Why do callers I’ve blocked keep calling?

Those numbers that you are blocking are truly being blocked. The problem is that those calls are coming in from different numbers. They are just faking the number that is shown on their caller ID. If you return the call, in many cases you will find some poor person who is irate at having dozens of persons like yourself returning calls to the faked caller ID number that is actually their number which has been hijacked by the spammers.

This is something that is also really slimy about all this. The spammers hijack numbers from your local community so that they look legitimate. You might discover that all those numbers you have been blocking are, in fact, legitimate people and businesses in your town who now cannot contact you at all! I discovered that a local dry cleaner's number had been one that I had blocked initially.

I really wish that the government would make it a FEDERAL offense for a person to use fake IDs in the telephone network. Even though the network is evolving to eliminate such calls, an effective solution is still coming (it requires ALL Telcos to do things to their equipment).

Since I've been getting spammed 60-70 times a week, I've been forced to do the following:

1) I've created a voice message for my phone service saying something like "Hello, this is xxx xxx. Due to the significant increase in spoofing by spammers, I have been forced to send all calls by everyone not already in my contacts list to to this voice mail. Please leave a message. If you are a legitimate caller I will add you to my Contacts list"

2) Turn on my Do Not Disturb function and configure it to let any calls from my contacts list through to me immediately.

Since my contacts list is quite large and has the names of most people I would expect calls from, this works out reasonably well. Normally when the spammers call, they have no desire to leave a message (they would have to actually provide a legitimate phone number for you to return the call), and so my voice mail box stays empty and I don't get any ringing notices on any of those fake calls. If a legitimate friend calls who is not yet in my Contacts list they totally understand my message and will leave a voice mail, I will just add them to my contacts list and from then on they can dial in directly to my phone.

This has worked well but there are a couple of minor disadvantages I've found:

A) I must leave the Do Not Disturb turned on all the time so I can't use it for other purposes it was designed for.

B) Since you are basically using your Contacts list as a "White List" for screening calls, it can be a little problematic at times. ensuring that all numbers that you might be called from are recorded. For example, each of my doctor's offices have phone numbers for a: main office call in, b: the number that calls coming FROM the office go out on, c: the number that automated messages go out on (this can be a third office number or frequently the number a medical portal for the doctor uses), d: the mobil number of the doctor, or e: other services working out of the same doctor's clinic. So for any of my doctors, I've had to set up 3-5 phone numbers each (not including things like FAXes).

C) Because of typically buggy software in these phones I have come across some issues that can prevent calls from people in your contacts from getting directly through to you. For example, I had the same number entered twice on one contact, only the first one listed had the international "+1" prefix on it. Until I deleted that number, that person would always be sent to my voice mail. Also, this is supposed to work for text messages as well, but I've also discovered that frequently it also might prevent a notification from a text from someone actually in my contacts. I do get the message, but no sound, etc.

Jeff Wiseman wrote:

Mothy1946,

There is an area here that is really grey to me. It's hard to tell sometimes whether a particular "feature" is executed on the cell phone, or on the Telco's equipment. For example, I can use the built in voice mail capability of my phone, or I could pay for and use the voice mail service that the Telco offers. When I block a number, I have assumed that the blocking is occurring on my phone. But as you've seen, some services may actually do the blocking in the Telco's equipment. But for any given customer, which is it?

Your phone has no built in voicemail capability. It just downloads messages from the carrier’s voicemail server. Once a call leaves the network your phone will receive it whether it is blocked on the phone or not. When your phone “blocks” a call the phone tells the network to send the call to the carrier’s voicemail server, when then syncs with the visual voicemail function on the phone.

You can block calls on the carrier’s network with many carriers; this is a paid service. For those calls they never reach the phone, and thus don’t go to voicemail. Most carriers also offer an app such as AT&T’s Call Protect. When you report a call using it that number is blocked at the network in the future, and likewise won’t reach your phone (or voicemail).

But when I see something come up on my Recent calls list (or put up on my phone screen when receiving such a call), I'm not sure whether it is my phone putting up the name and number, the Telco doing it, or a little of both. Our Telco had something turned on recently where you would actually get "Unknown" in the name and number fields in some cases. But again, I'm not clear on who's doing it.

Your phone only processes the phone number from Caller ID, which is sent by the telco. If a name appears in Recents it is because that number is in your contacts. “Unknown” means that the caller has suppressed their caller ID; this is a feature of all phones, you can even do it from your iPhone (Settings/Phone/Show My Caller ID). While Caller ID can send names, the iPhone does not use that information.

One last example of this is junk e-mail. On my desktop iMac when I put a message into the junk mailbox, the system "learns" from it and can start automatically putting similar emails into the junk mailbox. However, I recently discovered that apparently, the mail client on the iPhone doesn't work this way. If you move a message into the junk mailbox, the iPhone doesn't learn anything from it. But if the ISP providing the mail service is capable of it, the fact that you marked an email as junk gets sent back to the ISP and then THEY learn it in their system. But if your ISP doesn't have such a capability, you can move all kinds of messages from your inbox to your junk mailbox until the cows come home and it won't change anything :-)

That’s correct. It is the email provider that manages junk email, not the phone. Email providers have access to lists of spammers, and will block calls from domains on those lists. Have you noticed that gmail, AOL, Yahoo and iCloud have close to perfect spam blocking? And many ISPs don’t care, and don’t bother?

