Below is a screen capture of my most recent voicemail messages:
The astute among you will have guessed that they are spam calls. I have gotten at least 34 such calls, almost all of them from the 844 area code with a handful from an 888 area code, since January 24. All but one of them are ostensibly from a Brian at Main Street Financial offering debt consolidation loans. Another is from a Dave Simone of an unspecified financial institution offering a similar loan.
I have blocked many of these numbers but, given how many possible numbers exist in the 844 exchange, this is a Quixotic task. So, practically speaking, this means that I have to either put my phone in Do Not Disturb mode,* rendering it considerably less useful as a phone, or endure constant calls from these idiots. I have chosen the former.
Apparently, this is a rather widespread issue and not relegated to these two area codes.
My mobile number is, of course, obn the FCC’s Do No Call registry, but that’s completely ineffectual. Ostensibly, the FCC has this as its “top consumer protection priority” and has for the last twenty years or so. They have done nothing to actually stop it. Nor have the cell phone companies.
Amusingly—or maddeningly—FCC put out a press release just yesterday touting their efforts in tamping down robocalls and spoofed calls coming from overseas. But I got at least seven yesterday and one so far today.
______________
*UPDATE: Actually, as a matter of general practice, I use my iPhone’s Silence Unknown Callers setting, which means that the phone rings once and then the call goes to voicemail. This is still mildly annoying, in that it interrupts streaming and buzzes my Fitbit watch but allows me to use the phone. Alas, I occasionally need to turn that feature off when I’m expecting a call from an unknown number and have to remember to reactivate it.
