5 ways to protect yourself from phone spam

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Protect your phone number from any intrusion.

It's hard to imagine a person who has never received calls from spammers. Professional dialers interfere with life for everyone who once accidentally "lit up" their number when applying for a loan or registering on the site.

Often, fraudsters also use contact information for personal gain. Each time their schemes become more sophisticated. Calling is worth it Banks have recognized the massive nature of calls to customers from substituted numbers of citizens, allegedly from Russian banks.

In 2019, Sberbank warned Sberbank warned of a new type of banking fraud about a surge in telephone fraud cases: scammers have mastered artificial intelligence technology and can now use other people's voices when making a call.

Why you shouldn't call back unknown numbers

The most harmless option is when calls are made by a robot to check if the number is active. You will not get anything useful from such a conversation, but let all spammers know that you are ready to conduct conversations with them.

Often, when calling back, users are faced with cute call center operators who ask a lot of questions and deliberately take time. In this case, the conversation is conducted on a paid telephone line, and at these minutes rather large sums are debited from the subscriber.

How to deal with spammers

We are sharing ways to help you find out who called, prepare for fraudulent attacks, and stop the flow of telephone spam.

1. Block spammers

The first way is the simplest and most obvious. Only works if you have a spammer or scammer's number.

1. Open "Phone".
2. Go to "Contacts".
3. Select a number and click “Block Caller” (this function is usually found at the bottom of the screen or in the menu).

2. Check the numbers

Contacts of phone scammers and spammers tend to travel quickly across the Internet. There are special services that collect user reviews for certain numbers. Just choose a site that you like best, enter the numbers you are interested in and read what other people have written about it.

Here is a small list of free services for checking numbers:

• Ktozvonit.org;
• Someone is calling.rf;
• Cheinomer.ru.

You can also leave your feedback on the number. This will expand the base and help other users identify telephone spam.

3. Download an anti-spam application

Today, on the technology market, you can find many programs to combat annoying calls from spammers and scammers. True, you need to be careful when choosing a utility: often applications ask for a user number and access to the phone book, after which the contacts get into a common database. How this data is then used is an open question.

Nevertheless, such programs have large databases of spam numbers and can automatically detect caller information during an incoming call. We offer applications for Android and iOS that do not require user data.

Who is calling

Paid phone spam protection program. The database contains about a million numbers. Each has reviews from real users.

If you configure the application, then the automatic caller ID will turn on. During an incoming call, the caller's category - spam, call center, bank - or company name will be displayed.

Reviews for numbers can be viewed both in the application itself and in the call log. All user comments are anonymous.

Application not found

Yandex - with Alice

For Android, Yandex offers similar functionality. The mobile application has a call recognition function, the numbers are determined using the Yandex. Directory database or user reviews.

The developers claim that there are about five million organizations in the database. If there is no information on the number, then the screen during an incoming call will display "Possibly - advertising / debt collection / spam".

Caller ID can be enabled in the application settings.

4. Connect the directory of organizations

Thousands, if not millions of users have the 2GIS application on their smartphones. But not everyone knows about the "Caller ID" option.

It can be enabled in the phone settings. In the case of the iPhone, you need to act like this:

1. Go to "Settings".
2. Open "Phone".
3. Select "Block. and identif. calls ".
4. Turn on "2GIS".

Thus, the name of the organization will be determined at the time of the incoming call. There is no reason to doubt the accuracy: 2GIS has a huge database of city and mobile numbers. However, it should be borne in mind that the program detects contacts of legal and respectable organizations, not spammers and fraudsters. But in war, all is fair.

5. Use operator options

All operators offer spam blocking options to their subscribers. Most often, these options are paid, but they are quite effective. Here's how much the Blacklist function costs for different operators:

• MegaFon - 1 ruble per day;
• MTS - 1.5 rubles per day, blocking SMS spam for free;
• Beeline - 1, 01 rubles;
• Tele2 - 1, 1 ruble.

Advice for the future

When registering on sites, try to indicate your phone number only where it is absolutely necessary. And do not ignore user agreements: they, as a rule, have all the information about the possibilities of the further fate of your data.

Do not click on suspicious links that come in SMS. And be careful about distributing your number on Internet message boards.