How Much Is Verizon Call Filter

If you live in the Us, chances are y'all that dread answering your iPhone when it rings, if you fifty-fifty carp at all. For the past few years, we've been suffering a growing epidemic of spam calls—I go iii to four a solar day, and Adam Engst has taken to sending all calls that aren't from contacts to voicemail (see "Beware "iCloud Breach" Phone Scam," 23 May 2018).

To address this scourge, cellular carriers have started offering complimentary solutions for their customers: AT&T has Call Protect, and T-Mobile provides Scam Block. Until now, Verizon had been charging $2.99 per calendar month for its customers to use its Verizon Call Filter app. That paid tier is still bachelor, but Verizon now too offers a complimentary tier that lets y'all place, cake, and report spam calls.

When you lot first open the Verizon Call Filter app, information technology prompts you to requite it admission to your contacts and enable Call Filter in Settings > Phone > Phone call Blocking & Identification. Like many other such apps, Phone call Filter works through the CallKit framework that Apple released with iOS 10, which also powers apps like Hiya and Robokiller.

Enabling Verizon Call Block in iOS settings.

Next, y'all have to activate the characteristic in the Call Filter app itself. Open it, make sure you're in the Screening screen, and if information technology says at the top "Yous're not protected," tap "Turn on for free" and follow the prompts. Verizon says that it could take upwardly to an hour for the feature to be enabled on your account, so yous might as well go out the app and go practice something else for a while.

(If you don't see a gratis choice, check the App Store to make sure you have the latest version installed. Yous may have to delete and reinstall the app for it to prove up. If information technology's all the same non showing up, make sure you lot're not already subscribed to Verizon'south paid tier and that yous're running iOS 12.)

When you return, you'll know Call Filter is working if, in place of "You're non protected," you meet "Y'all're protected." By default, Call Filter will alarm you only if it thinks an incoming call is spam; you can turn that off inside the app by going to the Settings screen and flipping the Spam Detection Alerts switch.

Only if yous desire to go the most out of Call Filter, you want to enable spam filtering, which you can do by going to the Cake view of the Screening screen, tapping Spam Filter Off, and so turning on "Auto-block spam calls by take a chance level." There are three levels of take chances: All Spam Calls, Medium and Loftier Risk, and High Risk Only, with All Spam Calls being the default. You might desire to start with High Risk Only to avoid accidentally blocking legitimate calls and so punch it up if you keep getting bogus calls.

The Verizon Call Block app.

After using Call Filter for over a week, I tin confirm that information technology works: it blocked 4 spam calls in a couple of days.

Calls Verizon Call Filter blocked on Josh's iPhone

For $ii.99 per month, Verizon's Call Filter service will also let yous customize the spam and block lists, identify unknown callers, and "receive risk information," whatever that ways. It's a little chintzy of Verizon to charge extra in the app, simply at least the basic features are free and all these apps charge some kind of monthly subscription fee, often to use the service at all.

While it's good that Apple has created CallKit and that carriers are offering these tools, nothing volition truly change without government intervention or improvements to our archaic telephone organization. Fortunately, there is movement on both fronts.

Every bit The Verge reports, part of the reason Verizon is offering Verizon Call Filter for free is considering the US Federal Communications Committee has threatened to have action if the carriers don't put a stop to spam calls by the end of 2019.

One of the worst parts well-nigh these spam calls, and what makes them tricky to filter out, is that the perpetrators spoof legitimate numbers. I've received at least ane profanity-laced tirade from someone who was sick of spam calls merely didn't realize that the spammers steal legitimate numbers (mine, in this example). To deal with the spoofing, and to delight the FCC, the unabridged manufacture is working on a new call authentication engineering science called STIR/SHAKEN (we're not making this up!), which will at least verify that a call is coming from the number it says it is.

Until STIR/SHAKEN becomes standard, nosotros'll have to rely on tools similar Verizon'south Call Filter, AT&T'southward Call Protect, and T-Mobile'southward Scam Block.