FCC finally starts tackling America's robocall scourge

https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/13/fcc_robocalls_action/

by thebetatester • 5 years ago

240 210 5 years ago

Good start, but ideally networks should also be required to provide originator info (number, network, country of origin, as many hops as available basically) to cell phones, regardless of whether a call is blocked or has a different number set as caller id.

So not only would the networks be blocking spam, end-users could then block whatever calls they want. Don't wanna get calls from any VOIP numbers or anyone out of your country? You can block them and chill out.

mminer2372• 5 years ago

I believe the FCC started moving towards requiring that with SHAKEN/STIR a couple years ago, but the telcos were given a few years to implement it.

stjohnswarts7• 5 years ago

Nope they have to have it in place by June or July of this year I believe. If the software allows it I will drop any unsigned calls immediately, don't even let them go to voicemail. Let them keep shouting into the void. No I don't care if it causes some companies issues. I'm sick of spam calls. My car warranty is doing just fine.

MiddleEndian5• 5 years ago

Glad to hear this will soon be a thing.

bmitc• 5 years ago

It’s not just robocalls, as it’s also spoofing numbers. I have received many phone calls from average joes who said they were returning a call from my number, but I had never called them.

I’d say 95% of the calls I receive are spam. It’s so bad that I rarely even answer my phone anymore, instead letting it go to voicemail if the number is not in my contacts.

Everything in life has turned to spam. My physical mailbox, my email, and my phone is bombarded by spam and there’s practically nothing I can do about it.

pavel_lishin• 5 years ago

Robocallers routinely spoof numbers.

dylan6045• 5 years ago

It's very meta when the caller ID shows you calling yourself

MiddleEndian5• 5 years ago

instead letting it go to voicemail if the number is not in my contacts

At some point I stopped checking my voicemail and it seems to have broken. I am better off for it, because now I no longer am notified about new voicemails.

galangalalgol• 5 years ago

I don't have this problem on my personal phone, but my work phone the voicemail is garbage and so are my text messages. I just look at exchange and skype, ignoring the rest. My personal phone shows as a landline if you look it up, maybe that is why?

lumost• 5 years ago

my text messages recently surpassed 5 spam messages per day. In the not too distant future my phone will cease to serve any useful function related to being a "phone".

pkaye• 5 years ago

I sucks even worse for those of us on organ transplant lists. We don't know if the random number that calls us is the call we are expecting. Though mostly I just answer the call and don't say anything because most recorded scripts don't start unless you say something first.

ddingus• 5 years ago

I quit voice mail. It is absolutely horrible.

Maybe it does not have to be. Someone should take a swing at that.

The message they get is "you have reached [name] phone, please use SMS or email. This message box is not monitored."

Best thing I have done.

Not everyone can. I wish it were otherwise.

I do answer most calls, and all calls when I am waiting on something critical.

Robocalls got bad this year.

Sadly, they are all recordings. I used to have great fun with the live ones!

You can see that scene in "Boiler Room" where the guy gets a call from someone pitching a local paper to get a good idea of the fun.

I used to pick a rando goal based on my first impression. These ranged from a friendly exchange, pep talk, stall or troll, up through encouraging them to quit and walk out while I keep the line hot... (That guy from Vonage who I had on the ropes? Sorry in hindsight man. I really, really did want to just cancel, and... well, you were the lucky draw that day. Nothing personal.)

sdenton4• 5 years ago

My voice mail message just says that no voicemail will be listened or responded to.

Keverw• 5 years ago

I stopped getting voicemails too. Someone told me it said my voicemail box was full. No notifications to me. So I was unaware unless someone told me or I call my own number. Using visual voicemail on a iPhone with prepaid service.

flyinghamster3• 5 years ago

Another approach if you're getting a new phone/number is to just not set up voicemail in the first place. Then the spammers' calls go nowhere.

killtimeatwork• 5 years ago

My Polish cell provider has an option for disabling voicemails altogether, is that not the case in the US?

