HOT 252: Stopping Spam Callers - Silencing the Robocallers
Hands-On Tech (Audio)
Leo Laporte
4.3 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 1 February 2026
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
On this week's episode of Hands-On Tech, Mikah helps Omar with ways to reduce the number of scam callers he receives daily.
Send in your questions for Mikah to answer on the show at hot@twit.tv
Host: Mikah Sargent
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up on Hands on Tech, let's take a look at how we can stop all those spam callers. |
| 0:06.0 | It's about time, right? |
| 0:07.0 | Stay tuned. |
| 0:08.0 | This is Twitter. |
| 0:14.0 | Hello and welcome to Hands on Tech. |
| 0:19.0 | This is the show where I'm Micah Sargent, take your tech questions and do my doggone best to answer them. Today, we have a great question that I think comes up a lot. This is a little bit Apple-leaning, I will warn you. However, some of this stuff can apply on Android as well. Omar has written into us and says, Hi, Micah, I'm a big fan of your show. Well, |
| 0:38.8 | thanks, Omar. I'm writing to ask you what we can do with scam calls. I get over 25 a day. |
| 0:45.6 | Just last night, in a 10-minute period, I received 15 calls. First of all, Omar, that's awful. |
| 0:51.3 | That's way too many. That's ridiculous. It should stop. I checked out a paid |
| 0:55.8 | service and they wanted $129 per year. I was about to sign up with them and I thought to ask |
| 1:01.8 | you first. The more I thought about it, I felt like the iPhone might have or should have a way |
| 1:06.7 | to stop these calls. Please give me your thoughts. Well, first and foremost, yes, your iPhone does |
| 1:13.5 | have a way to help you cut back on these calls. It's a popular feature that we were all very glad |
| 1:20.3 | Apple added to the system, and it's a feature called Silence Unknown Callers, and you can access it in your Settings app. |
| 1:30.3 | So on an iPhone, if you go into the Settings app and you scroll all the way down from that |
| 1:34.9 | sort of main screen of the Settings app to the Apps section, you will need to scroll down |
| 1:40.2 | until you find your phone. Once you find the phone app in that section, within this area, |
| 1:46.1 | you will see an option that says silence unknown callers, screen unknown callers, and some |
| 1:53.3 | of the features therein. So let's talk a little bit about them. First, screen unknown callers. |
| 1:58.7 | If you have this feature turned on, what happens is it will give you |
| 2:03.2 | the option of having someone call you and get screened first. Okay? So let's talk about the three |
| 2:11.4 | different options. There's never, there's ask reason for calling, and there's silence. With never, |
... |
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