How to (try to) stop spam callers in South Africa

South Africans can take several measures to minimize the amount of spam calls and unsolicited marketing they are regularly bombarded with.

In 2021, Truecaller’s Global Spam & Scam Report found that South Africa had the 9th-highest rate of spam calls in the world. That was a massive jump from 17th place in 2020.

The popular call-screening app found that South Africans received an average of 13.2 monthly spam calls per user.

So even though there is legislation, and I’ve opted out, I still get a few calls every day. It is true, there may be some older form that still has a tick (or no tick) next to “Yes I’d love marketing calls” or “Don’t give my number to 3rdparty suppliers”, but either ways, the calls just don’t stop.

Truecaller has really worked well for me, so well, that I had to get rid of my iPhone and move back to an Android phone, as the Truecaller app is crippled on iOS due to not having dialler permissions.

So this app is really the only way as reporting to the police, and opting out, just don’t seem to work in practice. It is a nightmare in South Africa as far as managing it goes, and opting out of marketing calls.

See https://mybroadband.co.za/news/cellular/492323-how-to-stop-spam-callers.html
#Blog, #southafrica, #spamcallers, #technology, #Truecaller

Anyone else noticed how broken iOS 3rd party caller ID and spam caller protection has become?

Let me say up front, I migrated from Android early 2021 back to an iPhone, and I was truly spoilt with how flawlessly Truecaller worked on Android. But whilst becoming extremely disappointed at how crippled Truecaller (paid version) is on iOS, and having then subscribed to Hiya to try as an alternative, and also noticing so much not working, I started to drill deeper into the app store reviews.

What I noticed is many of these 3rd party caller ID / Anti spam call managers show ratings of 4.3 to 4.6 out of 5 start reviews. Looks very good, and there are thousands of reviews over the years... but change the sorting of reviews from 'Most Helpful' to 'Most Recent', and what you now see for the whole of 2021 and back into 2020, is just 1-star reviews and complaints about them no longer working.

It's probably worth noting that this is no coincidence, as it is not the apps themselves, but more likely due to Apple clamping down on the permission these apps can actually access to manage incoming calls. It basically looks like the market has dropped out of being able to ask for subscriptions any longer on these services. It's a great pity as I've been at the mercy of telemarketers and insurance and loans salespeople again this entire year since moving back to iOS. We can criticise Android's fragmentation and sideloading, etc, but at least they offer a solid way of blocking and reporting spam calls, and it's worth paying for that service.

Regretfully, I could not test RoboKiller as it's not available in my country's store, but it similarly seems to have an explosion of 1-star reviews from end of 2019 inwards. As it is, on iOS we do have to contend with trying to ensure the app stays active in the background, but just using Truecaller as the benchmark I have used on Android and iOS, it is like night and day, as far as the workable functionality goes. These apps generally are supposed to provide a caller ID name from crowdsourced info, advise also from that crowdsourced info whether it is a known reported spammer / robocaller, and provide us with a means of reporting / blocking calls we have received.

I really wish Apple would vet the apps that provide this service to either approve them having additional permissions, or else allowing us as users to grant those permissions, so that we also have some fully functional vetting and reporting of spam and robocallers.

#technology #robocallers #spam #iOS #truecaller #hiya

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https://gadgeteer.co.za/anyone-else-noticed-how-broken-ios-3rd-party-caller-id-and-spam-caller-protection-has-become