Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley breaks down how to stop robo and spam calls.

Video Transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: We're talking today about how to stop those annoying robocalls. I'm going to bring Dan Howley right in, because Dan, I think a lot of people are going to come to you and say, just give me that one line answer. How do I make it stop?

DAN HOWLEY: Oh, God, I'm so sorry, that's not the case. I am also a frequent receiver of robocalls. I usually get about three or four an afternoon asking me to extend my vehicle's long-term warranty. My car's 13 years old. I don't have a warranty at all. My father-in-law gets about 10 to 15 calls every day. So it's on the upswing again. We saw them started to fall off a little bit during the pandemic, because there weren't people around to man call centers. But they're starting to make a comeback.

So these are some tips to help you deal with those annoying robocalls. The first thing to look at is your carrier. A lot of the carriers, and by a lot, I mean the three that exist now, offer their own kind of free protection. We have AT&T with its Call Protect. T-Mobile with its Scam Shield, and Verizon, our parent company, with Call Filter. AT&T Call Protect and Verizon's Call Filter are free to monthly subscribers. You do have to pay more if you are a prepaid customer in some instances.

You also can get additional options for more protection. Basically what they're going to offer you is spam and robocall blocking, the ability to create your own list of different spam numbers so that you can put them there so that they automatically go to voice mail. And then you can get reverse call lookup, as well as Caller ID. So you're not going to get those unknown numbers anymore when you do get calls from robo services. T-Mobile Scam Shield is similar, but again, that's free. You don't have to pay for anything. So that's really a great deal there.

It really does come down to just being able to use your carrier and make sure that they are offering the right service. And I think out of those three, they're all going to be great options. But if you don't want to use those, there are available third party options. There's Nomorobo. That's right, Nomorobo. That is another service that will offer similar capabilities to what the carriers do, as well as a different pieces of technology that relate to the voice mail service that they do offer. That's $1.99 a month.

There's also YouMail. That's $3.99 a month. There is a free version, but the paid version also offers voice to text voice mail. So that's really helpful so that when you do get a call from a number that you don't recognize and it doesn't pick up and it does go automatically to voice mail, you don't have to do the whole rigmarole where you call your voice mail and have to deal with that. So you'll just be able to read it right away.

And then I have two more tips. Both Google Android and Apple iOS have the ability to block calls from numbers you don't know. Now if you don't frequently call or talk with people on the phone from numbers that you don't know, that can be very helpful. If though, you use your phone for work, you may not want to use a service like that.

So one of the quick tips that I tend to do, is when I pick up the phone, if I don't know the number, I do not say hello, I just say this is Dan Howley. And if I don't get a response, I just hang up. And that's so you don't have to hear the recording on the other end of the line telling you about your vehicle's long-term warranty or offering you a new, I don't know, Royal Caribbean cruise option, something along those lines. At least you can know that it's definitely a robocall and just hang up right away.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, Dan, I just started blocking every call that I didn't recognize, but that gets pretty tedious too. And it seems like it's a little wrong if we have to pay, right, to block some of these calls. But you can read all about this on our website. Dan there with some tips on how to avoid those annoying robo.