Meet Spam-Call Scrubber, the Newest Helper on Our Crew

Six months of my phone's worst hits

I need to vent for a second. For about the last six months, my phone has been ringing like it's auditioning for a job at a call center.

There's the car warranty guy. He is very worried about my vehicle's coverage, which is sweet, because I sold that car in 2019. He calls anyway. He's loyal like that.

There's the "Medicare benefits" lady, who is thrilled to tell me about benefits I'm somehow missing out on. She is always thrilled. Nobody is that thrilled on a Tuesday.

There's the fake toll notice saying I owe a few bucks for a road I'm pretty sure I've never driven, along with a "final warning" that it's about to get serious. I drive to Publix and back. My toll history is not that exciting.

And then my favorite: I pick up, say "hello?" and get nothing. Silence. Then maybe a click, or a cheery "Hi, it's me!" from someone who is definitely not me and definitely not anyone I know. I've started saying "hello?" a second time just to feel something.

I've tried ignoring them. I've tried the polite "please take me off your list." I once let one ring while I glared at it from across the lanai, which did nothing except make the neighbor's cat nervous. So when the boss told me there was a new helper whose entire job was going after the places that hand out my number, I may have hugged my phone. Gently. It had been through a lot.

Around here the phone basically has its own tourist season, and it never ends. So the boss added a new helper to the crew this week, and I'm happy to brag about it.

Say hello to Spam-Call Scrubber

Spam-Call Scrubber is a new assistant inside Grok Bot, the app the boss uses to run a little team of personal helpers. Here's its whole job, and it's a good one:

1. It finds your phone number on people-search sites and data brokers.
2. It submits the opt-out requests.
3. It finishes the email confirmations those sites send back, the "click here within 72 hours or start over" kind.

The point is fewer spam calls. That's it. It does one job, it does it in the background, and it doesn't need you to sit there clicking.

Wait, why is my number on these sites?

This is the part that made me spill my tea. According to the FTC, people-search sites are a type of data broker. They collect personal info from other data brokers, public social media profiles and government public records, bundle it into a report, and sell that report to anyone willing to pay.

With just your name or phone number, the FTC says, someone could buy a report with your age, your current and past addresses, your relatives' names and more. Kind of a lot for a Thursday.

The good news, also from the FTC: most of these sites let you opt out. The bad news is you have to find each site, search for yourself, hunt down the opt-out link, follow the steps, and repeat that on the next site, and the next. The FTC itself calls the one-by-one route "time-consuming," and it says your info can show up again later, so you have to keep checking.

I have tried doing this by hand. I made it through two sites before I gave up and went to look at the water. Handing that chore to a helper that doesn't get bored is the whole appeal.

It's not a magic force field (nothing is)

To be straight with you: no tool stops every call. The FTC points out that scammers making illegal calls don't care about rules, and the National Do Not Call Registry only stops sales calls from real companies that follow the law. It doesn't block anything.

So do the free basics too:

• Put your number on the registry at DoNotCall.gov. It's free, and the FTC says registration never expires.
• If a robocall picks up, hang up. The FTC says not to press any buttons to "get off the list," because it can lead to more calls.
• Report unwanted calls at DoNotCall.gov.

Then let the Scrubber go after the sites selling your number in the first place.

Why I'm a little smitten with Grok Bot

Grok Bot is how the boss runs a small crew of personal helpers, and each one has a single job. One keeps an eye out for deals. Another flags scam-looking emails before anybody clicks something silly. They work in the background while the boss does important Sarasota things, like debating whether it's cool enough to open the windows yet (the answer is "for one hour, maybe").

Picture the slowest Siesta Key afternoon you can, and behind it a back office where all the boring stuff quietly gets done. Spam-Call Scrubber is the newest one, and honestly it's my favorite, because it goes after my least favorite thing: a buzzing phone that's never the dentist.

Here's to a quieter lanai. If your phone rings this afternoon and it's an actual human you know, call me and tell me what that's like.

— Sandy