How to stop spam calls: what works today, and what stops the refill

Four things reduce spam calls. Three work today: turn on your phone's built-in call filter, turn on your carrier's free spam blocker, and put your number on the National Do Not Call Registry so that legitimate telemarketers stop. The fourth works over months: get your number out of the people-search sites and data brokers that sell it, so fewer new callers can pick it up. Blocking treats the symptom. Removal slows the refill.

Robocalls are a volume business. YouMail, a voicemail vendor that publishes a monthly estimate extrapolated from its own users' calls, counted about 3.8 billion robocalls in the United States in September 2026. The FTC's explanation for the volume is short: "It's cheap and easy for them to make robocalls over the internet from anywhere in the world."

Why you get so many spam calls

Your number is on lists, and lists get copied. The main ways a number spreads:

• Public listings. People-search sites publish names, addresses and phone numbers in a searchable profile. The FTC's 2014 study of nine data brokers found that none of them collect data directly from consumers; they pull from "government sources", "other publicly available sources" and "commercial sources", including "telephone directories" and web crawlers. In the report's words: "consumers are thus largely unaware that data brokers are collecting and using this information."
• Data append. The same report describes products where a client provides a name and address, and the broker "could provide the customer's landline telephone number or email address", with the appended data set "for the client's use in direct mail, telemarketing, and email marketing campaigns." That is how a company you never gave your number to can call you on it.
• Forms. Numbers also travel through sign-up forms. The FCC's advice is to read the privacy policy and look for opt-out options before submitting your number on a website, and to check the policies of the companies you do business with "for selling or sharing your information." We have no primary figure on how large a share of spam calls this explains.
• Guessing. Autodialers do not need your number from anywhere. The federal definition of an automatic telephone dialing system (47 U.S.C. 227) is equipment with the capacity "to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator" and to dial them.
• Answering. The FTC says that pressing numbers "to speak to someone or remove you from the list will probably only lead to more robocalls." An answered call confirms the number is live.

The practical consequence: blocking removes individual calls, but if your number stays on the lists, new callers keep arriving. To see which people-search sites publish yours, use the free spam call check. The sections below start with what helps today.

Does the Do Not Call Registry work?

It works for one kind of caller. In the FTC's words, the registry stops "sales calls from real companies that follow the law" and does not stop "calls from scammers making illegal calls." Calls that are still allowed after you register include "political calls", "charitable calls", "debt collection calls", "purely informational calls" and "surveys". Companies can also call you "if you've recently done business with them, or if you've given them written permission to call." The FTC's Q&A on the Telemarketing Sales Rule puts the business-relationship window at up to 18 months after your last purchase, delivery or payment.

Registering is free: go to DoNotCall.gov or call 1-888-382-1222 from the phone you want to register. The FTC says it "can take up to 31 days for sales calls to stop" and that "your registration will never expire."

Scale matters here. The FTC reported about 258.5 million active registrations as of September 30, 2025, and said complaints about robocalls "continued to make up most DNC violation complaints." In the FTC's words, "calls about reducing debt, imposters, and medical and prescription issues remained among the topics consumers most frequently reported in FY 2025." So register, because it removes the legal telemarketers, and then expect the rest to need blocking.

Block spam calls on iPhone

The built-in option is Silence Unknown Callers (Settings, then Apps, then Phone). Apple's description: "Silence automatically silences these calls and sends them to voicemail." Calls from numbers that are not in your contacts do not ring; they land in voicemail and in your Recents list.

The trade-off is that any legitimate first-time caller is silenced too: a delivery, a clinic calling back, a school. Apple's own advice is to add the people and places that matter to your contacts first. Two details from Apple's page are worth knowing: "If you call emergency services, call screening turns off for 24 hours," and "If you're roaming, phone calls are not screened, regardless of settings."

Newer iPhones add a middle setting. Apple describes Ask Reason for Calling as screening, where "the caller is asked why they're calling before your phone even rings," so you see a reason before deciding to answer. Which iPhone and iOS version you need for this depends on your device; check the Apple page.

