ABOVE: Chinese phone scam victim speaks to The Feed.
Samantha* is a 26 year-old photographer from Sydney who recently ended a volatile four-year relationship she says consumed her life and affected her mental well-being.
She'd tried multiple times to end it by blocking her ex-partner's number on her iPhone.
It was a traumatic thing – he made me incredibly uncomfortable, there was a big sense of control with him and I felt like I couldn't escape him so I had to block him.
However, Samantha found that blocking her ex-partner's phone number - and deleting it from her contacts list to prevent him from calling or messaging her - was far more complicated than she assumed it would be.
While on earlier versions of IOS, Samantha found that her phone would continue to alert her that her ex-partner had called, including his name in brackets.
"Wouldn't the act of deleting somebody's number indicate that you don't want to remember them?"
A 'disturbing' issue
While Apple appears to have rectified this problem in more recent versions of IOS, blocked numbers are still able to access voicemail and leave recorded messages, including an alert to the user to say that a new voicemail has been received.
Teresa Corbin, Chief Executive Officer from the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) says the ability for blocked numbers to continue to leave voicemails on devices is disturbing.
"I know from personal experience having received similar calls that it can really throw you, whether it's life or whether it's recorded doesn't matter because the threat is there," she said.
Corbin says ACCAN has received a number of complaints on the issue.
The problem is not isolated to Apple products. One Android user told The Feed that she has blocked several phone numbers from men she has been on dates with that haven't ended well.
The messages on her device will still be received, merely separated in a different folder that is easy for her to find.
Why is it so difficult to block phone numbers completely?
Associate Professor Mark Gregory, a telecommunications expert from the School of Engineering at RMIT, says the problem lies with the phones themselves.
The problem is that the systems are quite separate in the phone, so the SMS messaging, the voicemails [are separate] and some of these systems don't really talk to each other very well.
And so when you think you've blocked somebody, you really haven't from the other functions," he said.
The blocking process is often more complicated on Android devices because companies such as Samsung, Huawei, and Google customise these phones with many added layers of complexity - meaning users have to master their phones to understand how to do it.
"Over the top messaging services, Facebook messages, SMS, the phone, they would have to know their phone and be able to go through all the different things," he said.
While several apps exist that appear to cover all of these bases, Gregory says they are often inadvisable and can act unpredictably because they add another layer of complexity to the phone's functioning.
Role of Telcos
Gregory says telcos have largely avoided the responsibility of blocking phone numbers for everyday users, as it would it would require far too much customer technical support.
Even the 'Do Not Call' register - that supposedly allows users to avoid cold-calls from telemarketers - is a separate system easily ignored by international companies.
According to a consumer code, mobile phone users are able to contact their service provider to trigger an investigation, block an unwanted number entirely and have the telco issue a warning to a number that they are participating in unwelcome or unlawful communication. The telco can also report the investigation to the police.
However, Teresa Corbin points out that this process can seem extreme or too drawn out for some people who are experiencing immediate threats.
Corbin recommends that if users are receiving harassing phone calls or messages that they should do their best to block the number on their device immediately and report it to their telco where possible.
Ultimately the warning letters are important to show people that this is really bad behaviour and unlawful.
"A lot of the time the complaints relate to bullying and younger people who don't understand the law," she said.
Corbin notes that often the only fail-safe solution for a lot of victims of harassment or threats is to change their device entirely. Replacing phones is a routine procedure that has been adopted by many women's shelters for those escaping domestic violence and Telstra committed to donating 20,000 smart phones to women's shelters under their Safe Connections program between 2016 and this year
She's calling on phone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung to make the ability to easily and effectively block numbers a higher priority for devices in the future.
"In particular in a climate where the whole nation is focusing on domestic violence and family violence and trying to provide more protection to the victims, then it is something that we need to pay more attention to."
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