Dealing with Robocallers & Inbound Spam

Spam is ever prevalent in this new era of messaging and calling, and that, unfortunately, does not exclude SignalWire's phone numbers. However, there are still some solutions if you find that you are receiving voice spam!

Voice Spam & Robocalls

If you are using the SignalWire cXML APIs, you can use the <Reject> verb to help resolve this issue. <Reject> will end the call without charging you and allows you to either give the callee a busy signal or play a message that 'this number is not in service'.

To utilize this as a spam-prevention technique, you will need to track the numbers that call with malicious intent and store them in a database. When a call comes in, you can check the database to see if the caller number is stored as an offending number. If it is, you can <Reject> the call. If it is not, you can allow the call to go through. You can see an example of how to do this on a simpler level using a manually maintained block list in our python guide on blocking numbers!

This is far from the only solution - there are quite a few third-party providers (such as robokiller) that offer robocall protection/prevention services. You can always explore third-party providers in that realm whose services you can integrate with SignalWire as another solution!

Check out this guide if you want to have some fun with your would-be scammers by wasting their time and money!

Messaging Spam

Unfortunately, there are not as many solutions for resolving the issue of inbound message spam to your numbers as there is no way to reject a message based on the From number. As both inbound SMS & inbound MMS are not free of cost, we recommend that you release the affected number from your project.