Now I don't answer a call if the number isn't in my contacts and I'm not expecting a call from a new source.

It's not so much that I'm less willing nowadays to talk to a stranger on the phone (I could not BE much less willing) but now I know when it's a stranger. Why would I, then, pick up the phone? To what end?

Me: (Explains my phone will not ring, since they're not in my Contacts. They can leave a VM, & then TXT me, which WILL ding.)

Them: "OMG, I WISH I could do that. But I can't, obviously."

This exact exchange happens very often. It's a joy every time.

This moose has just answered a couple of the robocall card fraud calls, so the ba*ds have started up again...

1) "Thank you for buying tickets from East Midlands Trains..."

2) "This is a call from Bank Security..."

Standard response: hang up, open the "Who called me" (https://https://who-called.co.uk/) website and log the date, time and a brief description. Eventually it gets reported up the line to the VOIP or Mobile company and they cancel the scammers access. 3:O|>

Your direct number or means of contact is reserved for your close friends and family. Not answering is the digital equivalent of "No Soliciting" signs or answering machines.

If a complete stranger walks up to & and acts like your friend you walk away.

Entering a business; same thing.

You reserve the right to protect your personal space.

Before digitisation and tech scammers & social engineers just bought the phonebook.

If the advertising industry died in a fire we'd all be better off.

I think they cannot sell spam protection subscriptions in Europe. But I just looked it up my provider rolled out a spam protection service last November. Did not see a difference.
Still get a lot of calls that either ring once or have a robot telling me that they have a job for me ...

That's the most suspicious thing I've ever heard.

But they're pretty lax about bothering to do anything about it. As you say, they have little incentive. In fact, I don't know how it is elsewhere, but over here in America they actually now get to sell people a spam blocking subscription (so they actually have incentive to not help people for free to get more money for it...)

The German website (which I also used several times) should be notified automatically by the ISPs when there are many reports of people blocking the number.

And it should not be a localized German thing.

All I am saying is this is a 25+ years old problem that is not being solved on purpose as there is no incentive to do so.

I argue that the manufacturers are not the ones that need to take action. It is the ISPs who give away these numbers or allow them to be spoofed. Going for the root cause vs symptoms.

And I am not sure how many people actually block vs how many get scammed.

Responsibility should not be on the end user!

Now I have literally set my default ringtone to silence and then manually set contacts to have a ringtone. It's now so bad my default is to not even ring or vibrate. I've gone from not answering to not even knowing if there's a call because 99.99999999% of it is spam.

And now they're ruining text messages too!

The blocking is local, the report function indeed doesn't seem to go to the ISP but to the phone manufacturer. But it seems to work in the sense that spam calls are exceedingly marked as potential spam already when the phone rings.

Additionally, here in Germany it's quite easy to report these calls to the responsible agency via a web portal, and spammers are identified and get fined quite often...