Ever since the announcment that Google was combining Voice with Hangouts I've had an odd influx of calls from people I don't know.  A lot of them are scammers trying to provide me with "Operating Support" while others are mysteries to me.   I also get a lot of calls for the person who had my main phone number before me.  I don't get many calls from people I actually know (maybe 2 in a day) so getting between 4 to 10 bullshit calls in a day was kind of annoying.  I realize these are small numbers but relative to each other the bullshit calls are a huge percentage of my daily phone answering.

I looked around for an app that would let me block calls from numbers I don't know but I couldn't find any that seemed consistently good.  I also poked around in the dialer app and in google voice but on my initial pass through I didn't see anything that would help me.  Fortunately, I revisited both and found a solution that I think is going to work.

Blocking Unknown Calls in the Dialer

In the Samsung stock dialer on my phone, in settings, under the call section, there is an option for "Call Rejection" - it's right at the top so I'm not sure how I ever missed it - there is an option of "Auto reject list".  

This is the secret setting.  The textual description didn't actually give me much hope though.

Manage auto reject numbers.

I didn't think there would be an option to manage anything but specific phone numbers. However, if you go in to that option the first choice is "Unknown" - it was unchecked by default. I checked it and now I'm hopeful that numbers that aren't in my contacts won't get through.

There is a real risk here of course - someone I know might call me from a number I don't know.  I'll cross that bridge when I get there.  At the moment the risk is worth the reward.  I might change my mind later.

Blocking in Google Voice

To block calls in a similar fashion with Google Voice I couldn't do anything within the app.  Instead I had to go to the Google Voice website.  The calls setting section here didn't offer me anything but the "Groups & Circles" tab has an interesting group called "Anonymous Callers" - I'm guessing this is anyone who isn't a contact of mine.  

Perfect (I hope).  Basically for each group you can define what voice mail greeting they get and you can define what phones the calls are forwarded to.  I simply set it so "Anonymous Callers" are sent to no phone and set a pretty generic voice mail greeting.

Google Voice Spam Filtering

Finally I want to make sure all of the calls that are rejected to go my Google Voice voice mail so that I can take advantage of the built in spam filtering.  Oddly, on my phone when I picked the voice mail provider it acts like it fails to set it as Google Voice yet, when I call my phone directly and then end up at voice mail I end up leaving the message with Google Voice.  I suppose this is some kind of weird AT&T edition Samsung S5 bug.  While the voicemail works as expected the phone itself shows a voice mail icon that serves no purpose because it takes you to the phone's dialer and AT&T has no copy of the voicemail.