I’ll be the first to admit my experience with spam calls is purely anecdotal, but I’m sure I’ve made my spam call problem worse by answering the calls with my Pixel’s Call Screen feature. At the outset, Call Screen feels like a fitting tool for battling the bots spamming my Google Pixel phone.

An eye for an eye, as it were, a bot for a bot. However, I feel the reality is that this is backfiring on me. It seems I’m encouraging the bots to spam me even more, letting them know through my use of Call Screen that my number is active since Call Screen is answering for me. Now I get more spam calls than ever.

When will the spam end?

Please make it stop

It would appear I’m not the only one getting a lot of spam calls, though the numbers appear to be slightly down in 2024. The FTC received 1.1 million complaints about robocalls in 2024, compared to 2023, which was 1.2 million. That’s still a lot of complaints, and it lines up with my experience. Some days, I get five or six spam calls, usually spoofed as local numbers and sometimes random out-of-state area codes. At the very least, the FCC’s caller ID authentication standards are now mandatory for all IP-based voice service providers, making it harder for spammers to operate under the radar.

Still, even with some light at the end of the tunnel, I can’t seem to shake my spam call issues. Initially, I thought Google’s Call Screen was ingenious. I could use the power of a bot, but for the power of good, keeping my line free from pests. My use of Call Screen has seemingly backfired, and now I get more spam calls than ever. Worse, I worry I helped train the spam bots to recognize Call Screen.

At first, the spam bots wouldn’t hang up until Call Screen finished its blurb, but lately, the spam callers hang up within the first sentence. It would also appear that bots aren’t the only thing that learned to reject Call Screen. In my experience, it doesn’t work with humans. They hang up as well. My frequent use of Call Screen has wielded zero responses.

It would appear I’m not alone. Others have noticed that Call Screen mostly results in hang-ups. Then again, perhaps those hung up on are outliers, as plenty of other users claim how amazing Call Screen is, and it’s a feature people buy Pixels for. I get the appeal. There’s nothing more satisfying than siccing a good bot on a bad bot or not having to talk to humans.

Back to ignoring all calls

For now, it would seem I need to go back to my old way of reducing spam calls, and that was to ignore every call. Eventually, the spam lessens, or at least it has for me in the past. Here’s hoping I can find some peace.

I’ll be retiring from using Call Screen on my Pixel 9, which is a shame, but I see no point in using a tool that hasn’t received a single response. Pour one out for a great idea ruined by our evil human nature, as I’m calling it. Call Screen is, at best, essentially useless, and at worst, it appears to be making my spam calls grow in frequency the more I use it.