Just to be clear, that's in the context of talking to companies, not when a friend calls you up? Because I'm not sure if it's because I'm just thick or because I'm not natively English but it can be understood (as my sibling comment seems to do) as literally never talking to anyone unless you called them.

If two friends both had that policy, it'd be a standoff. They'd never get to talk on the phone.

This is why call centres based in Mexico always fail.

Everyone has their own strategy. I only answer calls from my own contact list. I have some friends who literally turned off the ringer and don't answer any calls. You have to leave them a message, or just text them and ask them to call.

You realize this fails because you can spoof Caller ID. The Caller ID was from the bank, so if you had the bank in your contact list, you'd have no protection.

I can count on zero fingers the number of times my bank has called, however. I don't have them on my contact list. I have a few businesses, mostly family, friends, and colleagues. Spoofing one of my contacts is a pretty tall order for a robocaller outfit, and likely would raise the cost of the call high enough to make it unviable.

If your contact list is small enough to be people that you know well, though, it's not a bad policy. Most scammers are not going to be equipped to imitate my brother's or my wife's voice and mannerisms well enough for me to believe them.

Personally, my policy is not to talk on the phone except with people who are close to me. All of the people who are close to me know that I prefer not to talk on the phone. Ergo, anyone who calls me is not someone I want to talk to.

Maybe it's a generation/cultural gap but me and my friends exclusively communicate in text chat apps. If we need to hash something out in voice real quick (finding each other in a park or something), it will have been prefaced by text and the voice call is done in the chat app, not through the phone network.

haha, sorry. I meant for companies.