Consumers received more than 50 billion spam calls in 2022 and more than 55 billion spam texts
in December alone. These scammers are after our money and our most sensitive personal information,
like our social security numbers. In this video, we'll show you how to block spam on
your iPhone and report spammers so they don't bother you or anyone else that you care about.
First line of defense: Silence Unknown Callers. Open the Settings app on your iPhone, scroll down
and tap Phone, then tap Silence Unknown Callers and turn on the switch next to Silence Unknown
Callers. These are calls from people who aren't in your contacts, but they'll still
show up in Recent Phone Calls and if it's an important call, they'll leave you a voicemail.
If you're starting to miss important calls, come to the Reasons tab in the Phone app and
tap the information button next to a number you want to save as a contact,
then tap Create New Contact and enter the information.
Can't I just block the spam number? You could, but it's probably not worth your
time because call centers that do these scams, they spoof their phone numbers.
They're not real phone numbers and oftentimes what they'll do is they'll spoof a number that
looks familiar to you to make it more likely that you'll pick up the phone.
But Silence Unknown Callers might be too extreme for some people. Maybe you're expecting a call
from your doctor or you work in sales. Remember, not all unknown callers are bad.
If you're looking for something a little bit less aggressive, tap back (upper left-hand corner of
the screen) to our Phone Settings, then look for Call Blocking & Identification. Tap on that first,
turn on the switch next to Silence Junk Callers. This is a feature that's enabled by your wireless
carrier, so if you don't see it, don't worry, there's nothing wrong with your phone. When this
is on, calls that are identified by your carrier as spam get silenced and sent to voicemail.
Well, we're here, let's take a look at Business ID. Some carriers,
like Verizon, can distinguish between legitimate businesses and spammers,
so if you have this Business ID switch in your iPhone Settings, turn it on.
Another way to tell if the calls you're receiving are legitimate is by looking
in the Recent section of the Phone app in the Reasons tab in the Phone app. Look for
a little check mark below the phone number in the calls. If you see it,
your carrier is saying that is a legitimate phone number and not a spoofed phone number.
There are more ways to cut down on the number of spam calls you receive on your iPhone. We'll get
to those in just a minute, but first let's talk about spam texts. Unlike Silence Unknown Callers,
which will sometimes let a phone call through if that phone number shows up as a serious
suggestion, Filter Unknown Callers filters out anything that's not from a contact. For example,
if a phone number shows up in an email that you respond to, like from a local business,
Siri knows to let that phone number through even if you have Filter Unknown Callers turned on.
Just be careful with this setting because things like two-factor authentication codes that get sent
through text messages probably aren't numbers you have saved in your contacts, but they'll
still be on your phone, just separated from the rest of your messages in the Messages app.
To show you what this looks like, let's close out of Settings, open the Messages app,
and now you can see we've got all messages, known senders, unknown senders, and unread messages.
Before we move on to our next spam blocking tip, we want to talk about one of the clearest
signs that something is spam. If you receive an iMessage from a big business,
don't respond unless they're using Apple Business Chat. You'll know it's a verified
business if you see a little check mark next to the name of the business in your text
messages. The messages might be a different color too. The check mark means it's safe.
Speaking of clear signs, you can give YouTube a clear sign
you're enjoying this video by clicking the like button below.
You can quickly block a number once a spam text comes in, but just keep in mind that if that
number is spoofed, blocking it's not going to do very much. To block a number from a message,
go into the message and tap on the phone number at the very top of the screen,
then tap Info and then tap Block This Caller.
At T-Mobile and Verizon, don't agree on much, but they do agree on this: they can over promise
and under deliver on 5G to swindle you out of your hard-earned cash. They do agree on that,
but that's not what we're talking about in this video. We're talking about 7726. 7726 is the
magic number that lets you report spam texts to your wireless carrier. Y7726 is spell spam.
Let's take a look at how we do this on an iPhone. Press and hold on the spam message,
then tap More. If you have multiple spam messages, you can tap next to each of them to select them,
then tap the Forward button in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. In the To field,
type 7726, then tap in the Messages field and tap the Send button. You'll get a reply to your
message. You should reply to that reply with the suspicious number you're trying to report. It's
kind of a pain, but fortunately, in iOS 16, the process got a lot easier for most people.
This feature used to only work with iMessage, but with iOS 16, it works on text messages now
too. So if you have a spam text message, look for that Report Junk button at the bottom of
the message list. Tap Report Junk, then tap Delete and Report Junk, and as you'll see on your phone,
it says it's going to send it to Apple and to Verizon. So no need to do the 7726 anymore.
The US government knows spam is a problem, so they've made it somewhat easy to cut
it down on the spam you receive. Right in the first half of 2022,
US citizens only received just under 35 billion spam calls. Way to go, FTC!
