What is Apple doing to block spam phone calls and texts?

Go to Settings>Phone>Silence Unknown Callers and turn that option on.

That will send all callers not in your contacts, recent outgoing calls, email, etc. directly to voice mail.

There IS a Junk folder: It is called “Unknown Senders” and you don’t have to view it. And you can add a 3rd party filtering app (I use Nomorobo, but there are several), and those create a Junk folder.

Ok and I see it is possible under Messages, Notifications, Customize Notifications to turn off alerts from Unknown Senders.

What would you like Apple to do? Can you define a set of rules that could positively identify spam calls and differentiate them from calls that you want to get? Apple lets you send calls to voicemail if the calling number is not in your contacts, but Apple can’t actually block the call before it gets to your phone. That can only be done by your carrier. Some carriers offer a blocking service, that works some of the time. Ask your carrier.

For every complex problem, there is a simple solution - And it’s wrong (paraphrasing H.L. Mencken).

The first problem is that the US Congress, in its wisdom, specifically authorized phone number spoofing, the intention being to allow a business to show a public number that someone could call back when the outgoing call was from an internal non-public number. And the second is that there is no way to determine the phone number that originates the call when the call is originated by a computer that doesn’t actually use the public switched telephone network.

For example, CSRs working from home (as most do) who make calls to customers using a VOIP application such as Zendesk don’t want their personal phone numbers to be displayed; instead the caller ID is the return number for the customer to call back to the business. But there is no way to differentiate between this essential and useful capability from someone who uses it to make spam calls.

What does money have to do with it? If something is not possible whether you spend $1 on it or $1 billion on it doesn’t matter. It’s a question of wasting $1 or wasting $1 billion.

All spam calls come from real phone numbers, and by the time a call reaches your phone all the phone “knows” is the caller ID which, thanks to the fine members of Congress, can be easily and legally faked.

Actually, your carrier knows something about where the call originated, and if you subscribe to their call protect service it will warn you of calls that might be spam. It isn’t perfect either, but is a little better. However, US carriers charge for their advanced call screening service; about $4 a month.

But the bottom line is that there is no way to determine absolutely the intent of a caller.

The solution is simple, the carriers need to disable phone number spoofing or have the option for subscribers to block spoofed numbers. The phone number that originates the call needs to be what shows up on the end users device. a call originating from overseas needs to have that prefix to be received. a phone number that is generated online and not from a physical device should show up as such so we can have the option to not accept calls from numbers that don't originate on a device (phone). What happened to the requirement to implement STIR/SHAKEN technology? was supposed to be implemented by June 30, 2021 by all carriers.

czimdars wrote:

Perhaps they could classify inbound phone calls?

How, exactly?

Perhaps they could advise when an inbound call is from an iPhone so I know it's an actual person not a bot?

Not possible. The cellular network does not identify what kind of device is being used to call.

If I made $275B in annual revenue, I'm sure I could come up with a more clever solution than: IF caller is not in your contacts THEN send straight to voice mail

Already done.

That has always been my setting and they still ring through - this is a new thing. Identified as “potential spam” or “unknown” and those previously went silently away. What’s happening??? This is new yesterday and today. Did the update for iPhone do something to enable this??

Edit: Sorry deggie, I have no idea why this posted as a reply to you. I even used the block quote tool which pulled in in the post from MedEdCarol, as intended... Maybe I just need more coffee...

That has always been my setting and they still ring through - this is a new thing. Identified as “potential spam” or “unknown” and those previously went silently away. What’s happening??? This is new yesterday and today. Did the update for iPhone do something to enable this??

The 'potential spam' identification is coming from your cellular carrier. unknown simply means that the caller is not sending any caller id information, which pretty much guarantees it's a scam call. Both are indications that come from the carrier.

Things like caller ID and call blocking can be overwhelmed by automated systems that can place dozens of calls to the same number simultaneously.

jrzimmerman wrote:

That's a typical cop-out answer to a difficult question. Your answer assumes that I know everyone and have them in my address book for every call that I might receive/want to receive.

The real answer is that there is nothing that Apple (or anyone else) can do about phone spam. Because there is no way to distinguish phone spam from real phone calls. If you can think of a way when the world’s telecom experts working day and night have been unable to you deserve a Nobel Prize.

Apple just needs to make a feature to “Hide texts from unknown senders” just like the option to Silence Unknown Callers. You could then go into the unknown Senders list and allow or block.

This is mostly in place, but the missing piece is the ability to completely hide these messages so they are in there own box or vault and the block/allow function.

Right now the messages are filtered but there is no way to open messages directly to the known senders filter view so you don’t see all the junk messages.

Nothing, that would be up to your carrier.

The only time I have had them ring through (and it has only been twice) is when they spoofed numbers that were in my contacts.