Block spam calls on Android

Pixel phones have Call Screen. Google: "You can use Call Screen to find out who's calling and why before you pick up a call." With automatic screening turned on, the phone answers unknown calls and asks the caller to identify themselves. If it decides the call is "A spam call, your phone hangs up." If not, "your phone rings and shows you how the caller responded." On Pixel 7 and newer you can choose what gets screened: spam, "Possibly faked numbers" and "First-time callers". Automatic screening is available in the US; if you see no Call Screen settings, "your device doesn't work with Call Screen."

Other Android phones with the Google Phone app have Caller ID and spam protection. Turn on "Filter spam calls" to block suspected spam silently. Google notes: "You don't get missed call or voicemail notifications, but filtered calls are in your call history, and you can check your voicemail."

Samsung Galaxy phones use Smart Call. Open the Phone app, go to Settings, then "Caller ID and spam protection" and turn it on. You can then pick "Block all spam and scam calls" or "Only block high-risk scam calls". Samsung's caveat: "The Smart Call feature may not be available on all carriers or models."

Carrier tools: what is free, what costs

The FCC says it "allows phone companies to block robocalls by default based on reasonable analytics." AT&T and Verizon offer a free layer and a paid upgrade; T-Mobile's page did not load for our automated check, so its row only states what the FCC's call-blocking page says. Prices below are what the carriers' pages said on 2026-10-09; they change.

Carrier	Free	Paid
AT&T	ActiveArmor app: "Fraud & spam call blocking", you can "block unwanted calls or have them sent to voicemail". Included with every AT&T wireless plan.	ActiveArmor Advanced, "$7 a month": identity monitoring, safe browsing, Wi-Fi protection. The extra features are mostly not about calls.
Verizon	Call Filter: "Spam Detection, Spam Filter, Spam and blocked call log, Allow numbers, Report spam". "If you do not update your settings, spam calls will go to voicemail by default."	Call Filter Plus, "$3.99/month" per line or "$10.99/month (for 3 or more lines)": caller ID, personal block list, block by category.
T-Mobile	Scam Shield app, listed by the FCC as T-Mobile's tool "to block scam calls and robocalls". Check T-Mobile's page for the current features.	Not confirmed: T-Mobile's page returned an error to our check. See the T-Mobile link in the sources.

For most people the free tier is the one to turn on. The paid tiers add convenience, not a different kind of protection.

One thing to know about what carriers can and cannot do: STIR/SHAKEN is the caller ID authentication standard the FCC required in IP voice networks by June 30, 2021. The FCC describes it as "allowing the phone company of the consumer receiving the call to verify that a call is in fact from the number displayed on caller ID." It makes spoofing harder to hide; it does not decide whether a call is wanted, and it does not stop a caller who uses a real number.

Stop the refill: remove your number from people-search sites and data brokers

Everything above filters calls as they arrive. This section is about why they keep arriving.

An honest framing first. We have not measured how much broker removal reduces spam calls, and we have not found a primary study that does. What we can say from the FTC's own description of the industry is that people-search sites and data-append products are two of the channels through which a phone number travels from one list to the next. Fewer public copies of your number means fewer places a new caller can get it. Removal is slow (weeks per site, and listings can come back) and it does nothing about callers who already have you on a list. Think of it as reducing the inflow, not as a block.

Which kinds of sites list phone numbers:

• People-search sites (Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, TruePeopleSearch, FastPeopleSearch, Intelius, PeopleFinders and their sister sites). These show a profile with your number to anyone who searches your name, and several of them belong to the same companies, so one request can clear more than one site. Start with How to remove yourself from people-search sites, and see all guides in the people-search category.
• B2B contact databases (ZoomInfo, Apollo, RocketReach, ContactOut and their suppliers such as People Data Labs). These sell mobile numbers to sales teams, which is where cold calls at work come from. See Why your mobile number is in sales databases.
• Marketing data brokers that sell lists for telemarketing and direct mail. Most have an opt-out, and the paths differ. The full set of guides is in the data broker directory.

