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Ublock Origin on my parents router cut their scam call popups by like 90 percent
So my dad called me last month because his laptop was showing fake virus warnings every time he browsed the news. He is 71 and lives in Tucson, and he had already clicked one of those popups twice before calling me. I drove over and instead of just cleaning the machine I installed uBlock Origin on his Firefox and also set his router to use a filtering DNS service. The fake warnings stopped almost right away, but here is the weird part, his spam calls on the house line also dropped a ton. I think one of those popups had signed him up for some junk list before I got there. What really got me was how fast it worked, like within two days he went from 8 or 9 junk calls a day to maybe one. I am not saying a DNS filter is a magic fix, but for older folks who click stuff, it buys you time to clean things up. Has anyone set up something like NextDNS or Pi-hole for their parents, and did the spam calls ever calm down for you too?
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uma_johnson9d ago
Honestly the spam call thing makes total sense to me. My mom had the same deal where she clicked one of those "your computer is infected" popups and suddenly the house phone was ringing off the hook with dudes asking about her extended warranty. I put uBlock on her Chrome and set up NextDNS on her router, and within a week the calls dropped from like six a day to almost nothing. Those popups usually hide a form that dumps your number on a sucker list, so once the popups are gone the leak stops too. Still get the random robocall here and there but nothing like before.
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