I often receive a lot of “spam” calls and texts — sometimes one a day, sometimes five. It got quite annoying, especially since my iPhone’s “Block Caller” feature worked on specific numbers, but the spammers/fraudsters changed their numbers every single time. I had hundreds of blocked numbers in my list. It was ridiculous.
AT&T’s Call Protect promised to help with that. And you know what? It did. Quite effectively. Spam calls stopped ringing through to my phone. Spam texts stopped coming through.
Sure, I got one every once in a while, but not many.
I would have to open up the Call Protect app once a week to see if any legitimate calls were blocked. And, yes, a couple were. But it blocked more bogus calls the legit ones.
So, I decided to “upgrade” to the premium version of the app, which, for $4/month, offers more features, including reverse caller lookup.
The premium version didn’t seem to block more calls, which is fine since the “free” version did a good job at that. And when running a reverse number lookup, it found one of the blocked calls was actually my doctor trying to schedule an appointment with me.
But the Call Protect Premium Reverse Call Lookup is WAY TOO HARD to use. There’s no way to copy a blocked number from the app and paste it into the reverse lookup page. The work-around is to “Add” the blocked call number to your contacts (WTF???), copy the number, then cancel the contact addition. Paste the copied number into the reverse caller lookup, and hit go.
Seriously? That’s like five extra steps that are completely unnecessary. I don’t know if this is AT&T’s bright idea, or HiYa’s system (HiYa “powers” the Call Protect app), but it sucks long big hairy ones. I’m paying $4/month to copy and paste numbers to perform a reverse caller lookup that is supposed to be one of the “Premium” features?
WORSE, 9 times out of 10, the blocked number I tried to check in the reverse caller lookup came back with, simply, “UNKNOWN CALLER”. I already knew that. So, AT&T/HiYa is UNABLE to trace the caller? Really? Makes no sense.
Why does AT&T — one of the largest phone companies IN THE WORLD — outsource their caller-lookup to some minor 3rd party who can’t do their job? AT&T obviously has access to ALL PHONE NUMBERS IN THE WORLD, yet doesn’t use their own database IN THEIR OWN APP.
So, while the reverse caller lookup worked once (and allowed me to make a vital doctor appointment), the rest of the time it’s useless. $4/month — almost $50/year — for something that doesn’t work.
This is called a “pure profit money grab”.
AT&T Call Protect Premium app — Not Recommended.
Free version? Sure. It won’t hurt, and it seems to actually block spam callers.
Kinda weird that something which is free does a better job than the paid version . . .
