One senior citizen we know who uses a Jitterbug featurephone, was getting called more than 20 times a day and night from a number in Belarus, a small country in central Europe. Each call would ring for one second, and when the call was answered, a tape in a foreign language would play for a few seconds. The number couldn’t be blocked (remember, we are talking about a featurephone). So what was the point of these calls? Well, as the scammers hoped, the recipient of the call was so intent on finding out what these calls were all about that he called back a couple of times. Each time, he was charged $8 for making an international call and only heard a tape in the same foreign language heard with the incoming calls. The scammers get a percentage of the revenue from the international calls made to them. Multiply this by millions of calls made each day to millions of people, and it is a huge criminal enterprise. Luckily for this person, the MVNO he uses (Great Call) removed the charges for the calls, and the victim of this scam ended up having to change his phone number.

So far, this feature has only been seen on phones running the Android Q beta, although it has not appeared on every handset with the preview installed. If this new settings page does make it to the final version of Android Q, or is made available to older Android builds, it will allow the phone owner to lower the odds of receiving a scam call from the coin flip it now is. With these new options, the owner of an Android phone won’t have to wait to receive a scam call before taking much needed action against them.