Calling a real estate robocaller back

https://www.philly.com/business/robocall-scam-philadelphia-home-buying-selling-20190430.html

by danso • 7 years ago

116 120 7 years ago

tyingq5• 7 years ago

An investigative reporter had no luck figuring out who it was. I'm curious if STIR/SHAKEN makes it possible to find the culprits, or if it just drives them to more niche VoIP providers.

BenjiWiebe• 7 years ago

It will prevent the robocallers from using local numbers to call you without actually buying/renting said numbers.

TuringNYC• 7 years ago

I've had people wanting to "buy" some property you have. Once they get you to agree to sell, then they ask if you can self-finance the sale (i.e., you become the bank and "sell" for nothing and they give you a monthly mortgage payment.) Sounds OK in theory, but you'd need a lot of paperwork/legal to vet the whole deal and you have no idea if the person can even pay until you spend even more on credit checks, etc. And If at some point they stop paying, you have to spend yet more on foreclosure and all the other stuff real banks have to deal with.

nmeofthestate• 7 years ago

Sounds OK in theory

Sounds terrible in theory!

toomuchtodo4• 7 years ago

It’s not if the income stream and high yield rate from a seller financing deal is more important to you (as the maker of the note) than a lump sum of cash. Everyone has different financial requirements, collateral they’re willing to put at risk, etc. You’re using today’s dollars (or assets) to find ways to buy more of tomorrow’s dollars (“investing”).

The paperwork isn’t too difficult to put together either.

wolco• 7 years ago

Not with a 20% down payment.

segmondy• 7 years ago

They want to rent, but with foreclosure protection. If they rent and don't pay, you can evict in 2 months. If they do this and don't pay, good luck evicting in 2 years.

logfromblammo2• 7 years ago

I'd ask for 25% down and 20% interest, and write quicker eviction for non-payment into the security instrument, as a separate civil action from a foreclosure.

...and then, I'd re-sell the note to a rich person/company who can afford better lawyers, because I don't really need my assets pinned down like that in one high-risk loan.

danso• 7 years ago

There's an idea for a dystopian comedy skit somewhere in this:

Will’s so busy leaving messages all over town that he never answers the phone when you call him back...Sometimes calls were forwarded to a host of people who went by “Pat.” They said they worked for PATLive, an answering service firm that takes calls for businesses when they’re busy or closed. Pats were taking messages for “Steven’s Office” in Alexandria, Virginia.
Asked why there were several Pats, a Pat said: “We’re all Pat.”
“We all go by Pat to keep it easy,” said Pat. “But we do have some Pats in the office.”

tyingq5• 7 years ago

I read their "how it works" and other pages, and the sales pitch isn't bad. They should be more selective about clients though. https://www.patlive.com

FussyZeus3• 7 years ago

Am I the only one who thinks this is bullshit? How is PATLive not also complicit in the crimes they're looking for "Will" to prosecute in?

I get so tired of these B2B service providers who get caught up doing borderline illegal shit and then just shrug their shoulders and say "not our responsibility." Everybody has these clauses doing the ass covering so they can sell services to anyone who knocks and they're never held responsible because of some bullshit contract.

WHY is that allowed? You're doing business with an individual/organization that is breaking the law, and you know it, or you would know it if you cared to look. That's gotta be at least worth a charge of negligence?

I'm just saying the "Will"s of the modern era would have a much harder time if the call centers, teleco providers, internet hosters, etc. were held responsible when they were found to be operating in cahoots with a scammer and I don't understand why they aren't.

Vet your fucking clients. And if you don't wanna do that, then shut your doors.

pault• 7 years ago

"What, your name's not Pat?"

"No, it's Michael."

"That's going to cause a little confusion."

BrandonMarc• 7 years ago

I just re-read this skit yesterday! Ha ha. "Rule number six: there is NO rule number six..."

Zak• 7 years ago

I have some friends who answered calls for PATLive a few years ago. I got the impression they didn't spend a lot of effort on vetting clients and responded to abuse in a reactive, rather than proactive manner.

