I hate getting called by telemarketers or other spammers on my iPhone. I get relatively few calls each day so when one happens it tends to attract my attention quite strongly. Things like the Do Not Call registry can help but they cannot eliminate the problem of getting these spam calls.
This is the strategy I’ve come up with to mitigate their impact on my daily life. You can’t prevent your phone from responding to a call (without crazy jailbreak hacks) but you can control how it responds.
- I have created an entry in my contact book with the name Spam Caller.
- I then attached a silent ringtone to that contact and set their vibration alert to None.
- Every time I get a call from a new spammer I add their number to this contact.
Voilà my phone now essentially ignores their calls. The next time I pick up my phone I’ll see a missed call from Spam Caller which I know I can safely ignore.
Here is a silent ringtone I created for this purpose: Silent Ringtone