Voice mail from a number I've blocked

Exactly the same problem here. I am in the UK, and within 1 hour of buying my new contract iPhone, I got a junk call. Every single day since they have phoned, with the same pre-recorded message.

A quick google search of the company involved has revealed they are running a scam where they want you to phone them and complain about the calls. This phone call is at premium rates, and that is where they make their money.

Please note however, at NO POINT have they tried to hide their number or caller I.D. I blocked their number the second day of owning the phone, but now I have this daily chore of dealing with a voicemail that I have no indication of where it is coming from, only to find out it is these scammers.

Several times now I have missed genuine voicemail as I assumed it was junk, finding out later from frantic text messages that the call was from a known contact.

Honestly this is making my life a misery. This is without question a bug/oversight in the iOS software. If iOS can take control of numbers to block calls, I cannot understand why it does not extend to voicemail.

At this point I am looking at 2 choices; either a change in phone numbers in the hope I escape them, or contract cancellation and moving to another phone brand. This cannot go on.

The confusion here seems to be call blocking vs blocked numbers.

Call blocking is when on your phone, you have chosen to 'Block this Caller', you will no longer receive calls from this number as the phone will essentially reject the call immediately, unfortunately, if your settings with your telco / carrier then pass that call back to voicemail, this is something you will need to speak to your carrier about.

Blocked numbers are when a person masks their phone number so the person they dial cannot tell who is calling. When they call your phone it will come up as 'Unknown Number' or something similar. Your phone has NO IDEA who the incoming call is from and therefore cannot tell if it is meant to be blocked or not. You can get some apps on Android that block ALL unknown numbers, but this would block probably a lot of important calls too!

Once again, the phone just rejects a call from someone that you have placed in the Block this Caller list. Once it has been blocked, it falls back to the carrier settings to then do whatever with the rejected call.

You go right ahead and "report" the 10-12 calls per day I get from numbers that DO SHOW CALLER ID, but they are FORGED! If you dial them back, you hear a recording saying they are not a working number. They come from a computer somewhere half-way around the world and insert a phone number with software from a list complited by more software to find disconnected numbers. They are UNTRACEABLE and the government: FCC, etc. cannot trace them. AT&T or any other carrier, could use a quick 'handshaking' routine like that used by ALL EMAIL servers, to be sure a call is from a real number before connecting it to my phone, but they are TOO GREEDY to allow the tiny bit of bandwidth to do something they USED TO DO.

Furthermore, these calls play a recording, they don't have a human at the other end. The recording is a sales pitch that fills up my voicemail every day, because I've chosen "block number" on the little apple "i" with the circle in the call log. This IS something the iPhone software could control, if Apple wanted to. But the carriers want this traffic, so they can sell $5/month add-on cost to block 30 calls you must continually update.

AT&T will do nothing. NOBODY ELSE CAN do anything, because the IP address of that CRIMINAL phone call (all calls made by machines are now illegal if a human isn't there when you answer) is only known to AT&T if they look in their cache before it disappears, usually 24hrs or less.

Oh, and since you are giving completely uninformed advice, why don't you do like AT&T and tell people to get on the Do Not Call List, because you KNOW those criminals respect THAT when they get their FREE COPY from the US Government of GOOD WORKING NUMBERS who don't want to be called!!!!!!!

I don't want to change my number, but don't know how to stop these stupid "lower your student loan" calls. I know AT&T could stop these criminals, if they wanted to. But they are criminals, themselves, and made Congress pass a law exempting them from class-action lawsuit. How corrupt is that?

Lmaan42 wrote:

Great thanks

telling me they shouldn't be able to doesn't stop the fact that I keep getting my voicemail filled up everyday by the number I blocked and it's driving me crazy

Sounds to me like you might want to try contacting the police... the word "harassment" comes to mind.

LivetoErr wrote:

It's annoying having to call my voicemail to lose the notification on something that's nothing.

So don't call your voicemail for this number!

You know what the number is. The voicemail is labelled with this number. So simply delete it without listening to it.

Lee Whitmore wrote:

The number doesn't come up on missed calls, so you have to play the message to get to the number!

"The number doesn't come up on missed calls" - true, because you blocked the number.

"... so you have to play the message to get the number" Really? Isn't the voicemail labelled with the number? Can't you just see the number without playing the message?

Dude - you're getting this all wrong. When you block a phone number within the iPhone itself - like you went into their contact and clicked "block caller" - then you won't receive text messages, FaceTime calls, or voice calls. All regular calls will be automatically redirected to VM. This is not a bug, it's how it's supposed to work. If you want to permantly block a caller from contacting you, you'll need to contact your carrier.

I've just registered, fingers crossed! Below is an extract from a web page from my carrier (Vodafone) on the same subject. Registration took 5 seconds.

You can register your mobile phone number with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS)

by texting your email address to 85095 for free. They’ll reply by text to confirm your registration.

Some Android devices may say that you’ve been charged for the text. This isn’t the case.

It is an option on the phone to use a feature provided by the carrier. Similar to Voicemail. You phone can access voicemail thru settings on the device, but it is actually a carrier feature.

"Why am I still getting voice mail from a number I blocked?"

Because once they block their caller ID info, they're effectively not calling from that number anymore.

Your "problem" has nothing to do with Apple, iOS, iPhones, or any other phone for that matter. Report the calls to the proper authorities.

Great thanks

telling me they shouldn't be able to doesn't stop the fact that I keep getting my voicemail filled up everyday by the number I blocked and it's driving me crazy

So why not simply ask AT&T to block this number for you? Then you won't get voicemails from it.

The number doesn't come up on missed calls, so you have to play the message to get to the number!