Technologies

I Found the Only Fix for Scam Calls That Actually Works

Yes, you can actually silence those annoying calls without changing your number.

Nobody likes spam calls. There is nothing quite as infuriating as being interrupted in the middle of dinner just to hear a pitch for car insurance, a useless survey, or ten seconds of dead air. It feels like an unavoidable part of owning a phone, but you don’t actually have to stand by and let «Scam Likely» ruin your afternoon.

The good news is that you don’t have to just accept these interruptions as a fact of life. You can actually shut them down with one remarkably simple solution. Imagine never having to deal with a mystery number ever again; it’s the kind of digital peace everyone has wanted since the first telemarketer picked up a headset.

We’ve got the exact details on how to banish these calls once and for all. If you’re ready to stop being a target for every scammer with an autodialer, here is the one move you need to make to reclaim your phone.

For more, here are five signs your information is on the dark web and seven tips to keep your phone secure.

The number of scam calls can’t be that bad, can it?

It sounds like I’m being overly dramatic, but everyone I know is dealing with scam calls. It’s not just anecdotal: Voice security company Hiya has numbers to back it up.

Based on an analysis of 221 billion phone calls made during 2023 and surveys of thousands of people, US consumers received an average of eight spam calls per week, Hiya found. Of those who reported falling for scams, the average amount of money lost was $2,257, a 527% increase over the previous year.

Money-grabbing schemes aren’t the only issue. AI is being used to impersonate influential people on calls to sway behavior. In this US election year, the Federal Communications Commission has already banned AI-powered robocalls following an incident where a Texas company created a robocall impersonating President Joe Biden telling Democrats not to vote in the New Hampshire primary; the FCC proposed a $6 million fine for the incident.

So what’s being done to reduce scam calls?

In 2021, the FCC mandated that a technology called Stir/Shaken be adopted by every major voice provider in the US. It requires them to verify where calls originate to accurately identify them for Caller ID. Congress has also passed legislation aimed at making the carriers track their anti-robocall efforts.

In December 2023, the FCC adopted new rules to add teeth to its existing policies by making it more difficult for telemarketers to blast unwanted calls and texts to consumers.

The problem is that these technologies and regulations designed to mitigate scam calls are not adequate.

Margot Saunders, senior counsel at the National Consumer Law Center, reiterated this fact. «We have been maintaining for some time that Stir/Shaken is not working to ensure accurate caller ID (which is all it is designed to do), because voice service providers are able to rent thousands of phone numbers to telemarketers and scammers that allow the callers to technically comply with Stir/Shaken without revealing meaningful or accurate caller ID,» Saunders said. «The numbers of unwanted calls are about the same as they have been for years.»

Although Saunders believes the FCC’s December 2023 change will make a big difference in the number of telemarketing calls, «it does not go into effect until early 2025, and it will take a while for the litigation to have a beneficial impact,» she said. «Most telemarketing calls are made on behalf of US corporations, and only the threat of costly litigation is likely to reduce these calls.»

You know where this is going with unwanted calls

You can do all sorts of things to try to reduce spam calls, from installing third-party call screening apps to activating scam blocking services offered by your phone’s maker or wireless carriers — some of which require an extra fee, making that «solution» even more painful.

The FCC takes a different approach to dealing with spam calls. It relies more on what you shouldn’t do and less on what scam-blocking services may be able to do.

Don’t assume that a Caller ID number shown with a local prefix is actually coming from your area.
Don’t reply to a caller or recording asking you to press a button or answer questions. Don’t answer «Yes.»
Never believe someone from an unknown number who claims to represent a company or government agency — hang up and call a publicly accessible number to verify the request is legitimate. The IRS, for example, said it usually contacts taxpayers through regular mail and not through a phone call or text message.

Don’t answer your phone. That’s it. That’s the answer.

So how do you know that a call is suspicious? Easy: Assume they all are.

Unless the Caller ID identifies a person in your phone’s contacts list, or you recognize the number (does anyone memorize phone numbers anymore?), assume the call is a scammer.

Just answering a suspicious call with «Hello» can open the floodgates for more scam calls because that tells the scammer there’s a human behind your number and, even more importantly, that this human answers their phone. The number may then be sold to other companies.

That’s a nihilistic approach to phone calls, I know. The volume of robocalls is so high that an incoming call is more likely to be spam. As I said, scammers have ruined phone calls.

Send calls to voicemail

So the solution is to just ignore every call? What about your doctor’s office calling you back to schedule a checkup — do you need to add every phone number and extension they use to your contacts? What if a friend’s phone battery dies and they use someone else’s phone to call you to get a ride? Won’t important calls be ignored?

There’s a narrow ray of light in the telephony darkness. Unless the call is from someone you know, let it go straight to voicemail. The best method is to let it ring, since even actively declining the call might be enough to alert scammers they have a live number. On the iPhone and Android, press the Sleep/Wake button once to stop it ringing on your end — the caller will continue to hear rings until the call is automatically sent to voicemail.

