Also caused me to completely miss an appliance delivery because the driver called me from his personal cell, I forgot I had "unknown callers" filtered, and he gave up when he couldn't reach me. Even though I get way more spam calls than legitimate calls, I realized that fully half of the legitimate calls I get are from numbers not in my contacts: delivery drivers, doctors offices, restaurants confirming reservations, etc. The collateral damage of this setting was worse than the scam calls for me.
Compromise solution --- send unknown callers directly to voice mail.
Or better yet, ask them to press a random number to connect the call --- before the phone will even ring or go to voice mail. This effectively weeds out most auto-dialers.
I have a Panasonic phone (connected to VOIP) that has this feature built in. It also has text to speech that reads the caller ID out loud. It's amazing how creative these hardware vendors have gotten now that their market is shrinking.
I have two kids, am self-employed (tutoring) in my community, and have many friends and acquaintances are over 40 (from church, for instance). Sending unknown numbers to voicemail has been completely fine in every case. I've never missed an urgent call that I couldn't call right back after I read the voicemail transcription.
By contrast, in December, I had these time-sensitive calls from unknown numbers: airline lost luggage delivery, Amazon delivery who couldn't get in, my kids' doctors, my pharmacy, someone from my accountant's firm, a bank rep, and a few organizations returning my call. December was a typical month, if a bit slow.
In theory, I could get a voicemail and then follow-up, but that would result in significant time wasted for both sides (e.g., calling doctors again or setting up re-delivery), and the total time I spent on dealing with spam calls is ~1 minute (5-10 seconds x 5-10 occurrences).
Exactly, that's why I love this feature. I don't even have to ignore the call, it just silently goes to VM.
Worth the occasional missed call IMO; I say on my VM msg if you are calling me and I don't know you leave a message otherwise your call will go to VM without ringing.
Snail mail is so overloaded with spam it might as well be the same.
The fact two fundamental and official mass communication channels are functionally useless is a sign of the rot in our country.
Email is teetering on the void. Chat is balkanized and siloed, same with social media, unlike telephony there is no source monopoly or tradition of cross standards.
Txt is the last bastion. It'll die in the next decade I'd guess.
1. Reading a message is low-obligation compared to answering a phone or taking physical mail out of a box.
2. A shorter message has less room to both contain a scam and a cover story. Necessarily, either the payload or the cover story or both are thinner in an SMS message than a scam email.
3. But most importantly, social customs around text messages conversations are different from phone etiquette: besides being unauthenticated, caller-id came after decades of being expected to answer the phone without knowing who was calling or why.
A stranger sending a legitimate but unexpected text message feels obligated to explain WTF they're contacting you. "You don't know me, but..." Scammers, on the other hand, are trying to bypass this. "Oh, you know me."
Tying into point #2, a low-data channel like an SMS conversation is a high-context interaction. Have you ever gone back and read old SMS conversations and noticed a difference between the richness of your memory of the interaction and the sparseness of what the text actually said?
(Google search results pull the quote, "Generally, high-context cultures prefer oral communications, while low-context cultures favor written communications." My thesis is the telephone is a technology that turns oral communication into a low-context activity, and SMS is a technology that turned textual communication into a high-context activity. It's not impossible but more difficult for untargeted scams to go unnoticed in a high context channel.)
> The fact two fundamental and official mass communication channels are functionally useless is a sign of the rot in our country.
It's a problem everywhere. This is what you get when you let the advertising industry operate unchecked. Scam calls and snail mail spam are just piggybacking on the fact that phone companies and postal services encourage and make money on telemarketing and mass marketing e-mails.
It's going to be hard to solve one without solving the other, as the difference between those scams and typical marketing communication is a matter of degree, not kind.
It is not a problem everywhere. I do not get snail mail spam or call spam in Germany. For post it was enough to put up a sticker that forbids advertisements. No idea really why call/sms spam isn't a problem.
I envy you. You're either incredibly lucky, or Germans are really law-abiding.
Here in Poland, the sticker that forbids advertisements does jack all. The post office might stop delivering spam, but most of the garbage in my mailbox comes from private individuals, hired by local companies, delivering the spam personally.
Call/SMS spam dropped somewhat thanks to GDPR, though I've experienced a uptick in the past few years, primarily driven by cryptocurrency scammers and fly-by-night companies selling photovoltaics. I do get an extra amount of phone spam, because I had a business and my phone number is listed in the business database.
Note that I do consider first-party (as in, from companies I have relationship with) cold calls as spam and scam too. Telcos in particular are notorious for scamming people - at this point, there is not much of a difference between scams discussed in this thread, and technically legal upsells and bullshitting done by my phone operator.
(They're not that better off-line, either. Only few weeks ago, a sales rep from a high-profile salon tried to scam my grandmother, by deceiving, manipulating, outright lying and using psychological pressure tactics, to get her to sign for a TV and Internet service she doesn't want or need. That happened physically, in the salon, when she went there to take over my late grandfader's phone contract.)
If it can be used to reach you and the cost of sending messages is low or zero, it will be destroyed by spam. I'm not sure anything can stop it, even serious dedicated police action and regulation.
Same problem with physical mail in the U.S. 99% of physical mail I get is commercial garbage, but I still have to sift through them since I don’t want to miss the remaining 1% from IRS.
They often call at dispatch time to ensure you’re there to accept delivery. They don’t want to drive out, only to have to return the appliance because nobody was home.
I’ve had several occurrences where a delivery person would get all the way to my house, park on my street, call my phone, and if I didn’t answer, just drive away. I don’t think it’s always about the mileage, sometimes the driver is just lazy and wants any excuse to not have to do their job.
(It’s happened with a package delivery, as well as a washing machine installation. In the latter case it was Home Depot, when I finally got ahold of them they said it was my fault for not answering the phone and that I had to reschedule for 2 weeks out, meanwhile I didn’t have a working washing machine. I cancelled the order instead, went to Lowe’s and had a washer in a few hours.)
Drivers I have had in the past just don't want to waste the mileage and gas if they can't guarantee that someone will be there, which to some extent I can understand even if it has caused me to miss delivery windows..
And emergency calls of various kinds etc. Fortunately it's not so bad for me that I'm willing to make myself harder to reach for legitimate, and possibly important, purposes.
Mobile phones just don't offer it by default --- the best most have is a "Do not disturb" setting.
There is a marketing opportunity here for some software developer --- lots of people would actually *pay* for a mobile app that could effectively weed out auto-dialers and/or selectively send only unknown callers directly to voice mail without ringing the phone.
Yes, he should have totally gone to the dispatch warehouse the day before and looked up the delivery driver schedule and called the delivery driver at home to let him know that when he delivers his appliance the next day, he should text instead of call if communication was required the next day.
Or even simpler, put on his Beam-a-Thought helmet and sent a message back in time directly into the noggins of every delivery driver at the warehouse.
I'm not convinced the solution to the problem "I'm not able to deliver this item because you're not answering the door or phone" is to expect delivery drivers to use asynchronous communication methods and plan their day around making deliveries when people that can't or won't respond immediately get around to replying.
I receive more spam SMS than scam calls too. Some of them are even asking me to provide information for the benefit of fake deliveries...
I use voicemail for that, I still get alerts for a new voicemail, and often the scam calls will just move on when there isn't an answer, or you can listen and it's pretty easy to tell if it's legitimate
I assume in the parent they still accept voicemails. I'm sure your partner would be aware of your policy of not picking up unknown numbers and think to leave a voicemail in this situation.
