How To Determine if You have Been Blocked on iPhone 7 & other devices running iOS 10

Are you suspicious you have been blocked by someone?  Are you calling or texting someone with no response or answer?  We have the answers to help determine if you are in fact blocked or just being ignored.

We are using an iPhone 7 and iPhone 6 for the examples in our post but these strategies will work on all Apple iOS devices. Some of the strategies are specific to iOS 10 users but overall, most are the same.

What’s different when calling someone who has you blocked

1. Does the call ring several times without anyone answering up without going to voicemail
2.   Does the call ring one time then go straight to voicemail
3. Call the number several times in a row to see if you are switched immediately to voicemail
4.   Use FaceTime to call the suspected blocker-do they answer using FaceTime

Being diverted to voicemail immediately and getting cut off after a single ring are sure signs you are blocked by the person you are trying to call

Forget to leave any type of voicemail or thinking they will get a notification when you call because they will not.  That’s the whole purpose behind this feature is to block callers and not be bothered in the future by calls or voicemails.  So, you may be SOL on this front.

The fastest way to know for certain you have been blocked is to call from a different number.  Do not tell the contact you are using a different number and if they ask make-up an excuse such as you forgot your iPhone at home.  Do this a couple or three times, if they always answer, you can be pretty certain they are blocking or ignoring you.  Now you can focus on trying other techniques to see if you are blocked.

How to disable Caller ID for all calls

1. Settings > Phone “turn off” share my caller id (Verizon Users Must use My Verizon)
2. Verizon Users (Me) must open settings > phone > Verizon services > My Verizon login and change it here.

How To Enable Call Blocking for One Call

1. Dial *67 plus the number

How to disable Caller ID for one call

Before you make your call dial *82  star, eight, two. Plus the number you need to call.  It will show as a blocked caller or unknown to the person you are calling.  Keep in mind 9-1-1 and 800 service calls can not use this feature.

How To Determine if You are Blocked on iPhone 7

1. Send an iMessage which warrants a reply of some sort.  This will tell you whether or not they are seeing your iMessages and just choosing to ignore rather than block.  Personally, I have a close acquaintance, I call him an acquaintance because you don’t do true friends this way who we will refer to as Mark.  Marko pretends to only check his iPhone once a week and will never pick up or reply.  I’m not blocked by Marko it’s just he’s an ass who won’t reply.  So this is a great example of a caller ignoring but not blocking.  See the difference.
2. Take a look at the read receipts feature in iOS.  This is one of the most useful tools developed by Apple in my opinion.  However, Marko has his read receipts turned off so this really doesn’t help me to know for sure.  But if you really need his attention, just come up with some kind of message relating to money in some way.  Evil I know, but effective.  The receipt will need to say “read” before you know they have seen it for certain.  If you see “delivered” this only means your message made it to the contacts iMessage.

Read Receipts can now be enabled for each contact in iOS 10.  However, if you are running anything before iOS 7 your will not have this option of even having read receipts anyway.  Users running iOS 7 to iOS 9.3.5 will have the ability to enable them under settings > iMessage “send read receipts” toggle on/off here.  This is truly one of my favorite things in iMessage and I always choose to send read receipts to everyone.

Facetime the suspected person blocking you

1. Do they answer using FaceTime
2.   Change the caller id on Facetime before calling (now do they answer) Users can change the caller ID in FaceTime Caller ID in Settings > FaceTime Choose a different number or email to FaceTime from which hey may not recognize

Knowing You have Been Blocked a Specific Contact

1. Make a call to the suspected blocked contact.  But before you do turn off caller ID so they don’t see your number and just choose to ignore it.  Users can disable caller ID under Settings > phone

How to Block a caller on iPhone 7 or iPhone 6 running iOS 10

1. Settings > Phone > “call blackish & identification”  scroll to bottom and tap “block contact”. Enter the number you wish to block.  In most cases, you will need to create a contact for this number in order for cal blocking to be effective.  I usually make up silly names such as: ”spammer”, “call spammer”, or “stop calling me”. Have a bit of fun with it is what I say.

2.  FaceTime needs to be blocked too.  Settings > FaceTime  scroll to   bottom and tap “blocked” and “add new”

Please keep in mind you will have to remove this from the blocked contact list if you wish to get calls or text from this caller in the future.  Maybe you guys get back together LOL.