this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Android prompts me to "Block and Report Spam" for spam phone calls, in both the Phone app for regular phone calls and the Voice app for calls through Google Voice.

There is no way to report spam in either app without blocking the number.

Spammers and scammers change their phone numbers frequently. Daily or more, in the case of sophisticated large operations. Those numbers get reassigned to innocent users, who will forever be blocked from calling me.

"Dumb" phone number blocks should only last for maybe a month or a year, not forever. And we should have "smart" blocks, that sync to phone number registration databases and expire when the number changes hands.

This is going to become an increasingly impactful problem if we keep using phone numbers as identifiers while most phone number users don't keep the same number for decades.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Half the spam calls I've gotten have a 1/10,000 chance of being local to me by using the same area and exchange code - XXX-XXX-????. About 1/4 use the same area code, so 1/10,000,000. The other 1/4 are in that 1/10bil chance. Still, unlikely since there aren't too many in the 1/10k bucket with reason to call me, but it's important to not misrepresent the majority of calls having odds off by 3 magnitudes.