I have two kids, am self-employed (tutoring) in my community, and have many friends and acquaintances are over 40 (from church, for instance). Sending unknown numbers to voicemail has been completely fine in every case. I've never missed an urgent call that I couldn't call right back after I read the voicemail transcription.
By contrast, in December, I had these time-sensitive calls from unknown numbers: airline lost luggage delivery, Amazon delivery who couldn't get in, my kids' doctors, my pharmacy, someone from my accountant's firm, a bank rep, and a few organizations returning my call. December was a typical month, if a bit slow.
In theory, I could get a voicemail and then follow-up, but that would result in significant time wasted for both sides (e.g., calling doctors again or setting up re-delivery), and the total time I spent on dealing with spam calls is ~1 minute (5-10 seconds x 5-10 occurrences).
Exactly, that's why I love this feature. I don't even have to ignore the call, it just silently goes to VM.
Worth the occasional missed call IMO; I say on my VM msg if you are calling me and I don't know you leave a message otherwise your call will go to VM without ringing.
Snail mail is so overloaded with spam it might as well be the same.
The fact two fundamental and official mass communication channels are functionally useless is a sign of the rot in our country.
Email is teetering on the void. Chat is balkanized and siloed, same with social media, unlike telephony there is no source monopoly or tradition of cross standards.
Txt is the last bastion. It'll die in the next decade I'd guess.
1. Reading a message is low-obligation compared to answering a phone or taking physical mail out of a box.
2. A shorter message has less room to both contain a scam and a cover story. Necessarily, either the payload or the cover story or both are thinner in an SMS message than a scam email.
3. But most importantly, social customs around text messages conversations are different from phone etiquette: besides being unauthenticated, caller-id came after decades of being expected to answer the phone without knowing who was calling or why.
A stranger sending a legitimate but unexpected text message feels obligated to explain WTF they're contacting you. "You don't know me, but..." Scammers, on the other hand, are trying to bypass this. "Oh, you know me."
Tying into point #2, a low-data channel like an SMS conversation is a high-context interaction. Have you ever gone back and read old SMS conversations and noticed a difference between the richness of your memory of the interaction and the sparseness of what the text actually said?
(Google search results pull the quote, "Generally, high-context cultures prefer oral communications, while low-context cultures favor written communications." My thesis is the telephone is a technology that turns oral communication into a low-context activity, and SMS is a technology that turned textual communication into a high-context activity. It's not impossible but more difficult for untargeted scams to go unnoticed in a high context channel.)
> The fact two fundamental and official mass communication channels are functionally useless is a sign of the rot in our country.
It's a problem everywhere. This is what you get when you let the advertising industry operate unchecked. Scam calls and snail mail spam are just piggybacking on the fact that phone companies and postal services encourage and make money on telemarketing and mass marketing e-mails.
It's going to be hard to solve one without solving the other, as the difference between those scams and typical marketing communication is a matter of degree, not kind.
It is not a problem everywhere. I do not get snail mail spam or call spam in Germany. For post it was enough to put up a sticker that forbids advertisements. No idea really why call/sms spam isn't a problem.
I envy you. You're either incredibly lucky, or Germans are really law-abiding.
Here in Poland, the sticker that forbids advertisements does jack all. The post office might stop delivering spam, but most of the garbage in my mailbox comes from private individuals, hired by local companies, delivering the spam personally.
Call/SMS spam dropped somewhat thanks to GDPR, though I've experienced a uptick in the past few years, primarily driven by cryptocurrency scammers and fly-by-night companies selling photovoltaics. I do get an extra amount of phone spam, because I had a business and my phone number is listed in the business database.
Note that I do consider first-party (as in, from companies I have relationship with) cold calls as spam and scam too. Telcos in particular are notorious for scamming people - at this point, there is not much of a difference between scams discussed in this thread, and technically legal upsells and bullshitting done by my phone operator.
(They're not that better off-line, either. Only few weeks ago, a sales rep from a high-profile salon tried to scam my grandmother, by deceiving, manipulating, outright lying and using psychological pressure tactics, to get her to sign for a TV and Internet service she doesn't want or need. That happened physically, in the salon, when she went there to take over my late grandfader's phone contract.)
If it can be used to reach you and the cost of sending messages is low or zero, it will be destroyed by spam. I'm not sure anything can stop it, even serious dedicated police action and regulation.
