FaceTime users getting bombarded with spam group calls — what to do

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FaceTime users getting bombarded with spam group calls — what to do

(Image credit: Apple)

Something very odd is happening to many Apple users — they're being bombarded with seemingly countless group FaceTime calls, often in the centre of the nighttime.

"Yesterday they called ten times in 3 minutes," wrote ane Reddit user a week ago. "Whenever I hung up, the group would immediately telephone call again. ... I've had to turn FaceTime off completely, which unfortunately stops me from FaceTiming my friends or parents who may phone call or who I've been wanting to talk with."

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"I got a FaceTime call with xi numbers included at effectually midnight," wrote a user on an Apple support thread earlier this calendar month. "I set my phone on airplane mode to ignore the calls ... When I woke upwardly the next day I turned off airplane manner then received that Group FaceTime call virtually immediately subsequently."

As Dan Goodin equally Ars Technica points out, this has been happening off and on for nearly a twelvemonth, with the earliest post on the Apple support thread dating back to March 31, 2020. Merely the frequency of posts about the trouble has picked in the past few weeks.

It seems that organized pranksters are making sure that if a participant drops off a group call, they will exist immediately reconnected. Jerks appear to be adding random numbers to FaceTime grouping calls just to annoy people.

Unfortunately, if this is happening to y'all, your options are express. You tin can block the individual phone numbers on the group calls one past i, just that may non always work since the perpetrators may be using disposable numbers. Or you can just disable FaceTime altogether, simply for the dark or permanently.

Goodin said for the moment, Apple users tin can't limit FaceTime calls to only numbers that are in a user's contacts list. Nor can users block all the numbers on a group call at once.

Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom's Guide focused on security and privacy. He has likewise been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-haul driver, code monkey and video editor. He'southward been rooting around in the information-security space for more than than 15 years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom's Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown upwardly in random Goggle box news spots and even chastened a panel word at the CEDIA home-engineering conference. Y'all can follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.

Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-facetime-prank-calls

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