Once in a while, I get an annoying scam phone call telling me that my car warranty is about to expire and blah blah blah. It always comes from the same number and every time I try to get through to a real person instead of a recording, it hangs up on me or just keeps playing a recording over and over again.

Since AT&T for some reason won’t block specific numbers on cell phones, it’s up to the phone itself to block the numbers. There’s no elegant way to do it on the iPhone without jailbreaking it, so what I did was this:

1. Download a silence ring-tone from here.
2. Load the ringtone onto my iPhone.
3. List the number I want to block under a contact named “Blocked”.
4. Assign the silent ringtone to the Blocked contact.
5. Add any other numbers I want to block under that contact.

There’s a more detailed tutorial about it here. This method solves the problem of having the phone ring and picking it up, but it doesn’t help if your phone is set on vibrate as well. It also doesn’t help when you’re on one line and the blocked number comes up on the other line and you accidentally switch over.