In recent years, as the number of spam and robocalls have flooded my phone lines, I started to notice a pattern. Many of them showed up with an area code and middle 3-digits that matched my own phone number. It was obvious that this was a trick to get you thinking that the call could be local and that almost copying your exact number would bring a comfort and familiarity to increase your chances of answering.
Now, while I hadn’t heard anyone openly talk about it, I tried my best to share this with friends and family to discourage them from answering, explaining to them the idea. Today, Verizon announced a new feature as a part of their Call Filter app that will take care of these exact type of calls.
This tactic is apparently called neighbor or neighborhood spoofing, and as Verizon explains, you have most definitely seen these calls where the area code and prefix of your phone number has been matched to get you to consider answering them.
The Call Filter Free and Call Filter Plus service from Verizon has a new “Neighborhood Filter” option in it to manage these. Verizon says that you can find it in the “Block Filters” area of the “Management” section.
When activated, Call Filter will block all calls that fall under your neighborhood numbers lists. You can set up to 10 of these neighborhood numbers for Verizon to watch out for, and it will indeed block any that match the criteria. Should it also block a legitimate call, you can go back into the app and tap the “Ignore Filter” option within its post-call details.
As you can see in the image above, you setup neighborhood numbers with area code and prefix, plus you can tell it to just block those “similar to mine.” There is actually a good amount of settings here to help you get rid of all those damn spam calls.
Grab the latest version of Call Filter to get his excellent new feature.
This post was last modified on July 12, 2021 11:06 am