Nadyne

Lifehack: use your phone’s address book to avoid scam calls

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Scam calls are a fact of life.  The Do Not Call registry has cut down on it some, but shady companies operating overseas don’t pay attention to this list.  But with just a teensy bit of effort on your part, you can readily ignore scam phone calls.  This requires a telephone with an address book and caller ID.  And it’s dead simple.  Here’s what you do:

  1. Create a new entry in your telephone’s address book named “Scam” (or whatever else you’d prefer).
    1. Optionally, if your address book supports pictures, give it a picture.  I use the no symbol: my phone’s screen is big and bright, so it gives me a visual indicator that I can see across the room when my phone rings.
    2. Optionally, if your phone supports ring tones, give your Scam contact a silent ringtone.  Here’s one for you in different formats and lengths.
  2. Whenever you get a scam call (for some reason, I’ve been getting a lot of the Windows malware calls lately1), add that phone number to your Scam entry in your address book.
  3. Whenever you see Scam on your phone, smile widely and don’t pick up the phone.

You could go a step further and assume that anyone who isn’t in your address book is probably a scam caller, or just someone who you don’t want to talk to.  In that case, and if your phone supports it, you could set your default ringtone to silent (either its silent setting, or using a silent ringtone — I prefer the latter, since my phone vibrates when it’s in its silent mode), and then assign custom ringtones to those whose calls you want to ring.

I know that this doesn’t feel like it’s a big thing, but your Scam address book entry will get long over time. I’ve only been doing this for about four months, and I’ve already got 15 telephone numbers in there.  I wrote this post because my phone just rang, and I looked up and saw that it was a scam, and smiled to myself in satisfaction that I didn’t have to interrupt what I was doing and get annoyed by someone trying to sell me carpet cleaning or Windows malware removal or whatever other method they’re trying to employ to part me from my money.  I just checked my caller history, and Scam shows up in there many times over the past couple of weeks.  All of those are calls that I haven’t answered and that haven’t wasted my time.

  1. Remind me to tell you about going along with one of these calls once. ↩

2 thoughts on “Lifehack: use your phone’s address book to avoid scam calls”

    1. Even better is the security researcher who got cold-called by one of these scammers, set up a VM, let them go to town on it, filmed the whole thing, and posted it to YouTube. Ars got cold feet and didn’t let them go all the way (which, yeah, I get it, but that’s why you let them do it in a VM!).

      I played along when they called a couple of months ago, except I didn’t have a VM handy. I happened to be ironing when they called, so I just continued ironing and made up answers as I went along. Usually I listen to music when I’m ironing to keep myself entertained, this time I wasted the time of a scammer to keep myself entertained. So the scammer asked their questions, and I gave answers that I thought could be right (but I’ve never used Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8; although I do have a Win2k8 server under my desk). But they were wrong enough that the scammer interpreted it as me not knowing anything about computers, which I was perfectly happy to let them do.

      I finished up ironing around the same time that they wanted to take control of my machine. I said that their application wouldn’t run on my computer, and the guy asked me why. I told him that EXE files won’t run on a Mac. He swore profusely and hung up on me, probably quite upset that he thought he’d reeled one in and was quite mistaken.

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