Phone operators follow relatively simple scripts for most clients, taking down information so someone else can call back, but occasionally perform more complex tasks like scheduling appointments. My impression is that most of the clients were small businesses at the time; a few were government agencies.

It's easy for a scammer or robocaller to pass as a legitimate business with a service like that: just don't include any red flags in the script.

CodeMage• 7 years ago

Asked why there were several Pats, a Pat said: "We're all Pat."

"His name is Robert Paulson."

Etheryte• 7 years ago

Forgive me for being out of the loop here, but why is it so hard to make this business unprofitable and easily trackable? For any kind of contracted relations as mentioned in the article (automatic call centers etc), the law enforcement can get a trace. For off-the-shelf temporary SIM cards, make them rate limited and block them when a complaint is filed. Is there something I'm missing here? Given the numbers, this seems like a huge problem, is there simply no incentive to solve it?

tyingq5• 7 years ago

The patlive.com service does seem to be the obvious place to track down who their lawbreaking client is. It's a US company, which was probably a mistake. I assume "Will" could have contracted with a service outside the US.

On the plus side, patlive.com charges $1/minute as their cheapest plan. Robodialing them back, with a sufficiently clever script, would be costly for "Will".

criddell3• 7 years ago

I looked at PatLive's FAQ and there's no contract required. You pay by Visa, MC, or AMEX. If you can use a reloadable card then they probably don't know who you are.

jjoonathan• 7 years ago

Foreign telecoms make good money looking the other way on spam. They mix in enough legitimate users that the rest of the world can't just block them without, e.g., also blocking the entire Indian subcontinent.

We may get there. It'll probably take the form of deploying STIR/SHAKEN on the US side and making engagement with anyone who doesn't implement it purely opt-in.

JudgeWapner3• 7 years ago

I hope telecoms die a slow death like cable (TV) companies. with 5G coming soon, plus this robo-call epidemic of late, maybe that will push a critical mass of people to VOIP and leave this sorry industry (with their silly litany of technical-sounding acronyms) in the dust.

I'm not a facebook fan, but I wouldn't be entirely against "Facebook Phone" (as in, a drop-in replacement for dialing numbers now that works as an appliance, not a shitty "add-on" for fb messenger) if they moved in to disrupt the industry. Of course privacy-be-damned at that point, but it's the lesser of two evils IMO.

Mashimo• 7 years ago

Why are Robocalls so common in the US, but not in other countries?

temp1831• 7 years ago

The U.S. has more rich suckers to prey on.

TheSpiceIsLife• 7 years ago

At first glance this comment might seem shallow, but I think we can unpack it a bit.

1. It’s probably correct? The US is a very large single market

2. From some quarters the US does come across as being fairly laissez-faire

3. The scale of predatory economic activity in an otherwise highly developed economy is(?) unmatched

4. Penalties seem to be a cost of business rather than genuine attempts at deterrent

5. The general appearance of a lack of accountability

But, I’m just looking on from afar, and I’m sure the media advances the hyperbole.

TomMarius• 7 years ago

Because unsolicited calls are not legal in other countries

AndyMcConachie• 7 years ago

They're often not legal in the US either, but it isn't enforced. It has more to do with enforcement than it does legality.

onion2k• 7 years ago

Here in the UK they died out about 20 years ago when our Data Protection Act came in to force and stated companies could only call people who had given them prior permission. Calls still happen (either illegally from UK companies or from overseas companies to whom the UK law doesn't apply) but they're much less common.

bgeeek2• 7 years ago

Naw, they never died out at all. We used to get bombarded with international calls prior to blocking international calls. Now, they just spoof them from an adjacent city - we've had them purportedly from Liverpool and Bristol. Bizarre, but still happening.

ianhawes2• 7 years ago

American consumerism, access to easy credit, lower financial education, etc..

taborj• 7 years ago

Not sure if this is carrier-specific, but the phones my family uses will receive robocalls, but they come in with the name "Scam Likely." So somewhere, someone is keeping track of the various numbers that are used in a list, and using that to alter the carrier ID information to our benefit.

It doesn't catch all, but it hasn't incorrectly flagged one yet.

eitland• 7 years ago

Google does on my phone. Sometimes it will ask me after a call if it was spam.

