[General Questions and Answers] angiehere:
Need help selecting a call blocker for LG X Power

Not sure how to do this because I couldn't see a place to begin a new thread, so hoping I'm not being bothersome.

I just got my husband the LG X Power phone with a new phone number to replace his horrible Galaxy, which was a nightmare from day one. I have an ex family member who puts very high quality spyware on our phones; the kind of spyware that is such that he never has to have actual contact with the phone, all he needs is the phone number and for the unsuspecting user to answer the wrong phone call and bang! he can now see and hear anything going on. That being said, I have explained to my husband NOT to answer the phone unless the number shown has a name attached to it that he recognizes. So that part is taken care of, but within a day of having the new phone with new number, it began to ring. And ring and ring and ring; it was nothing to hear it ring 40 times a day or more, from phone numbers in Egypt and DC mostly, but other locales as well. This is unquestionably because since spyware is already on the devices of other family members, the ex has found the phone number by way of one of our contacts list. I say this because as soon as his previous number was disconnected, my phone began to go crazy in the same was as his previous phone had done. I've spoken with a computer forensics specialist about locating and identifying the spyware itself and the location from which it hails and the cost is prohibitive; I will do that only as a last resort.

My husband doesn't have that many contacts, so I gave his contacts a ring tone completely different from the main ringtone to make it easier. I'm still a bit concerned that he might accidentally answer it in the middle of the night without thinking; so far there is no spyware on it and I would like to keep it that way so I'm looking for a call blocker, but it needs to have specific properties.

First, I need it to work with Android 6, which is the OS on his phone. Safest Call Blocker evidently doesn't work with 6 because I installed it and set it to block everything not in his contacts, but the phone continues to send calls through.

Second, I need a call blocker that does NOT send calls to voicemail, does NOT pickup/hangup or in any other way respond to the call. I need it to decline to answer and send it to the app's own internal log so that I can keep track of what numbers the calls are being placed from in case a numerical pattern emerges. If the call is picked up, the spyware is in and everything done is for nothing.

There seems to be about a gazillion call blockers and a lot of them say what OS they will work with, but not which ones they are not yet compatible with. Trying to do a search will make you pull your hair out; you get all kinds of irrelevant information, but nothing that helps me figure out which blocker to use.

In case it clarifies or helps in some way, neither my husband nor I use our phones for anything except phones; if we need the internet, we have two desktop computers, a laptop and two tablets that handle those functions. My husband doesn't text at all; ever. He never checks email at all; ever. The only non phone thing he does is use the Google speech engine to get phone numbers or locations of auto parts houses or whatever he may need at the moment, but that doesn't happen more than once every couple months, so I don't consider it terribly risky.

I'm not averse to a paid blocker if it has a free version for me to try to see if it works before I add one more useless app to his phone. I would be so happy if anyone has a lead on an appropriate call blocker; I don't want to use the phone's own reject call function because if he makes one mistake, it could be the one that makes this phone as useless as the last phone.

Please help me if you can!!

Angie