How to Stop Annoying People Calling You

For some reason, someone from the Australian Stock Report rang me trying to sell me investment advice. The investment advice costs about $1000 per year, which is a rip off. Anyway, I tried to argue with this guy, but he didn't really address what I said. He just talked about a bunch of unrelated things. I suppose the logical thing for me to do would be to just hang up, but I suppose one of my personality flaws is that I am too polite. He said he was going to call me in a few days.

I have an app on my phone called Truecaller that I used to block his number. This is a great app. The problem is that marketers can easily turn off caller ID thereby making the caller show up as "private number." The Truecaller app has an option to block all private numbers, which I activated for a while.

The only problem is that my mother's phone, when she calls me, shows up as a private number. I've tried very hard to turn this off on my mother's phone, but nothing has worked, so unless I want to block my mother, I need to accept private calls, which means I am vulnerable to spammers and marketers.

What I will do when I receive a private number is simply pick up the phone but say nothing. I will wait for the other person to speak. If it's a voice I recognise, I'll keep talking. If it's a voice I don't recognise, I'll just hang up.