TrapCall 101: A Quick and Handy Guide Through the Basics

Welcome to TrapCall.

Whether you’re receiving unbearable amounts of Blocked Caller IDs or want to know who’s behind unknown numbers, TrapCall’s powerful anti-harassment tools and will help you on your way to living a more peaceful life.

Getting Started with TrapCall

Getting started with a new app is no easy task, so we’ll guide you through using TrapCall with simplicity in mind. This guide will help you better understand how TrapCall solves harassment and privacy problems to give you the peace of mind and protection you’ve been looking for.

TrapCall combat phone harassment through:

• Unmasking blocked calls
• Stopping harassment (blacklisting, automatic spam blocking, call recording)
• Providing advanced contact info (Live Caller ID and number lookup)
• Transcribing voicemail
• Worry-free support

One quick note: if you haven’t yet created your TrapCall account, feel free to keep reading to better understand what TrapCall can do for you. Then, be sure to create your account and join more than 100,000 users stopping phone harassment with TrapCall.

Unmasking your blocked caller IDs

If you created your account but have not yet set up TrapCall on your phone, please visit our phone setup walkthrough.

Once you’ve completed setup and have unmasked our Practice Call, TrapCall is successfully activated on your phone. That means you’re ready to unmask every blocked, private, or No Caller ID call that you receive. Here’s how you do it:

1. When you’re receiving a call that is from a Blocked Caller, Private Caller, or No Caller ID call, simply press the decline button on your phone.

For iPhone users:

• When the phone is unlocked, pressing the red decline button or your iPhone’s lock button on the right side of your phone twice. The first press silences the call, and the second one declines it.
  
• When your phone is locked, press the lock button on the right side of your phone twice. Again, the first press silences the call, and the second one declines it.
  

For Android users: you may need to check the instructions for how to decline calls on your device, but most phones either have a red decline button, or have an on-screen button that you can swipe down on to decline a call.

2. After you decline the call, it gets forwarded to TrapCall, and after a few seconds, we send it right back to you with the unmasked number.

For our Premium and Ultimate users, we also provide the Name and Address of the caller with Live Caller ID (only on iPhone), which you can also find on the Calls screen in your account.

Stopping harassment

Blacklist unwanted callers

After you’ve unmasked a blocked number that’s been calling you, you can add that number to your blacklist.
Once a number has been added to your blacklist, any future call from that number will be played a message that says, “The phone number you’re trying to reach has been disconnected or is no longer in service.” Then, TrapCall ends the call, preventing them from leaving you a harassing voicemail.

Plus, on iPhone, we can even block these numbers so that blacklisted calls never ring on your phone. Just enable Call Blocking permission in our iPhone app to set that up. This feature will be coming soon to Android users.

At this time, there is currently no way to prevent a blocked, private, or No Caller ID call from ringing on iPhone. But, with TrapCall, as soon as you decline that incoming call, we’ll be able to unmask it and see if it’s a blacklisted number so we can send them the blacklisted message and disconnect the call.

Check out our Help Desk to learn more about blacklisting with TrapCall.

Automatically block spam calls

In addition to your personal blacklist, TrapCall also comes with a built-in blacklist of over 100,000+ spam numbers that will never ring on your phone when you enable Call Blocking permission in our iPhone app (coming soon to Android).

TrapCall’s global blacklist of spam numbers is powered by RoboKiller and is updated constantly to make sure the newest spam numbers and robocall tactics are blocked before they ever reach you That means when your phone rings, you can answer it with confidence.

TrapCall also allows you to hold people accountable with built-in incoming call recording for Ultimate plan users.

Whenever you decline an incoming call, it will get forwarded to TrapCall, and then we’ll send it back to your phone a few seconds later. At that point, when you answer the call it will be automatically recorded. You can playback or share these recordings at any time through the app or website. If you don’t want to record the call, simply decline it again for it to be sent to your voicemail.

To see how this works, watch our Incoming Call Recording video.

*** Please note that you may not use the recording capability of TrapCall unless you have determined that your use is legal. Before recording any call, you should check the laws of your state and the laws of any state in which a person you are calling is located in order to determine if you need the other party’s permission to record a call. ***

TrapCall delivers advanced contact info

Get Live Caller ID of unrecognized callers

Premium and Ultimate plans provide you with the name and address of every caller you send to TrapCall through our app or website (when that information is available). In addition, with our iPhone app, you can even get LIVE Caller ID for every call that you decline and send to TrapCall.

When you decline a call from an unrecognized number and it gets sent to TrapCall, if a name and photo of that caller exists, we’ll send the call back to you with that additional info so you can decide whether to answer the call or send it to voicemail.

Lookup unfamiliar numbers

If you need to find out additional info belonging to a number after they’ve called you or need to look up a number you’ve never received a call from, our iPhone or Android apps can perform a reverse phone lookup and get the name, address, and photo that’s associated to the phone number. Click here to find out how.

TrapCall works with your voicemail

Because TrapCall uses your phone’s conditional call forwarding feature, that means your missed and declined calls will get sent to TrapCall first, and then we send them to your voicemail system. This process provides users access to voicemail transcriptions that their service provider may not offer.

For Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and MetroPCS, this process is automatic, and you will continue to receive voicemails through your carrier just like you normally do.

For AT&T and Cricket Wireless, most users will have their voicemail setup automatically. However, some users may have to take a few extra steps to get their voicemail setup properly. If you’re not getting voicemail messages through your carrier, please contact our Support Team to resolve that issue.

For US Cellular, you will need to use TrapCall’s Hosted Voicemail to access your messages, as US Cellular’s voicemail system is not compatible with third-party applications.

TrapCall’s Hosted Voicemail system is a fully-featured alternative to your carrier’s voicemail system, though, and is available to all users. It offers text message or email alerts whenever you receive a voicemail, message transcriptions so that you can read the message without having to listen to it, and we offer all the same greeting customizations that you might already to use to let callers know they reached the right person. If you’re currently using our Hosted Voicemail system, just dial 509-554-5555 to login and change these settings at any time, or contact our Support Team if you’re interested in trying our Hosted Voicemail system.

TrapCall has support available when you need it

While TrapCall is busy stopping the phone harassment you’re experiencing, we don’t want you to worry about a thing. To make your experience with TrapCall worry-free, our Live Support Team is available from 10AM to 9PM EST every weekday via Live Chat.

That means if you ever have a question, need to make a change to your account, or just want to better understand what TrapCall can do for you, help is just a click away.

We’re thrilled that you’ve decided to join the community of over 100,000+ users who trust TrapCall to stop phone harassment every day. If you have questions about the service, we’d love to chat with you. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the peace of mind that comes from using TrapCall!