“Blocked Call blocked by phone” on a Samsung? Fix it!

September 14, 2022September 14, 2022 Paul E King 3 Comments How To, How-to

While dealing with several other issues involving phone calls, I discovered today that I could not call my wife’s phone using Google Voice. It would instantly put me into voicemail with the message on the recent history that read Blocked Call. Blocked by phone.

TL;DR – Samsung Smart Call. How to fix at the bottom. May be on other carriers and phone models under different names.

blocked call blocked by phone Samsung galaxy s21 ultra — Until I fixed the issue, it said blocked call, blocked by phone. After fixing just says blocked call.

I don’t use my Google Voice number all that much. You can call and leave a message and I’ll get it, yes that’s my number, but it’s basically something I keep around due to a council run I did a few years ago and if anyone in the neighborhood or Pocketables wants to reach me they can leave a message and I’ll call them back. They can find me in a variety of places, and voicemail is one.

Basically I looked at my wife’s S21 on T-Mobile and mine and discovered that she had a menu option called Caller ID and Spam Protection. I did not. We have the same carrier, account, phone model. This was odd. It’d worked a couple of months ago.

Caller ID and Spam protection, tap on that and you get a menu that you can configure call blocking. — Open phone, 3 dots on the top right, the above is my wife’s phone which was giving “call blocked by phone” – note the “Caller ID and spam protection”

image 6 - for some reason we don't have an alt tag here — And this is what mine looks like. Hers has the Caller ID and spam protection, mine didn’t.

Fixing “call blocked by phone”

Phone app, 3 dots top right, settings, tap on Caller ID and Spam Protection if you want to configure it, or you can disable it completely by tapping the slider.

image 7 - for some reason we don't have an alt tag here — After choosing only block high risk calls I was able to call it using Google Voice and a couple of other things without getting the message “call blocked by phone”

I seem to have T-Mobile’s Scam Shield, she has Samsung’s Smart Call and no memory of ever enabling it. I don’t think she did because we’ve had the inability to get into her Samsung account for over two years now and… lemme tell you, their support has not been great to deal with. Seriously, how hard is it to get someone to understand that the password was forgotten and the birthday doesn’t work so just send an email and we’ll reset it?

You can verify that it’s a Samsung app by scrolling down a bit, visiting the privacy policy, it’ll take you to Hiya.com which seems to be doing the heavy lifting for the branded Samsung app.