People reckon they’ve worked out how to stop spam phone calls once and for all.
The solution is surprisingly straightforward, and those who claim to have insider knowledge from the telemarketing sector have confirmed its effectiveness.
A Reddit user, driven to their wit’s end by relentless spam calls, sought advice on the r/lifehacks forum. They posted: “I get an insane amount of spam calls- half of them are silent when I pick up. I looked through them to see if any are ‘registered’ and almost always they are in fact unknown numbers, somehow from cities near me.
“If I get 15 calls in one day 10 of them will be junk. I don’t answer them because I heard that can help but they just keep coming. I also try to block them all but it’s just different numbers. How can I stop this?? Please help.”
And it turns out there is a simple yet ingenious method: pick up the call and immediately hit the mute button. The rationale is that the caller will mistake the silence for a dead line and subsequently erase your number from their system.
One individual on Reddit detailed the technique: “Answer the phone, but just put it on ‘mute’ and wait for them to disconnect. Most of the time they won’t actually pick up, but whether it’s a person, or just the auto dialler on the other end, it doesn’t know how to register a blank/silent line, will assume it’s a dead line, and remove the number from the call list. After it gets removed from one, it gets removed from more, etc.”
A similar post about the same issue was left in the r/LifeProTips Reddit forum five years ago. It came from someone who claimed they “used to work for a company that had ‘questionable’ marketing strategies”. They also suggested putting your phone on mute.
They wrote: “Answer the phone and immediately mute the line (important to not make any noise whatsoever). Let the robocall talk to themselves until they hang up. They will flag your line as disconnected/dead-line. Takes a bit of time but they will slowly go away once different systems/company lists have your number flagged as a DL.”