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by quxpar 1554 days ago
Americans have avoided this problem by making the overwhelming majority of phone calls spam, so any call not from an existing contact is ignored.
1 comments

I would love if that were the case, but I don't see how workable it is because caller id is spoofable, and people commonly need to pick up calls from local unknown numbers like doctors offices, mechanic, etc whose number you may not have(or who may call from a whole bank of numbers).

The best bet is to try to get a phone number from across the country. If you live in NY, get a phone number from a city you have no relation to, say Seattle. Then, anyone calling from Seattle is almost certainly spam and you can still pick up 212 or 646 numbers.

I did this by accident. Best bit of advice you can give, honestly. Most people don’t know that if you actually make friends with they guy/gal setting up your account (and not doing it online), you can literally choose your phone number. My phone number spells my (very popular) first name and is from an obscure part of the US. Any phone calls from there is spam. That being said, bots tend to use that prefix for spam, in general and for a few years there, I got a lot texts and calls: “missed call from this number, who dis” and “I don’t want your warranty” type of things. That was annoying.