent and even though the new law has been active for just one week we already have reports and numbers labelled as fraud. So basically the true commercial calls are lying around battling with spam calls on the same prefix, meaning they will slowly be less convenient and probably this can eliminate commercial calls once and for all, thus leaving only spam calls with that prefix.

Barathemos : Luckily we don't have that, but we do get inundated with propaganda via regular mail. And here we don't have just two parties, we have 6 registered for next month's elections and one of them is an agglutination of a handful of others who previously entered as separate entities. And I'm sure other parties which have existed previously are also in coalition with registered parties, so the grandiose total goes to 15 or so.

And that's the general elections for the presidency of the country, we then have the regional and local elections which may even have other minor or local parties. So yeah, if we were to have what you guys have at the other side of the puddle, spam calls would be deemed almost illegal or we would directly riot.

Dauntez : I luckily don't receive them as often and my phone mostly blocks them naturally, so my phone has stopped buzzing on its own. Hopefully you guys over there would have the same laws as we do and network providers were forced to block them.

zanderlex : They sometimes leave a voicemail, and it's even more annoying than the call itself. The problem is that you have to go through them or you run the risk of clogging your voicemail or get important ones dug beneath these disturbances.

supercool22 : I received so many calls that I only blocked the numbers who insisted. I see no reason to block a number that called just once unless my phone or network provider lists it as "reported as fraud". The thing is that, with the change of prefix, I might need to unblock those which are (or should be) now legitimate numbers, you may never know who could be their new owners.