It is not possible for any phone to block any call; once the call leaves the mobile provider’s network all the phone can do is divert it to voicemail. Your carrier may offer a blocking service for specific numbers that would prevent it from getting to your phone; contact them about any such service they offer.

Re-read my first paragraph in my last post. Normally when you get the situation that you describe it's because the incoming number that you see (and add to your block list) has been spoofed. They are actually calling from a number that is DIFFERENT from the one that you blocked. And unfortunately, if the REAL owner of that number attempts to call you, THEY will be blocked!

Now if the number that you've blocked truly does belongs to the person calling you and they are getting through to you, then something else is misconfigured or something (a bug perhaps? I've seen it). In any event, the normal reason that some numbers that you've blocked seem to still get through to you is because they've been spoofed.

dorrifromny wrote:

I am so tired of blocking spam calls but they keep calling from those blocked numbers. Why is the block not working. iPhone 11 is updated but still having problem. My service provider is AT&T

Because these spammers are smart, you've correctly blocked the number but they are spoofing that number but are actually calling you from a different number.

Jeff Wiseman: You shouldn’t be using Do Not Disturb. Settings/Phone/Silence Unknown Callers will do the same thing more effectively, without co-opting DND.

And you also need to enable Dial Assist to get around one of your other number recognition problems.

And it is a FEDERAL offense. But callers from Bangladesh don’t care about US law. The vast majority of spam calls originate outside of the US, specifically because it is a federal offense in the US.

dorrifromny,

Yes that's a pattern I recognize. You might even have the case where 80% of the calls are ACTUALLY originating in Florida. They just rotate through many other numbers. If you were to actually call some of those numbers you might discover a person who is being driven crazy with all the calls they are getting from people all over the country asking "Did you just call me?"

The scrambling of email information is very common to the point you can't trust the address info in either the sender's area or the Reply To area. But one thing's for sure, if the sender has YOUR name in the field or the To field has someone else's name, then it's likely a scam.

Silence Unknown Callers was added in iOS 13.

Having the same problem. The block caller function on my near new iPhone 11 doesn’t work for a number in my contact list. I still get calls from this individual even though his number is supposedly blocked

Thanks Jeff I understand your comments about being spoofed but I’m sure this is not the case here. This is someone who I know well and have had his number in my contact list for 2 years but recently he has become a nuisance and I don’t want to hear from him. When he rings his name comes up on my screen so I guess I have the option of ignoring it. He isn’t computer savvy enough to be spoofing.

Jeff Wiseman wrote:

The scrambling of email information is very common to the point you can't trust the address info in either the sender's area or the Reply To area. But one thing's for sure, if the sender has YOUR name in the field or the To field has someone else's name, then it's likely a scam.

I have a friend who writes technothrillers. For his first novel (Singularity) he asked me how difficult it was to spoof the sender of an email message; he wanted a message to appear to come from his protagonist, Jon Knox, to an international spy. So I sent him a reply that came from Jon Knox. It is trivially easy.

Lawrence,

Thank you for that information. Unfortunately, I believe that the Silence Unknown Callers is a recent invention. I'm running the newest iOS possible on my 5s iPhone (12.5.1). So at this point I have no choice. But that does sound like it could be a more appropriate feature :-)

I do have Dial assist on so i don't think that was the problem. I have other contacts with the +1 prefix, but the one causing the problems was where I had the number in the contact twice. One with the +1 prefix and one without.

And even folks in the US get away with this because in many ways the government doesn't (or can't) enforce all the laws that they make. I had one call that the person claimed to be from my doctor's office and wanted me to get these back and legs braces on Medicare. I hung up. A week later I got these packages. I checked online and found out that Medicare had given them nearly $3000. I called medicare and explained the scam, they documented it, supposedly gave it to their fraud unit and that was the last I heard of it. That was 8 months ago and nothing was ever adjusted in my account. It's a long story but I discovered their operation was out of Florida even though their calls to me supposedly came from California and North Carolina (among others).

My wish is that it would be made a federal offense to use a phony ID on anything going through the mail or internet. Well, I would be happy with just some very hefty penalties for sending spoofed IDs anyway.

Heh! Well I've usually tried to follow the "Received By" headers for the email since they are added AFTER the email has left the sender's control. However, if they are living in a country with a corrupt government and telcos, the owner's of the servers can be persuaded to allow those headers to be hacked. Most of the Spam advertising I see is originating in South America somewhere using some fake generic domain name

dorrifromny wrote:

while we’re on the topic of spoofing... i get emails with my friends names slightly different. But when i look at the sender info it’s all different stuff. Sometimes it’s a long string of letters and numbers. Other times it has fake company names and i never look up those websites because i’m afraid that’s just add more. Any ideas? It happens in mac mail and gmail.

That means that someone who has those contacts in their contact app was hacked.