My last ditch efforts at maintaining my phone number
I’ve had my phone number for 21 years now. I’m not particularly attached to it but it’s a great number. There’s a pneumonic that I told my then-6-year-old to remember it and to this day she does. Really, everyone who knows my name can remember my phone number, unless they forget how to spell.
TL;DR – what I’m trying to restore phone sanity.
For the past two years however, most of my calls are garbage. Before noon yesterday I had nine calls intercepted by T-Mobile’s Scam Shield, four fake calls from my work that’s being spoofed nonstop (who doesn’t have to pick up for a call from their work?) and a couple of texts that came through T-Mobile’s email to text gateway that were obvious spam.
And what’s really a problem is I have business cards, hundreds of legitimate contacts I’d have to inform, my kids know my phone number, and of course the carriers do absolutely nothing, or perhaps they can’t do anything, when you report these.
So here’s what I’m trying, and it’s a bit of a re-hash as I’m headed back to GV for some features but hoping some of the T-Mobile front end Scam Shield works.
Google Voice
Step 1 is getting Google Voice back up and working. I used to be a really big fan in the Sprint days, but I had several issues with it just never ringing, and when we lost carrier integration and then *I* lost carrier integration I had to abandon it.
I set it back up, same number I’ve kept periodically active for the past few years, and set call screening to on. This will at least make someone have to say their name in order to even reach me.
I’ve set up contacts and anonymous to behave differently in the legacy control panel.
Forward them cakes
The next step was attempting to forward my phone number to Google Voice. This used to be accomplished by dialing ##something#phonenumber but that seems to not be the case with T-Mobile any more. It now is, at least on my S21 Ultra, default phone app, 3 dots, settings, supplementary services, call forwarding, and then I’m using always forward to forward to Google Voice. You can choose whatever you want.
Stranger things
Things are no longer ringing, and I’m not sure entirely if that’s a good thing. We shall see.
Scam Shield still says it’s blocking some calls, I’m now getting scam voicemail on T-Mobile and it appears only legit voicemail on Google Voice.
Got any suggestions?
Now all I have to do is figure out some way to have a different outgoing call number for when work calls my phone number so I can get around these telespammers.
