CozyNet Blog

Writing on phones and scam calls

Publish Date: 2026-09-04

I keep a rather large and diverse RSS News Feed of various sites and blogs, and one of those is a Mr. Joel Salatin. He recently wrote a post on "Medicare scam calls," and had the following to say:

I have a flip phone, no smart phone.  I've never texted, never apped, never taken a picture or selfie, never GPSed a location and all of this partly to create private space.  I don't want the world to have access to me every moment of the day.  I don't think it's healthy.  In old school thinking, I view the phone as something I can use to call folks I want to and for folks I want to talk to, to know they can call me.  That's it.  I don't view a phone as an open door for robots to clog up and interrupt my day.

I don't even accept messages.  If it rings and I hear it and it's within reach, I answer it because I've done everything possible to limit any call I get to people from whom I want to hear.  In other words, just because I have a phone does not mean I've given permission to any entity on the planet to interrupt my day.

And I heartily agree!

He goes on to say that he's receiving robo-spam calls (or scam calls?) from Medicare, to which he chose not to opt into despite being eligible for the program and asks the following:

So here's my question, and this is not silly, satire, or stupid (I hope). How do you get these things to quit? Does anybody out there know how to stop these things? And please don't tell me "there's an app."

So I too also use a flip phone and I don't do phone "apps." I would prefer to never text either and wish I could get to a place like that, but it's a small yet important thing to keep in contact with friends, family and church who all have a preference for texting. I don't want to rock the boat over here, so I concede to at least that much.

Anyhow, from my experience, it takes preventative steps to reduce the robo calls. There's really no stopping them, but they can be prevented for the most part.

The first thing that helps is to simply not answer the call. This means relying on the built in address book of the phone so that you know who's calling. If it's from someone not in the address book and you're not expecting a call from anyone in particular, then don't answer it. The moment you answer a robo call, your number is registered to a database as being live / responsive. This is valuable information that can also be sold knowing that there's someone on that line that'll engage.

Ever get those strange calls where nobody says anything and it just hangs up? Congratulations, you're now a candidate for future spam calls!

Older people are especially prone to engage with any phone call from out of the blue, which I don't really understand why. If it's a call from a number you don't already have assigned to someone you know in the phones address book, then don't answer it. Also, caller ID is unreliable, so don't even bother with it.

I suspect figuring out how to manage an address book on a phone is probably asking too much from them however, which is why they'll answer just about any call they receive since they don't know who it could be. The other hang up too is that mobile phones are prone to just wiping your address book for no good reason and it could take hours to poke all them numbers and names back into it. It's really not convenient at all.

In this type of situation, what you could do is "pick up" the call, but say nothing. Let the caller introduce themselves first. The robo callers typically won't activate until it detects a sound coming thru the call, like "Hello?" If you say nothing and make no sounds, most of them will actually hang up after a few seconds since it's costing them money to make the call...

Handset phone with answering machine.

Another preventative step, albeit not easily feasible if using a modern mobile device, is to setup a traditional handset phone and answering machine and letting the phone ring on for a long time before the answering machine picks up. Some robo callers will attempt to engage with the answering machine, but will hang up after a few seconds of dead air. If it's someone you know leaving a message, you can pick it up right then or call back later. This is the beauty of an answering machine, because it communicates to everyone calling that you have other things going on and can't deal with them right in that moment. Voice mail services fail to communicate this and most young people will instantly hang up since nobody bothers with voice mail whereas an answering machine communicates to the caller that your message is being received and will be heard.

You can delete the spam messages like throwing away junk mail at the time of your choosing. At least it didn't drop out of the sky into your hand, uninvited and unsolicited.

Another approach here requires some intentionality by splitting up the order of priority where at home the handset and answering machine are the primary mode of contact whether that be for friends, family, accounts, billing contact, business, etc, while the mobile phone is secondary and restricted to only a small handful of people (i.e. 10 people at most.) This is something that I've been planning to do myself because there's no sense in making yourself the subject of everyone's beck and call from a single device strapped to your side 24/7. That's a "smart" phone person mentality disorganized, addicted to attention, instant gratification, and superfluous time wasting connectivity, so why copy after that with the intentional limitations of a flip phone? Go back to the handset and answering machine! If someone's calling your mobile phone while you're out working in the field, it dang sure better be your wife or someone you know otherwise don't even bother answering it.

And one more preventative step which has spared me alot of robo calls is simply not giving my phone number to every retailer, market, gas station, no-name entity that asks for it at the register. All they're doing is collecting the number to sell off to data collection brokerages that associates your purchases and location with your number as an identity. Why else do you think you get a small discount for doing that? And as for using the number for warranty and returns, is it really worth it? Just take the paper receipt and don't lose it...

There's one unfortunate factor that can't be stopped, and that's other people having your phone number on their device contact list that ignorantly permit all manner of apps access to that contact list which is sold off to yet more data collection programs. Your own grandmother could unknowingly be the source of your robo call / spam text messaging problem because of her spyware coupon apps and slot machine games. Isn't that just splendid?

And that's all I've got on this subject. If you're a techy type of individual with lots of computer skills, then setting up your own PBX service that requires dialing an extension to reach your line would be by far the best filter you could ever hope for because 99% of robo callers and live scam callers won't go thru the trouble of dialing the extension, much less even know the extension since it's something you only provide to the people that need to know it. Someday I would love to setup my own PBX phone system because I really want my answering machine back.

Thanks for reading my blog!