Helping you fight Phone Spam
March 20th, 2009 | Published in Google Voice
Among the GrandCentral features that we have carried over to Google Voice, is the ability to tag a caller as spam. This means that future calls from that number will not ring your phones, will not be in your messages when you check voicemails from your phone, but will end up in a Spam folder that you can check whenever you feel like it, similar to your Gmail spam filter. Tagging a caller as spam only affects your account and is not shared with other users.
One of the lesser known features of the Phone Spam filter is that we also collect numbers from reported (and confirmed) Phone spammers to block them for the benefit of all our users (we call it Craig's list internally since Craig came up with that idea). These are not individual pranksters reported by individual users, but automated dialers that call thousands of numbers every day.
Phone Spam is something most of us wish we had never experienced (those of you who have not yet received your "second notice that the factory warranty on your vehicle is expiring", count yourself lucky), but it is unfortunately a growing trend.
The Phone Spam list has also carried over to Google Voice and data shows its growing usefulness: we are blocking tens of thousands of calls on a daily basis, and that number is growing daily. Although we can't promise you won't get reminded about your factory warranty, we'll do what we can to help you avoid it...
One of the lesser known features of the Phone Spam filter is that we also collect numbers from reported (and confirmed) Phone spammers to block them for the benefit of all our users (we call it Craig's list internally since Craig came up with that idea). These are not individual pranksters reported by individual users, but automated dialers that call thousands of numbers every day.
Phone Spam is something most of us wish we had never experienced (those of you who have not yet received your "second notice that the factory warranty on your vehicle is expiring", count yourself lucky), but it is unfortunately a growing trend.
The Phone Spam list has also carried over to Google Voice and data shows its growing usefulness: we are blocking tens of thousands of calls on a daily basis, and that number is growing daily. Although we can't promise you won't get reminded about your factory warranty, we'll do what we can to help you avoid it...