“Although there are some robocall blocking solutions out there, most of them just flag suspicious calls by adding something like ‘Scam Likely’ to the caller ID, but they don't actually stop the calls from ever (annoyingly) ringing your phone. Rather than selling vaccinations, they're selling medication.“ - Pepper Maker Ethan Naluz

Pepper is the latest product attempting to solve robocalls, due to the fact that there are over five billion robocalls each in month in the U.S.. And this number is set to hit 62 billion (in total) by the end of 2019. Why? Because robocalling is a cheap and easy hustle. Every successful spam call brings in an average of $430.

So Pepper works like an email spam filter.

“Instead, of warning you that a call *might* a robocaller, Pepper blocks robocalls from ever ringing your phone in the first place, so you don’t even get call notifications unless they’re confirmed to be from a human.” - Ethan

According to Ethan, not a single robocall has gotten past Pepper’s technology. The service currently works in the U.S. with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, and the company says it will expand internationally if there is enough demand. Would you use this?

It’s worth highlighting a few other clever products in the space, which all of their own approach to blocking unwanted, spammy calls. Mostly notably, there’s RoboKiller, an app which has devised a smart SEO strategy to get in front of folks looking for a solution.

According to the predictive trends newsletter Glimpse, 89% of RoboKiller’s traffic comes from search, but searches for ‘RoboKiller’ only account for about .5% of traffic. Instead, RoboKiller uses landing pages for individual phone numbers (the company has created about one million of them) that people commonly search after getting a robocall. Using this approach, the company’s site visits have gone from 375,000 in May of this year to 2.5 million in October.

A few other options to block those robocallers 🚫

📞 Numverify

📞 CallHero

📞 RoboStopper

What does an *aesthetic* game of Tetris look like? Well, this. 👈