We really recommend adding yourself to the Do Not Call Registry on your iPhone. Just type in
donotcall.gov. If you've never done this before, tap Register Your Phone,
fill out the information. If you have done this before, maybe you watched our last video,
you can check your registration status by tapping Verify Registration and filling out the form.
Now, the government has a database filled with real people's phone numbers that really
don't want spam calls. It's a good thing that hackers don't know about it. The Do
Not Call Registry is a good step to take. You probably will still receive some spam though,
because spammers aren't necessarily known for their adherence to the rules.
Fortunately, you can report these spammers to the FTC on your iPhone. Go to
reportfraud.ftc.gov. We're going to go there, and they've got this big Report
Now button which you can tap on to report a spammer. It's kind of like the button
at the crosswalk that doesn't really do anything, but you get to press it.
You might be asking yourself, will this really make a difference? And just like voting, you
alone probably not, but big things can happen when a bunch of people come together. Two years ago,
for instance, the FCC issued a $225 million dollar fine to telemarketers who made a ton of robocalls.
But they only really go after the big fish, so as good as this registry is, this not gonna make
that big of a difference, just like voting. But you can make a really big difference for
us by clicking that Subscribe button below this video. It helps us out tremendously.
If changing your iPhone settings and reporting spammers to the government isn't enough,
there are some spam blocking apps that we should talk about. Wireless carriers offer
spam blocking apps, but we recommend starting with a third-party app like Nomorobo, Truecaller,
or Robo Killer. For a few reasons, most important reason they're free.
Second most important reason, if you switch carriers, you don't have to get a new app.
And carriers are just so good at nickel and diming people to death these days.
Let's head to the App Store,
tap the Search tab (lower right-hand corner of the screen) and let's type in Truecaller. We're
not sponsored by Truecaller, just one of the many you can pick. Tap the Install button to the right
of Truecaller or the other app Nomorobo, Robo Killer. One of our live streams recently, somebody
said Nomorobo was good. Okay, check out our live streams Tuesdays 11 a.m. Eastern or thereabouts.
Once the app has finished installing, tap Open,
tap Next, tap Next, tap Get Started. We're going to go into the Settings app on our phone, tap the
Open Settings button and under Call Blocking & Identification we have our Business ID, Silence
Junk Callers and now Truecaller switches. What are we doing with them, David? We turn them on.
You might be concerned about privacy; does this give Truecaller access to your phone calls? The
answer is no. What happens is whenever you receive a phone call, that number gets checked against
Truecaller's list or whatever app you're using and if it's spam, it could be labeled or blocked by
the app itself. All this being said, you might need to be careful with a third-party app. We
had someone in our livestream the other day saying they installed one of these spam-blocking apps and
it just blocked pretty much everything on their iPhone. They got on the phone with Apple Support
and Apple Support said to reset all settings, which is really bad advice. So if you're getting
too many things blocked on your iPhone, try uninstalling the app and finding an alternative or
tweaking the settings a little bit. So far we've only dealt with the Phone and Messages app, but
what about the spam texts that come through other apps like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp? What can
we do about those, David? Third-party iPhone apps like Truecaller can't check other iPhone apps like
Messenger or WhatsApp, so it's really up to you to be vigilant, be cautious and here are some tips to
help you stay vigilant. If you get an alarming text or phone call, take a deep breath, take a
step back. National Grid probably isn't shutting off your power, you definitely did not win a $100
Amazon gift card. If it seems suspicious, it probably is. Recently I've been getting spam
texts that say my membership to something is about to renew and I could just go somewhere to
cancel it real quick because I don't want to lose that $50 of my monthly payment to nothing. That's
pretty smart. Just make sure you're not clicking links from numbers you don't recognize. Before
we explain what to do if you accidentally click a link in a spam message, you should click on
the link that is labeled Join below this YouTube video. That's how you become a channel member,
get access to custom badges and emojis, PDFs or some of our settings videos and a whole lot more
and it's one of the best ways to support us. If you do click on a link, double-check the website
address. A lot of the times they're similar though, so you do have to be careful. Don't
enter any information, especially your passwords or credit card information. And if you haven't
entered any information, don't worry, just close the tab. People get concerned that they get a
virus if they go to the wrong website, but that's not how this works. What happens is the spammers
trick you using a fake website into giving up your personal information. You have to give them your
information really to get hacked. Still, it is a good idea to clear your history and website data.
So let's step back to the main page of Settings on our iPhone, scroll down, tap Safari, scroll down
and tap Clear History and Website Data. Now that you've blocked spammers, check out our next video
to learn about the signs your iPhone has been hacked and what you can do about it.