Works surprisingly well considering it is Google in 2019, but now that I think of it I can see a number of ways they'll mess up this as well ;-)

criddell3• 7 years ago

I use Google's Call Screen service. It answers the call and tells the caller to state their name and reason for calling. The response shows up on my screen as text and I can decide to pick up at any time.

99% of the time, the call just disconnects.

I really wish Google would let me set my phone to ring only for numbers in my address book and give everybody else a busy signal.

fpgaminer2• 7 years ago

T-Mobile does this, at least. You can also turn an account option on which will just plain block "Scam Likely" calls.

DrWumbo• 7 years ago

I had a friend collect calling me from jail for 8 days. It kept showing up as Scam Likely, so I wasn't answering. One day I decided to answer it in order to leave an awkward conversation and was shocked to learn what had been going on. I bailed him out that day and vowed never to trust a Scam filter again.

ianhawes2• 7 years ago

“Will” doesn’t want to buy your house. Will wants to collect the lead, determine how appealing the property is, and sell the lead to someone local. Will isn’t touching that property with a 10 foot pole. Phil on the other hand, just bought the lead and will make a lowball offer.

Oh, and "Will" on the voicemail isn't Will either. It's a voice actor off of Fiverr that likely has no idea their voice is being used for this scheme.

mtw3• 7 years ago

does everyone has a subscription to Philly? I've never been to the site and wants me to pay to read 1 article

RandallBrown• 7 years ago

I was able to see the article without any issue. There was a banner telling me I should subscribe, but that was it.

mtw3• 7 years ago

Changing to Firefox worked. It seems Philly is able to work around privacy mode in Safari.

CHsurfer• 7 years ago

I want a phone service that automatically charges the caller a small amount ($1-$2). I can waive the charger for known numbers. Each time an unknown caller calls, I get an SMS right after the call to waive the charge for this and all subsequent calls or to proceed with the charge.

lemcoe92• 7 years ago

And how would you expect to collect on any of that?

jrockway2• 7 years ago

I think it's easy, right? Forward your number to a voice that says, "to call me, please type your credit card number on the keypad. a charge of $2 will apply." If they pay, you connect the call. If they don't pay, the call disconnects. Easy.

Nobody will call you, of course, including spammers.

ct0• 7 years ago

Just block all unknown callers with "should i answer" and change your voice mail to prompt the caller to leave a VM or send a text for an immediate response.

everdev• 7 years ago

Or just a feature to whitelist numbers, block all others.

I've gotten some helpful calls from neighbors though whose number I didn't have saved.

awj• 7 years ago

We see that every once in a while with email, where someone decided to sign up for an email list but also wants to charge $1-2 for "unsolicited" delivery.

Just set your phone on permanent DND w/ exceptions. It's literally the same thing, except you're not going through annoying contortions to "stick it to" someone that is probably a robot...

toast0• 7 years ago

Get a phone number from alaska? In bulk, those numbers may be more expensive to call, but probably will be allowed in consumer level minutes or unlimited plans subject to nebulous fair use clauses.

JudgeWapner3• 7 years ago

perfect application for blockchain: the phone doesn't ring without being on a safelist, or from a key that is obtained from buying $0.50 of some shitcoin. by default, the micropayment goes back to the caller's wallet 5 minutes after the call. but if you press the SPAM button, the blockchain is instructed to hold the payment in the receiver's wallet.

Any given person only needs $2-3 in reserves in their wallet, to make at most 4-5 outgoing calls, before their fees are refunded. Then a nominal fee for the miners.

vageli• 7 years ago

Get a 900 number.

devm0de• 7 years ago

What many of these real estate investors do is have a phone number on their bandit signs or use in their robodialer voice mails that forwards to the answering service. That phone number might be provided by services like callfire or callrail where you can generate lists of numbers. Some services let you script all actions.

Callfire allows for things like enabling recording on the call forward (potentially illegal) when someone calls it. Then investor themselves or pays a virtual assistant like $3hr to sift through all those calls for any potential leads. You can hear the entire call to patlive if you wanted to. Or they just trust patlive to forward messages as they’re the answering service.

