Phone Spam

Sometimes I get calls on my cell phone from numbers I don't recognize. Some of these are toll-free, others are not. I've looked up a couple of the numbers on Google and learned that their sources are scammish, or at least unscrupulous. I also receive text-message spam occasionally, so I went into my Verizon Wireless account to see if I could set up blocking on the sources of these calls and texts.

Guess what? Verizon thinks that I should pay for this privilege. As of now it will let me block five numbers without charge, but the blocks expire in three months, which means I'll have to go back in and set them up all over again. If I want to make them permanent, or not have a restriction on how many numbers I want to block, I would have to pay an additional $5 per month.

That's just greed, my friends. I might consider paying a one-time fee of $5, but every month? Gotta be kidding me. If you think about it, why should I even have to go into my account? The ability to block a number should be built into a phone, in its call history: mark this number as spam.

Think of email as an analogy: when you get spam email messages, your email program either diverts them to a spam folder, or you can designate them as spam and the program will treat messages from the same sender as spam in the future, or you can just delete them each time you receive them. But you don't have to pay anything extra to the maker of your email program, or your internet provider, for doing this. Shouldn't it be the same with our phones?