If you want to know where to start, use our free check: enter your number, and we show which people-search sites list it. Free, no card: check your number.

Recheck cadence: listings reappear when a site refreshes its sources. Our guides note the sites where we saw a listing come back. Searching your own number again every few months, and re-submitting where needed, is part of the job.

Spam texts

Forward unwanted texts to 7726 (it spells SPAM on a keypad). The FCC says most mobile carriers let you block spam by forwarding the message to 7726, and to check with your provider. Its other advice: "Do not respond to texts from unknown or questionable sources, and never click links in these messages." You can also file a complaint with the FCC.

On iPhone, Messages can put texts from unknown senders in a separate list: Settings, Apps, Messages, then Unknown Senders (Apple calls it Screen Unknown Senders in iOS 26 and Filter Unknown Senders in iOS 18). On Android, Google Messages has spam protection under Messages settings, then Protection & Safety. Apple's filter hides the messages; Google says suspected spam "can be dropped" or hidden in the spam folder.

If a call was a scam

If you gave out information or money on a call, the useful steps are these:

• Call your bank or card issuer on the number from your account statement or the bank's own website, not a number from the call. That is the FCC's advice for any caller who claims to be a company or agency.
• Report to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov if you lost money, or at DoNotCall.gov if you did not. The FTC asks for the number that received the call, the number on your caller ID, and any number you were told to call back. The FTC says it "releases them to the public each business day" so that phone companies can use them.
• You can also file a complaint with the FCC at consumercomplaints.fcc.gov.

The FCC's general advice on spoofed calls: "If you answer such a call, hang up immediately," and "Never give out personal information such as account numbers, Social Security numbers, mother's maiden names, passwords or other identifying information in response to unexpected calls."

What does not work

• Pressing a number to be removed. The FTC: "Pressing numbers to speak to someone or remove you from the list will probably only lead to more robocalls." Hang up instead.
• Trusting the caller ID. The FTC: "Caller ID is easy to fake, so even if it shows that a call is coming from nearby or a company you know, you can't trust it." The FCC describes "neighbor spoofing", which "displays a phone number similar to your own on your caller ID, to increase the likelihood that you will answer the call"; the FTC adds that such callers "often match the first six digits of your phone number."
• Blocking numbers one at a time. Spoofed numbers change often; the FCC: "Usually, scammers switch numbers frequently." A manual block list helps against a repeat caller that uses a real number, not against a campaign.
• Call-blocking apps you have not read the privacy policy of. The FTC's note: "Some apps access your contacts list, so know whether that's important to you. The app's privacy policy should explain how it gets and uses your information." Giving an app your contacts to protect your own number is a trade worth thinking about.
• Changing your number. It works until the new number lands on the same lists. Without removal, the cycle restarts.

FAQ

Why am I suddenly getting so many spam calls? Usually your number was added to a list: a form you filled in, or a people-search or data-broker site that sells it. Autodialers then call lists at almost no cost. The FTC says it is cheap and easy to make robocalls over the internet from anywhere in the world.

Does the Do Not Call Registry stop spam calls? Partly. In the FTC's words, it stops sales calls from real companies that follow the law, but not calls from scammers making illegal calls. Political, charity, debt-collection, informational and survey calls are also still allowed.

What is the fastest way to block spam calls on my phone? Turn on your phone's built-in filter (Silence Unknown Callers on iPhone, Call Screen or Filter spam calls on Android, Smart Call on Samsung) and your carrier's free tool (AT&T ActiveArmor, Verizon Call Filter, T-Mobile Scam Shield). Both take a few minutes.

Will removing my number from data brokers stop spam calls? It will not stop calls already in progress, and we have no measured data on how much it reduces them. What it does is shrink the number of public places that list your number, so fewer new callers can pick it up.