So long as your answering service or where you’re generating your numbers doesn’t blow your cover then you can keep this game up for a long time. That’s what these answering services are trained to do is protect their clients identities. But I doubt that holds up when the FTC comes knocking.

NoblePublius• 7 years ago

Can someone explain why it’s so easy to spoof caller ID? And can someone else explain why spoofing caller ID isn’t a felony worthy of life imprisonment?

herodotus2• 7 years ago

The telephony protocol permits owners of a local telephone exchange (any setting with many internal phones) to display a chosen number in the caller-id field. The intent was that outgoing calls would appear to come from the general number of the organization, rather than the individual who actually placed the outgoing call. Unfortunately, when this was designed, no thought was given to the possibility of (now widespread) abuse. One cannot completely blame the original designers: when they did their work, telephony was essentially a closed system controlled by a handful of large telephony companies. The rise of using the internet as a transport medium was not something they could have anticipated: there was no internet back then!

rand0mthought• 7 years ago

You are probably banned in Google, so there is link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing

cr0sh2• 7 years ago

Not that this explains it, but IIRC, caller ID information is sent (or was, at one time with land lines) "out of band", in a particular data format, that occurs between the first and second rings.

IIRC, it's done using frequencies that either can't be heard (ie, outside the freq response of the phone), or the sound is "switched off" between rings (quite possibly this, since the "ring" voltage is completely different from the "line-in-use" voltage - so this voltage change can be detected and switch the signaling as needed).

At any rate, it's a known thing, and if you understand how it works, it's possible (well, again, was - for land line phones) to build a box that can inject these signals between the rings so the phone being called will display it. Normally, this is done (IIRC) by the CO, but I think if the info is already there, it doesn't override it.

I might be completely wrong, though; it's been a couple of decades since I last read about how it worked; also, I have no idea how it works in cell-phone land, but likely it hasn't changed because "inertia" and having to support older land-line phones...

AnimalMuppet• 7 years ago

When you have an incoming call ringing on a landline, the ring signal is very much out of band - it's 48 volts, with enough current to drive a solenoid to move a mechanical hammer against a physical bell. (You do not want to be electrically in contact with a phone line when ring comes in!)

The caller ID information comes as a frequency-shift-keyed (FSK) message (I think). As you said, it's between the first and second rings. But you can't hear it, not just because it's not a normal audio tone, but also because the phone is still on hook and isn't playing any audio that comes over the line.

That's regular caller ID, which is type 1. Call waiting caller ID is type 2. It's also an FSK message. (That is, I'm sure that it's an FSK message. I think type 1 is also FSK, but I'm less certain of that.) This comes immediately after the call waiting "beep". It's short enough that I don't think your ear can pick it out of the transition from the beep tone to the regular conversation that the beep interrupted.

I'm not sure whether you could get fake caller ID that you send through a CO. The phone line isn't "off hook" yet, so the CO isn't passing audio. (If you say "hello" into the phone while it's ringing, I don't think that audio goes down the destination phone line either.) But that's only how I think it works; I don't know.

sokoloff• 7 years ago

For legitimate outbound sales, I might be calling from 617-867-5309, but want my caller ID to always show up as the office main number (perhaps 617-867-5300). Or I might want to show my Google Voice (or Twilio or other) number as my number even if I happen to be returning your call from a specific line or phone.

As for felony life sentence, while I'm sure that's facetious for effect (and I chuckled), if you accept any of the above reasons, it seems you also need to allow for inadvertent misconfiguration. Once we broke up the telephony stranglehold (overall a good thing, I think), we allowed a bunch of federated phone systems to start working together, most of whom are good actors.

mtw3• 7 years ago

I'm seriously contemplating cancelling my cell plan. The annoyance I get from robocalls spam (plus monthly cost) is far greater than the utility. Relatives and close friends can always send messages through other services

drb91• 7 years ago

I believe you can disable incoming calls at the telecom level. Not sure who offers this but I do some phone banking and run into this about 1/100 calls.

