Home > News

Spammers Bombard Apple Users with Group FaceTime Calls

By Laura Tucker
Group Facetime Calls Featured

Most people learned to lean on video conferencing during the pandemic. These platforms were used for both personal and business uses. It didn’t take long for spammers and pranksters to start exploiting the platforms. macOS and iOS users are reporting that they are being besieged by group FaceTime calls that are either spam or pranks.

Group FaceTime Call Spam

Group FaceTime calls have only been available on iOS and Mac for a few years. Certainly, the feature was put to great use in the past year during the pandemic. It was found to be quite useful, along with Zoom, Skype, Teams, etc.

Just a few months after people began quarantining and sheltering at home, FaceTime users began reporting that they were being flooded by group FaceTime calls that appear to be spam or pranks. Worse yet, there doesn’t seem to be much recourse, as the numbers that are calling cannot be blocked.

Group Facetime Calls Iphone

There have been reports since last June of these group FaceTime calls, and the frequency seems to have picked up significantly in the past few weeks. There have been up to 31 users at a time on these video calls. When someone hangs up, a different number calls them right back, frustrating users.

Reports of the calls are being posted to the Apple Support community and Reddit. “Since then, I’ve received about seven more calls throughout the day,” said one user. “When I realized what it was, I hung up and it called back 11 more times,” said another.

One report explained how it works: “The high volume of callbacks appears to be the result of other people receiving the call dialing everyone back when the initial call fails shortly after answering. As more and more people receive follow-on calls, they, too, begin making callbacks.”

No Fix So Far

At this point, there is no fix. These calls cannot be blocked. FaceTime calls work much like regular phone calls. Each phone number or Apple ID needs to be blocked individually. If you’ve ever tried to block spam phone calls, you understand – they just call back from a different number.

Group Facetime Calls Ios

You can’t block calls from outside your contact list. However, you can do that while you’re in Do Not Disturb mode. But that’s not very favorable, to operate all the time in DND.

Another option is to disable FaceTime calls altogether. But that means you’re also blocking FaceTime calls from family, friends, and co-workers. However, desperate times call for desperate measures.

If this news has not deterred you from using FaceTime, check out this list of FaceTime keyboard shortcuts on Mac to use the app more productively.

Image Credit: Apple Newsroom and public domain

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.