Spam Phone Calls

Mark Hamill

Been getting more and more of these recently, phone calls from Eastern Europe or Africa, that hang up immediately if you answer, hoping you will call back so that they can empty your credit/rack up a huge bill.

Now, my phone's Do Not Disturb settings means they at least don't wake me up in the middle of the night and on my phone (nexus 5X) I can at least block the number /report as spam (to ... someone? I don't actually know who gets these reports). But they are still extremely annoying and my first reaction is to blame the phone networks who will immediately claim no responsibility and say they can't do anything (while taking their cut of the charges, I'm sure).

Thing is, can the network supplies actually do something preventative to stop this kind of spam? They really can't just block all calls coming from a country and while they could take reports of these spam calls and block individual numbers after the fact, that is reactionary and the numbers can be changed by the spammers and the calls keep coming.

So, to keep my rants against the networks actually informed, is there something they could/should be doing to stop these calls or are they just an annoying fact of life with mobile networks? And do they make any money from them?

ED E

Cant just block a whole country code, there'd be uproar.


You may be able to configure your phone to block all calls not from contacts.