Apple really needs a way to enable permanent do not disturb for just phone calls, ie your phone only rings if you are in the contacts.

dmix• 7 years ago

Apple really needs a way to enable permanent do not disturb for just phone calls, ie your phone only rings if you are in the contacts.

That's a really great feature idea. I hope someone here who works at Apple or Google reads it.

herodotus2• 7 years ago

There is an effort underway to end spoofing. It is called Caller ID Authentication. See https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication

mothsonasloth• 7 years ago

In the UK I get robocallers phoning me about car accidents or triple glazing grants.

I always say "yes", then you get a real person who picks up.

Then I will do the old bait and switch. Start talking about how my car got written off after the great M25 exodus of 2018. That I lost my foot from a low flying scooter delivery driver. The story then becomes more and more ridiculous and eventually they will hang up.

Since opting for this tactic my phone call count has gone down considerably.

bgeeek2• 7 years ago

Yep, these are the ones we get. I detest the way in which they say "hello" and leave a pause, expecting you to say something back. At first it made me feel silly for having been tricked into a natural response. Now, we just don't answer the phone anymore...

blang• 7 years ago

I've heard the opposite can happen, if you respond and stay on for a while, you are marked as a real and active number and will get more calls.

bduerst• 7 years ago

This is true. Your number is marked as real/responsive and recycled, sometimes resold.

rscho• 7 years ago

Even more cruel: say yes, listen to the start of the spiel, then gently lay the phone down. They'll call back not knowing if it was a line malfunction. Now rinse and repeat.

I got some so angry that they threatened to come over and break my face at home. This technique has up to now never failed me.

braindouche• 7 years ago

I once decided to talk with a "Hi this is Windows your computer wanted me to tell you it has a virus" guy once, and he's going through his script, trying to determine whether I have a Windows box or a Mac by describing whether I have a command key or a win key on my keyboard. My fancy-pants programmer keyboard happens to have neither, but in trying to explain this to him, he got so mad I literally heard him throwing things off his desk, last of which being the phone itself. I assume my family is still cursed, though I never took his physically improbable suggestions.

Nextgrid• 7 years ago

I use a fake identity generator (search for “fake name generator”) to play along and give them real-looking details and then ask them for the company’s details for whatever scam they’re shilling.

They’re never telling you that upfront but they’re usually more than happy to say after “closing” (or so they believe) their deal.

At that point I can go after the company in small claims court for calling a number registered on the TPS (equivalent of the do not call list in the US).

cr0sh2• 7 years ago

Just going to throw out the call/sms blocker I use and love:

https://github.com/kaliturin/BlackList

I have no connection to the software other than being a satisfied user. Yes, it's open source. Yes it's Android only.

Yes, it's SMS app is bare-bones. And the UI is ugly.

That's the tradeoff for this kind of thing. It's a shame there isn't an active development community around it making it so much better.

The basics are all there and they work great. Mainly if the UI was updated, and certain "extras" were added to the SMS app (for me, that'd be emoji/smiley usage and photo upload/download) - it would be perfect. But I'm willing to put up with the "bad" to gain the "good" parts of the app.

billyt555• 7 years ago

Is it just me or does this article end mid-thought?

gnicholas• 7 years ago

I regularly receive calls from an agent at a reputable (or at least I used to think) brokerage here in Silicon Valley.

They use the typical trick of calling you twice simultaneously, so the second call can go straight to your VM box. The message was boiler plate: "we're looking for a home in your neighborhood for a client, but inventory is very thin as you know so we're wondering if you know anyone who might be open to selling."

The thing is, there were 3 houses for sale on my street at the time, so it was immediately clear this wasn't based on an actual client. I had recently spoken with an agent from this brokerage firm and I sent her a follow-up email to let her know that her colleague's (illegal) shenanigans were undercutting her company's reputation.

fpgaminer2• 7 years ago

We all hate robocallers and scammers. We all hate getting called every day by them. But did you know there's something worse? My wife recently discovered a not so fun side effect of spam calls...

Scammers have this popular trick of spoofing the caller ID for a number local to you. People are more likely to pick up the call if it's a number that seems familiar to them (like, the first 6 digits are the same as your phone number).

