Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls?
Founder of Nomorobo here. We put a stop to all of those annoying robocalls, telemarketers, and spam&#x2F;scam calls and texts. It&#x27;s about the only thing that works nowadays.<p>It&#x27;s not your imagination - these types of calls are out of control. According to our data, 40% of all calls made in the US are illegal, unwanted spam&#x2F;scam robocalls. And those &quot;neighbor&quot; spoofed calls (same area code and extension) are especially prevalent now. Beginning last summer, they started to account for ~20% of all robocalls. Before that they were only about 2% of all robocall volume.<p>The Do Not Call list is almost completely ineffective against these types of calls. It was created 15+ years ago to stop legitimate companies from telemarketing. But today&#x27;s robocallers are criminals that don&#x27;t really care about the law. They have one goal - scam people and take their money.<p>Manually blocking calls will also get you nowhere. And please, for the love of god, don&#x27;t press a number to get on their alleged &quot;do-not-call&quot; list. That will guarantee that you will get even more robocalls - they know you&#x27;re a live number now.<p>On the technical side, our landline service (free) is powered by Twilio and our mobile product is available in both app stores (14 day free trial, $2 bucks a month after that). We&#x27;re a PHP&#x2F;Laravel shop and our team is completely remote.<p>To do the actual detection, our algorithm analyzes over 70M calls per month and adds over 1,300 new numbers to the blacklist every day. We built the world&#x27;s largest commercial telephony honeypot (300k+ lines) and can detect new attacks within minutes of them starting (even with spoofed numbers). Just last month, Nomorobo stopped over 27 million from reaching people&#x27;s phones.<p>I&#x27;m happy to answer any other questions that you have about robocalls. I&#x27;m kind of the &quot;robocall guy&quot;. I won the FTC Robocall challenge back in 2013 and grew Nomorobo to be the leading robocall blocker on the market. I&#x27;ve even testified in front of the US Senate about the robocall epidemic.