With voicemail on most phones, you can see a list of pending messages, often with a rough voice transcription for each one. I can tell at a glance that the unknown callers leaving 4-second messages are most likely scammers, and anything longer than that I can skim without listening to the full message.

You can even bypass the disruption of getting the call. On the iPhone, go to Settings > Phone > Silence Unknown Callers and turn on the Silence Unknown Callers switch. Anyone not in your contacts, list of outgoing calls or Siri Suggestions goes to voicemail without ringing the phone. Android phones have a similar feature called Filter Spam Calls located in the Phone app’s settings, or a Call Screen feature, depending on the device.

You can also screen a call without picking up on some devices. With Apple’s Live Voicemail feature in iOS 17 and later, ignore the incoming call and then tap the Voicemail button on the lock screen if the caller hasn’t hung up. While they leave their message, iOS transcribes it in real-time, and you can break in and talk to the person if it’s a call you need to take.

On Android, Google Call Screen uses Google Assistant to answer the call, interact with the caller and create a real-time transcript. At Google I/O 2024, the company demonstrated a next-generation variant of this feature, which relies on its AI tool Gemini to listen to a call you’re on and pop up alerts if it seems to be a scam call.

Still, these features are unlikely to make a meaningful dent in the overall problem. «We believe these tools are not useful for several reasons,» Saunders said, pointing out that only knowledgeable and careful consumers are likely to use them and that the privacy implications of this type of live monitoring are potentially enormous.

«The best way to stop the illegal calls,» Saunders said, «is to punish the providers who originate and transmit them. This point has been made time and again to the FCC.»

Seriously, stop answering your phone

Look, I want to believe there’s a technical way out of this mess. Some conversations really are better over the phone, without the potential for misunderstanding via texting or the need to look half-human on a video call. As long as scam calls entrap people profitably, scammers will also ratchet up their techniques (like creating AI voices that mimic a friend or family member).

We can make it harder for the scammers to succeed by doing the simplest thing.

Just don’t answer your phone.

For more security advice, here’s how to protect your data on Wi-Fi and how to delete your data from the internet.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for Feb. 5, #970

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 5 #970.

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s NYT Connections puzzle is kind of tough. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including the number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Star-spangled signs.

Green group hint: Smash into.

Blue group hint: Not green or red.

Purple group hint: Same surname.

Answers for today’s Connections groups

Yellow group: Cultural symbols of the US.

Green group: Collide with.

Blue group: Blue things.

Purple group: Lees of Hollywood.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is cultural symbols of the US. The four answers are American flag, apple pie, bald eagle and baseball.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is collide with. The four answers are bump, butt, knock and ram.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is blue things. The four answers are jeans, lapis lazuli, ocean and sky.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is Lees of Hollywood. The four answers are Ang, Bruce, Christopher and Spike.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for Feb. 5 #704

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 5, No. 704.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle is a fun one, once you clue in on the theme. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Quint-essential.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Not four, or six.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

DAYS, GIVE, WOVE, DOVE, LOVE, DOGS, SCONE, STOLE, GEEK, LODE, SIEGE, SLEW, HENS

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

TOES, OCEANS, SENSES, VOWELS, BOROUGHS, WEEKDAYS

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is GIVEMEFIVE. To find it, start with the G that’s three letters to the right on the top row, and wind down.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Technologies

The Motorola Signature Is the Moto Phone I’ve Wanted for Years

Motorola’s new phone is its best flagship yet and could be the Galaxy S26 Plus rival that Samsung didn’t see coming.

At CES 2026, among the AI humanoids, flashy concepts and next-gen foldables, was a Motorola phone that I didn’t expect to be a CES highlight. And no, I’m not talking about theMotorola Razr Fold. While it was the talk of the town (after all, it is the company’s first-ever book-style foldable), there’s a premium smartphone with top specs and a sophisticated design: the Motorola Signature.

Recent high-end Motorola phones have had good-looking hardware, but they don’t compete with the Galaxy S25 Ultras or Pixel 10s of the world. They fall short in one or more areas, including display, performance, cameras, software or battery. The Motorola Signature is the company’s first flagship phone that looks confident enough to take on heavyweights like the upcoming Galaxy S26 Plus and the current iPhone 17, without faltering on either hardware or software.

I’ve been using it for a couple of days now, and this Motorola phone doesn’t have any major downsides, especially for the price. The biggest one could be availability: It won’t be coming to the US, but it is now available for purchase in India at an unbeatable price. It undercuts the OnePlus 15, iPhone 17 and the Pixel 10 by almost $150 or more (directly converted from INR).

With the ever-increasing prices of premium phones, the Motorola Signature is the flagship killer we’ve been waiting for. At about $660 (INR 59,999), it is hard to beat, and I can admit I’m finally excited about a Motorola phone that’s not a Razr.