I've known about this trick, but I never really thought about the collateral damage. See ... that number they're faking is a _real_ phone number. And it's someone else's phone number. It's not the scammer's number.

Well my wife's phone number got used. You wouldn't believe the number of people who call scammers back! She was getting hundreds of calls a day; non-stop. Most people were calling back trying to figure out who called them. Some were angry. A few threatened her with violence.

And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. You can't stop someone from spoofing your phone number on Caller ID. You can't stop people from mistakenly calling "you" back. You're just stuck in phone hell. The only solution is to change your phone number ... not really a great option.

It lasted about a week; we resorted to just keeping her phone on Do Not Disturb.

What a nightmare.

softwaredoug• 7 years ago

I’m totally ignorant here, so I’m sure there’s a good reason: why is secure caller id so hard?

cobbzilla• 7 years ago

The telephone network was designed with total trust for “network operators” who essentially have “root” to do anything.

This worked OK when the only operators were the various national phone monopolies (Cap’n Crunch notwithstanding), but today that level of access is much easier to get and abuse, and is difficult to trace.

There are efforts to bolt-on security to the telephone network but it’s really hard.

I think it’s more likely that (over the next handful of decades) the phone network fades into obscurity as more voice calls are connected over data links which offer much improved security models.

breakingcups• 7 years ago

Because there's no financial incentive to fix it.

antonvs• 7 years ago

It's being worked on - there's a standard called STIR/SHAKEN which uses certs to verify calls. I worked on this on my last contract. It's pretty easy to implement as a prototype - I've done it myself - but integrating it into the entire legacy phone network is another matter entirely.

Here's an article about it: https://www.howtogeek.com/402141/how-phone-companies-are-fin...

closeparen• 7 years ago

The architecture of business telecom is really flexible. Customer PBXes have wide latitude to make their own routing decisions, and numbers are shared across arbitrarily complex multi-site, multi-provider topologies.

What your neighborhood grocery store buys from the phone company is just a pool of voice circuits, probably fewer than its extensions and even its DIDs. There is no simple circuit-number mapping like in residential telecom.

Designing federated AuthN/AuthZ for this is not simple; getting it rolled out across all the participating equipment (with many owners and service lifetimes of 15+ years) is basically never gonna happen.

NickBusey• 7 years ago

Yup. I've had this happen on my Verizon business phone. I called Verizon and was told the only recourse was to change my number, but of course the rep acknowledged the spammers could spoof any new number I received just as easily. So Verizon's only answer was basically "Deal with it."

diogenescynic2• 7 years ago

Verizon’s scumbag lawyer was appointed as head of the FCC and promptly rolled regulation on robo-calls.

sucrose• 7 years ago

Scammers have this popular trick of spoofing the caller ID for a number local to you.

I recently moved to a different state and kept my old phone number. When someone calls using that old area code, it's immediately obvious that it's a robocall. I have no ties to that area code, therefore no reason to answer. I usually Spokeo the suspicious numbers afterwards because I'm curious who it is.

A few months back I tracked down the PII of a number that called me, so I texted them back. Here is our short, interesting conversation: https://imgur.com/a/4V2ugw9 (phone numbers and contact list names have been redacted)

MagicPropmaker• 7 years ago

Why is it so hard to catch them? Can't the FTC set up a house sale, and when the buyer presents himself at closing, have him arrested? Eventually the buyer needs to be available to close the sale. I suppose it can all be done electronically (I bought property with an electronic closing) but for the demographic they're trying to market from, electronic signatures and document handling may not be easy. Someone will have to meet with them, and there an arrest can be made (for the robocalling).

uptown• 7 years ago

I tracked down one of these robocallers once. I'd been getting multiple calls a day from the same number. The number was tied to a business name, which had an old domain name registry in some online index. From there, I was able to find the original domain name purchaser name and phone number. I also found his Facebook page, with poor privacy settings - and a few other details about the guy. So I gave him a call. He was very surprised to get a call - but listened, and accepted that a phone call wasn't where I'd stop if his calls continued. They stopped that day.

whenchamenia• 7 years ago

"Hello this is Lenny..."

Calling a real estate robocaller back

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