Telemarketers skip ringtone and go direct to voicemail

The calls and voicemails are both handled by your cellular provider. When blocking a call on your phone, all it does it prevent it from ringing when the caller id number is detected, but cannot stop a voicemail from being left. I understand that is not the issue you are having, but it does show the limits any phone has over the calls that come in from the cellular provider. Voicemails are not actually being recorded on your phone when they come in, they are actually being recorded by your cell provider and your phone just communicates with them to download the visual voicemails to your phone.

You are only going to be able to resolve this with your cell provider if they are able to help at all. The same thing happens to me on my home phone using the Xfinity service, and my home phone is one that plugs into the wall without any cellular connection. The phone is not the problem.

I do understand what you are saying. My point is that it is the tactics of the Robocalls/Scammers that are causing this, not your iPhone. It does occur on Android phones and even any other brand of VOIP phone. There are many articles on this topic with legislation stuck in Congress to prevent them. The Scammers claim that since the phone does not ring, that "Do Not Call List" should not apply to them. Here are just 2 articles, but there are many more. Some solutions include complaining to the FCC are letting congress know how you feel. Unfortunately there is a lot of money behind the scammers the lobby congress in ways that is not helpful to us consumers.

• https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2021/12/01/robocalls-evade-crackdowns-using-tactics-voicemail-call-lists/8819857002/
• https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/business/phone-ringless-voicemail-fcc-telemarketer.html

To the point that Verizon told you to call Apple, that does not surprise me. It would be incorrect to infer anything from that standard answer when they cannot resolve a problem, even though they know exactly what is going on.

My cellular carrier is AT&T here in the U.S. Like other AT&T users, I can send a message to anyone’s AT&T voicemail using AT&T’s voicemail service. I never have to call the other person’s cellular telephone. It doesn’t matter if it’s an iPhone, Android phone, or whatever.

Well then I guess I don't understand what you are asking and maybe someone else can help. I'm going on what you have stated:

• "Telemarketers skip ringtone and go direct to voicemail"
• "The question not answered is how the caller or computer is not allowing the phone to ring the standard 20 seconds"
• "These nusaince callers are jumping to voice mail with no rings or max 1.5 seconds"

These were directly responded to in the articles I provided with these quotes:

• "The new technique of companies sending robocalls directly to voicemail, without having the phone ring"
• "Mobarak said calls that go straight to voicemail should be treated the same as any other robocall"
• "No, Your Phone Didn’t Ring. So Why Voice Mail From a Telemarketer?"
• "Mr. Kemp had just experienced a technology gaining traction called ringless voice mail, the latest attempt by telemarketers and debt collectors to reach the masses."
• “The concept of ringless voice mail was to develop a nonnuisance form of messaging or a nonintrusive alternative to robocalls,”

Several additional points come to mind after going through the above:

• In the sixteen+ years I’ve been an iPhone user, the behavior you mentioned of a spam caller quickly going to voicemail after at most a brief ring has never happened to me. Not one time.
• It has also never happened to any of my friends, relatives or acquaintances that they have mentioned.
• I have a decades old (pre-VoIP) landline. That line gets 8-10 spam calls per day. After four rings, that line goes to voicemail. Spam callers always hang up without leaving voicemail while the greeting is playing.
• The one unusual thing you mentioned was forwarding your VoIP phone to your iPhone. I realize you said the calls that go to voicemail don’t originate there, but I would still recommend suspending that for a while to see if results change.
• If there are other similar unusual things you do, consider suspending them as well.

tjpsnj wrote:

iPhone is no longer a secure device.

It does appear you have now read the articles that I posted explaining the process of ringless voice mails and have a much better understanding on who is doing it , why they do it, and their efforts to keep doing it. I totally agree with you that they should be stopped and I have received them as well.

If what you got out of the information that the "iPhone is no longer a secure device", you seem to be making a huge leap and focusing your frustration in the wrong place. No where in those articles does it say it is a problem with the iPhone. Voicemail has always been a carrier service and your phone is not an answering machine. All of the voice mails are on your providers servers and your iPhone simply downloads them when the carrier tells your phone that there is one available. It is the same as the carrier telling your phone to ring when a call comes in. It is this infrastructure that is being exploited by the scammers and the results will be the same for any device, no matter who the manufacturer is. It would be more appropriate to claim that our cellular infrastructure is not secure and with that I would agree. Making it secure is possible as detailed in the already posted articles.

You may remember the days when you had to dial a number to receive your voicemails from the carrier. The process is still the same, but the iPhone automated it further by using Visual Voicemail to see the voicemails that your provider has on their servers without needing to call in. This sometimes leads people to believe that their phone is an answering machine, but that was the beauty of this seamless feature when it was launched.