For as long as cell phones have existed, so have spam calls. From the incessant automated opportunities to extend your car’s limited warranty to shady texts regarding deliveries for packages you didn’t order, spam has become a fact of modern life. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is.
Regardless of where you live, the number of spam calls made each day in the United States is staggering, with billions going out every month. With each one of these calls, texts, or messages making it to your inbox, you become vulnerable to unwanted subscriptions, higher insurance rates, and even identity theft.
Even if your personal information is more vulnerable than ever in a hackable world, there are measures you can take to reduce your risk of falling for a scam. Tech solutions and privacy services helping to protect this information abound, but these often come with costs and limitations. Starving out the spammers and scammers from receiving the personal information they need to reach you is a more thorough and long-term solution.
The experts over at Incogni—an automated personal data removal service—are here to help, offering 55% off your first month of service with the exclusive code GIZMODO.
In addition to this Gizmodo reader discount, Incogni offered a few things you can do as a consumer to protect yourself from robocalls.
#1 Block known scammer numbers on your mobile devices
A free and easy trick to stave off robocallers is to block individual numbers you’ve received spam calls from in the past. Here are the quick and easy directions to doing this on your Android or iPhone.
On Android:
Open the Phone app and tap on the “call history” tab.
Find the number from which you received a robocall.
Tap on the number and then on “block” in the menu that appears.
On iPhone:
Open the Phone app and tap “recents.”
Find the number from which you received a robocall.
Tap on the blue information icon to the right of the number.
Scroll down and tap on “block this caller.”
Tap on “block contact” in the pop-up message that appears.
Bear in mind that this will only work on robocalls coming from numbers that have contacted you in the past. Nimble scammers switch their numbers up often, so this method will only work in rare cases, and only until the spammers start calling from different numbers.
Another idea is to add your number to the FTC’s National Do Not Call Registry, but that’ll only keep your number out of circulation with companies that abide by the law. The worst robocallers don’t check the registry.
#2 Manually extract your numbers from circulation
Telemarketers and scammers can’t call you if your name and number isn’t in their database. This begs the question: where did they even get your number from?
It’s difficult to ascertain completely, but a safe assumption is that they received it either directly or indirectly from a data broker—a company that specializes in collecting, aggregating, and monetizing your personal info. Some of these brokers include people search sites, which publish details about you and your family members for anyone to look up or purchase online.
According to Incogni research, manually retracing your digital steps in order to opt out of feeding your personal information to data brokers can take hundreds of hours and isn’t a permanent solution either. As Incogni tells Gizmodo, you’d have to periodically check back with each broker, because they’re known to re-add opted-out profiles after some time.
But if you can manage to figure it out, extracting your personal data from these companies will drastically reduce the number of robocalls, targeted junk mail, and scam attempts you receive.
#3 Turn to an automated solution
If you don’t have hundreds of spare hours to devote to this issue, we at Incogni, a cybersecurity service offering automated personal data removal, are here to help.
Incogni removes your personal information from broker databases, works hard to protect it going forward, and handles all the sensitive interactions with them you may be overwhelmed by, from follow-up communication to fighting rejected claims. We help users eliminate their data in a fraction of the time it would take to do it manually, then monitor the internet to prevent it from ending up back online.
To take the stress and frustration of safeguarding your personal data, Incogni will jump through these companies’ convoluted hoops, adhering to each one’s unique removal procedure. We also facilitate data broker interactions like rejection appeals on your behalf so you don’t have to lift a finger. Every three months, Incogni restarts this whole process to keep your data out of circulation.
If you’re interested in giving our service a try, we have an exclusive offer for Gizmodo readers. Our service can be canceled anytime and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you’ve got nothing to lose except for those annoying calls.
Protect your personal data with 55% off your first month of Incogni with the exclusive code GIZMODO.
This article is a sponsored collaboration between Incogni and G/O Media Studios.
