FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections

At this point I'm firmly of the opinion that "leak this 10 digit code and anyone on the planet can call me relentlessly" is just a broken model. Maybe that worked better when the calls carried a significant cost, but clearly the scammers are able to do this sort of thing at scale.

In practice of course, my phone is 100% permanently in "do not disturb" mode and does not ring at all unless I've added you to my contact list. Which means the scammer, already pretending to live in small town rural USA (where they most certainly are not) has to correctly guess the number of one of my relatives before my pocket actually rings. It also means I'm unreachable for anything actually important that isn't in my contact list. That's an annoying price.

I'm not sure what the correct end solution is, but the current solution seems to be very broken.

If I could just block the numbers, or auto send to voicemail, that my phone already flags as Spam/Telemarketing this wouldn’t be so frustrating for me. I do need my phone to ring for unknowns/outside my contacts numbers, so the blocking ability I need isn’t available (on iOS anyway.) I am left manually doing this when something rings if it is flagged, I will ignore it and if it’s unknown and not flagged I will answer it. It’s not perfect but could easily cut more than half of my current interruptions.

For what it's worth, upcoming iOS 26 has a new screening feature. The idea is that calls from numbers you don't have a connection with will be asked to briefly identify themselves and why they're calling. It'll show you this text and give you the choice to block/send-to-voicemail/ignore/accept.

The problem I have with my iPhone is not callers, thankfully, it’s random iMessage from emails spamming me constantly, as many as 5 per day. The “filter unknown senders” option does not appear to work at all for these scammers.