People Are Sick of Getting Spam Calls — Is There a Way to Prevent Them?

Even the must socially shunned of us can rely on one person's name to always pop up on our phone's caller ID: Spam Likely. No matter how few people you give your private number out to, there almost always seems to be a way for these pesky scam rings to get through to your line. Which could leave you tearing your hair out and asking: Why do I get so many spam calls?

The primary reason is that it's big business. Time is money, and spam callers prioritize this phony outreach because it can be a lucrative enterprise. Security company LifeLock penned on its website that annually around $25 billion each and ever year is finagled by these tele-scammers.

And there's no shortage of money-grabbing cretins who will dedicate their lives into stealing from unknowing folks who actually work/worked for a living, as opposed to actually contributing to society. LifeLock went on to state that people usually get spam calls because their phone numbers ultimately "fall into the wrong hands."

Data mining companies/brokers will compile personal contact information and curate this information from numerous sources. These include:

• Public records
• Personal websites
• Social media accounts

But there are other ways folks can have their privacy compromised as well.

LifeLock goes on to state that "the dark web" can host data that's been obtained through illicit means. And there's been no shortage of high-profile data breaches in recent history. Bright Defense listed several that affected millions of users across various financial institutions in 2025 alone.

The Firewall Times also published a timeline of all the data breaches that hit Amazon between January 2012 and March 2023. These include a ransomware attack against the online mega-retailer's Ring doorbell camera company; however, Amazon "noted that third-party vendors may have experienced a breach."

In June of 2022, someone who used to work for Amazon was convicted for data leaks associated with Capital One bank in 2019. In 2021, Twitch user data was uploaded to 4Chan, and the EU fined Amazon a whopping 746 million euros for General Data Protection Regulation infringements.

A year prior, customers' emails were also leaked by Amazon employees. Other big companies, like Sony, had also experienced data breaches. In 2018, The Guardian reported that Sony Pictures had accounts hacked that contained private correspondence with employees of the Japanese conglomerate.

This included criticisms of actor Angelina Jolie, which were penned by producer Scott Rudin, who called Jolie "a minimally talented spoiled brat."

But when it comes to your personal data being stolen, like your phone number being disseminated among spam call farms, there are some ways to prevent that.

The first is to do everything you can to keep your private number off the internet and out of the data bank repositories of businesses that may be hacked. So it's a good idea to create a spam email address for when you sign up for promotions, streaming services, or even social media accounts.

Getting a "burner" phone number via apps like Google Voice could also help minimize the amount of spam you get. And you can turn notifications off on your app of choice to reduce the number of dings and vibrations emitting from your phone.