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Is anyone else receiving a staggering amount of spam calls recently?
For the record, I am Canadian and for all I know, maybe this only pertains to Canadians, maybe it only pertains to me. But I've been receiving a large amount of calls that just end up with no one on the other end, or just sounds of busy call centers, or 'wrong number calls' which are happening far too frequently for it to be a mistake. Anyone else experiencing this?
I'm American, but yes. It's gotten less bad recently. There are far too many number spoofs that my mom's Vonage picks up "accurately" (the modem display shows a mangled number, then the phone number), compared to real people.
My favorite one so far, which has recurred is this one:
Robot: "Hello!" silent background.
Me: "Hi!" (knowing it's a robot)
three second pause before call center audio kicks in
Robot: <whatever the topic is.>
I was going to say blame the Trump admin, because the FCC changed some rules to allow large-scale robocalls, but I'm not sure if that would actually affect Canadians. I guess it might, since international calling is a thing, and I don't know of any changes in Canada.
Not super recently but in the past few years, yes. It got me to finally put my number on the do-not-call list, which didn't help much, but I'm glad I did it anyway.
It also got me into the habit of screening my calls, which helped a ton. Not only did it make the spam calls not-a-problem, but it also made me realize that it was low-key unhealthy the way I would instinctively answer regardless of who was on the other end. Whereas before I might let myself be pulled into a stressful conversation with certain family members or coworkers, now I take a second, decide whether I really need to answer this call right now, and usually let it go to voicemail. Oftentimes the other party sorts out their nonsense themselves before I have a chance to call them back, but if not, I return their call at a time of my choosing when I am more mentally prepared to deal with them.
So although the spam calls suck, I was able to find a silver lining in that turd-raining shitcloud, and they mostly just don't bother me anymore.
I’m American. I’ve been getting robocalls multiple times a day for a couple of years. For some reason I’ve been getting these spam phonecalls meant for my mother about how they want to purchase a house my mother inherited, this is a pretty recent thing.
I got some spam texts about two years ago, they stopped after a couple of months but recently I’ve been getting a barrage of texts about growing my penis size.
It’s definitely getting worse. Though that’s probably because I sometimes answer the call and just say “Itsa me, Mario."
American here - I was used to about 3 spam calls per week for the past year or so. These past two weeks, I can get 5 or more per day. Somedays I don't get any and other days I get at least 5 calls and two or three texts. Seems that they're ramping up their spam
Agreed, it's been especially bad for the past 2. No, my utility company is not going to give me a a free vacation to mariott after I confirm my credit card has not been stolen.
I suspect some sort of exploit discovered or a mass of numbers was un-blacklisted.
Spam calls, spam texts to my cellphone, but the spam emails (dozens of the same "hot singles" format) that were so terrible last month have faded. I'm questioning even having a landline anymore. The nostalgia doesn't make up for the irritation.
I am consistently surprised to hear that people still have these
Habit is a hell of a drug.
I got a lot of robocalls over the past few years. Usually it's the "Hello, I've heard you've been in an accident that wasn't your fault, is that correct?"
The weirdest ones I got were UPS scam robocalls in Chinese. I'm British...
Told people at work about the latter and they were skeptical, then actually got one such robocall, put it on loudspeaker and showed them just to prove my point.
Steadily worse over the past few years. Fraud and scams I general have ballooned in popularity post-Covid. Now a frequent occurrence on my mobile. If I don't recognize the number then I don't even bother. At least 7/10 calls received are human or robot spam. If it's a human calling about something I might care about, then they can leave a message. I'll never get a landline.
We have to warn customers that scammers can spoof numbers and even hijack existing conversation threads they may have open from us, i.e. for emergency alerts.
Also Canadian, and yep, on my cellphone I used to get them once a month or so, but since COVID started it's risen to several times a week now. A lot of them are automated robocalls in what I can only assume is Mandarin or Cantonese, and the most annoying part is that they rotate the phone numbers they use so I can't even block them effectively. And the remainder are just your garden variety cold calls for various (likely shady/fly by night) businesses like air duct cleaning, landscaping, or repaving services. At least those ones I can block, but they're still pretty obnoxious. Strangely enough, my landline barely gets any spam/scam calls though, so that's good.
Luckily, between my carrier's (T-Mobile US) spam blocking and the Pixel's call screening feature, I haven't dealt with more than one or two spam calls a week for a year.
It's annoying, but this is a mostly solved problem with the right devices and carriers. I've noticed that my friends on AT&T with iPhones seem to get far more spam calls than about any other combination of phone and carrier, and even in my personal experience I've never gotten more spam calls than in my time on AT&T.