Motorola Signature is lightweight, slim and rugged

The Motorola Signature has a 6.8-inch 1,264×2,780-pixel resolution AMOLED display with support for a 165Hz refresh rate. It is an LTPO panel, so it can be set to 1Hz for an always-on display (like the iPhone 17 series and Galaxy S25 Ultra), thereby saving battery life. Its resolution might not be as high as the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s, but it is a promising screen for gaming and content consumption.

I couldn’t find a game to test its 165Hz refresh rate, but watching YouTube videos, Instagram Reels and reading ebooks — both indoors and outdoors — was a pleasing experience. The screen remains legible in all lighting conditions.

Motorola’s new phone is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset and is paired with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. While it’s not the highest-end chip available (that’d be the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5), it packs plenty of power. I had no issues in day-to-day use, occasional multitasking or gaming. My only complaint was with the camera shutter in low light, but we’ll get to it in a bit.

The Motorola Signature ships with Android 16 with the company’s in-house Hello UI on top. It is a comparatively clean interface with plenty of customization options to fine-tune your experience. One of my favorite features, Moto gestures (twist to open the camera or make a double-chop motion to turn on and off the flashlight) is always handy in unexpected ways.

You get an AI Key on the left side of the phone to trigger Moto AI (uses Perplexity or Microsoft Copilot), but it can only be triggered once you create a Motorola account. You can configure the button to do other shortcuts, like double-press it to take notes and press and hold to trigger Moto AI. But in reality, I didn’t use any of these features in my daily life and would’ve preferred the ability to remap them to a shortcut. Google’s Gemini assistant is also available.

The Signature has a 5,200-mAh silicon-carbon battery and supports 90-watt wired charging and 50-watt wireless charging. Should those speeds hold up, that battery might fill up quickly using either method. It lasted me an entire day on medium use, but on another day, I had to charge it twice when I pushed it with streaming, browsing, Google Maps navigation for 30 minutes and active camera usage. It doesn’t compete with OnePlus 15’s massive 7,300-mAh cell but does well to reduce battery anxiety.

All of this sounds more impressive when you take the Signature’s design into context: The flagship Qualcomm processor’s power, 5,000-mAh plus battery, big AMOLED screen and three 50-megapixel cameras housed in a slim and lightweight design. The new Motorola phone is 6.99mm thick and weighs just 186 grams. For context, the Galaxy S25 Plus, with a smaller battery, measures 7.3mm thick and weighs 190 grams, while most recent big phones weigh 200 grams or more.

I shifted from the iPhone 17 Pro Max and enjoyed using the Motorola Signature because it weighed less. But I didn’t expect it to be so light. The Signature feels good in my hand. I’m glad it doesn’t have sharp flat sides like the Galaxy S25 Ultra. Plus, I love its linen-inspired finish on the back, which sets it apart from the competition. Like its Edge siblings, the Signature is rated IP68 and IP69 for dust and water resistance (meaning it can survive being submerged under a meter of water for 30 minutes and high-pressure water jets), so there’s no fear of dust and water damage.

Improving on the 2 weakest links

Most Motorola phones that I’ve used in recent years, including the $1,300 Razr Ultra have one or two downsides: software support and/or cameras.

The Signature marks a new beginning for the brand as it joins the ranks of Samsung and Google with seven years of Android OS software and security updates. This is on par with Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones and better than what OnePlus offers. I hope this new software update policy is implemented on more Motorola phones launching in 2026.

Secondly, the Motorola Signature (finally!) introduces an impressive camera system. On the back, you get three cameras: a 50-megapixel main camera with OIS, paired with a 50-megapixel telephoto camera with a 3x zoom lens and OIS, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera. This is the first Motorola phone with cameras that I wouldn’t trade for another setup during my vacations.

Photos from the primary and telephoto cameras have better color accuracy than previous Moto shooters. Images have a slightly warmer tone and are saturated — not as much as the OnePlus 15, which delivers much more saturated tones. I prefer Signature’s look in most scenarios.

However, the ultrawide-angle camera retains fewer details, and OnePlus does better in that regard.

The telephoto lens struggles with edge detection in low-light portraits, but I loved using it for architecture shots and capturing scenery around me. It can deliver some stunning shots even in 6x. Mind you, it has 3x optical zoom, but I shot the above photo in 6x, and it has a nice bokeh, good details and an overall pleasing look.

Motorola Signature final thoughts

Overall, the Signature has solid cameras for the price and the best optics yet for a Motorola phone. But there’s one hindrance: The camera shutter in low light is slow to process images. For instance, I wanted to snap a few action shots during a badminton game, but I missed some great smashes because the camera wouldn’t allow me to capture images faster.

The Motorola Signature marks a solid flagship comeback for the brand. It has a big and bright display, a capable processor, a versatile camera setup and good battery life. This phone is hard to fault in its price segment.

The Signature is now available to purchase in India at a starting price of INR 59,999 (approximately $660) for the 256GB variant. It will go on sale in Europe for €999 (approximately $1,170) with 512GB storage in the base version. Motorola has plans to launch its new flagship phone in more countries across the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific regions. However, the Motorola Signature won’t be coming to the US.