On the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, Whitepages has a pretty prominent role. It’s there to track down annoying callers that continually call you, and will block them. Now Whitepages is bringing this to everyone and fighting the IRS phone scam – perfect timing too with Tax season nearly upon us – and will auto-block known IRS scam numbers. Whitepages gets this information from their data, and knows area codes where IRS swindles are happening the most. To help protect users from being swindled.
This is a new auto-blocker from Whitepages that will automatically stop known IRS scam calls from getting to you. Whitepages notes that there are over 300 million incoming calls that the company scans per month in the US. And nearly half of those are classified as “unwanted” calls. The company also noted that IRS scam calls have grown quite a bit over the last two years, a whopping 2,500% from 2014 to 2016. Luckily the latest update to Whitepages ID will help mitigate those scam calls.
New in this update to the Whitepages ID app is also the ability to adjust the auto-blocking features. Users are now able to keep the auto-blocking feature on, or adjust the protection level that they have on their device. These levels include Scam or Fraud, Suspected Spam, Hidden Numbers and International Numbers. Custom Alerts also make their way into this update. You’ll be able to get alerts from Whitepages about popular or new area codes of scam calls. This way users can stay in the know about scam calls and to ignore them.
Circling back to the big feature in this update, which is the IRS Scam Auto-Blocker, Whitepages also adds in an IRS Specific Reporting feature. So if you get a call in regards to an IRS scam, you can report that number to Whitepages and help the company improve the auto-blocking of these numbers for others that may be getting these scam calls. You can download the update to Whitepages on the Google Play Store right now. It’s definitely worth a spin if you get a lot of unwanted calls, especially with the Income Tax deadline set for April 18th, just over three weeks away.