Suspected Scam Phone Calls - are they always genuine?

[gez-jam]

Recently I started getting notifications of Suspected Scam Calls.  I've owned a Samsung A15 for some time and only recently has this started (following my buying a new Samsung phone).  I assume the protecting software against scams has been activated by her purchase.  The result of this is that I am getting large numbers of notifications daily of "Suspect Scams".  The simple solution is clearly to reject and block them - BUT how do I know they are genuine scams???

Not all phone calls received are from people I have contacted before and they are not in my contacts list.  Looking at the list over the last week I received one call on Monday 17th, 7 calls on Wednesday and 2 (so far) today (Thursday).  Looking closer at the numbers it is clear some might be but there are many  that are not:

1. those starting 07 are normally are mobiles with no means of ID

2. Some have 0800 which is weird as these numbers are usually used by me, the customer!  Two of them were not actually tagged as suspicious.

3. Some repeat in a rather obvious way eg: three numbers all start 01434700 and finish with unique digits - 258, 262 and 250.  Some sort of number generator?

4. One number begins 0330 and is probably OK?

Is there any point in having this security system installed if it can't do better than "Suspected"?

Sorry this query is so long but its driving me mad with phone ringing unnecessarily.

[Alex_H · Accepted solution]

Hi @gez-jam,

Welcome to the EE Community

It sounds like you have Smart call enabled on your Samsung phone. This is powered by a service called Hiya. You can turn the call screening off, or have it block all calls labelled spam/fraud so that the phone does not ring etc or block only those identified as high risk. 

The setting for it is controlled by opening the green phone icon, taping the 3 dots in the top right, clicking settings then clicking Caller ID and spam protection.

In terms of how it identifies spam/scam calls they use a variety of methods including user reported data, i.e. people who received a call from the same number reporting the number as spam and algorithms that monitor number behaviour to detect suspected spam behaviour.

They also allow companies to register with the service, so that if a legitimate company who registers calls you with your Smart Call service enabled, it will show the name of the company and a green tick next to the number to let you know its legitimate. 

Some genuine calls may be incorrectly flagged as spam as it wont be 100% fool proof but generally it is pretty accurate at identifying and labelling them, so it can be useful if you do receive a lot of spam calls. 

Alex