Causality12• 5 years ago

Frankly I'm amazed that spam doesn't fall under harassment laws.

orev2• 5 years ago

There are already laws to stop this, like the do not call registry. But the scammers don’t care about the laws.

cableclasper• 5 years ago

Everything in life has turned to spam.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

echelon2• 5 years ago

Because we don't punish the spammers. And by spammers, I mean the big "nice" players too, like Google and Facebook.

We tolerate them, and every year they grow a little more evil and audacious.

pjc502• 5 years ago

Not "we", a fairly small number of completely anti social people who are happy to destroy a resource for others if they can make money.

robcohen• 5 years ago

We did this to ourselves by not making our systems Sybil resistant or DoS resistant. Bitcoin solves this problem by requiring a fee to submit a transaction to the ledger (Denial of Service). lightning does this by requiring you to select who you network with (sybil). Solution is for any modality is to restrict to known good addresses, and for anyone else charge a substantial fee.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 5 years ago

I agree with most of what you say, except for email.

Because of such things like DKIM, I really don't have an email spam problem, or if I do, it is because I signed up for it myself.

Because there is a record of who is transmitting the message, hosts and ISP's that transmit spam get punished by having their emails ignored. It is thus in their best interest to make sure they behave well, and deal quickly with any complaints.

The big difference in phone spam is lack of accountability. I believe if you fix that, the problem can be solved pretty quickly

stjohnswarts7• 5 years ago

I'm amazed at google's spam filters. They catch like 99% of the spam from an email I've probably had for 12 years or so. Every now and then something slips through but it's pretty good. When I look at the spam folder I see I probably get 20:1 spam:legit email.

jjav5• 5 years ago

Yes! It is interesting, and quite a twist, that spam in email is by far the least of spam problems these days. I get hardly any spam ever on email anymore (on my own email server). Was going to say once a month but no, it's way less than that.

And yet, I'm getting a constant barrage of spam over SMS and voicemail, there's no stopping that.

flyinghamster3• 5 years ago

Because of such things like DKIM, I really don't have an email spam problem, or if I do, it is because I signed up for it myself.

Running home and work mail servers, I would disagree. If I let my shields down, I get kajillions of spam emails from snowshoe [0] spam operators (assuming it's not all the same operation!), coming from hundreds of IP addresses in dozens of /24s, all with random word salad domain names, valid DKIM, and valid DMARC, with domain registrations that lead nowhere. Blocking whole /24s and certain egregious TLDs is the only way to stem the tide. As long as there are ISPs, colo/cloud providers, and registrars who are willing to pocket the cash and look the other way, nothing's going to improve.

[0] https://www.spamhaus.org/faq/section/Glossary#233

lolthishuman• 5 years ago

I don’t think I’ve picked up a phone call in 2 years. Text me or email me no exceptions. So much spam I see increased on voicemails the past year. Clearly all scam.

gogopuppygogo4• 5 years ago

You aren’t an elderly person who isn’t technical.

I watch the scam baiters on YouTube and on occasion you hear a victim crying while the perps laugh.

Truly bad people to be executing scams against some of the most vulnerable.

knodi1235• 5 years ago

I guess you don't schedule a lot of medical appointments or work with contractors.

I wish I could block all unknown numbers, but I'll miss the rescheduling call from the roofer who had to borrow his wife's cell because his fell out of his pocket, or I'll miss the "please confirm you're coming to your appointment tomorrow" and now I've lost a doctor's appointment I scheduled weeks in advance, etc.

hansvm• 5 years ago

My physical mailbox

Definitely consider USPS form 1500 if you have any repeat offenders [0]. If it's possible to interpret the spam as trying to sell you something then courts have broadly upheld your right to personally decide what kinds of content are excessively offensive without any additional oversight. Credit card offer? Discount to buy a used car? Nah, it's sexually explicit advertising that won't make it into your mailbox again without a hefty windfall.

Also, credit offers lately have been including fine print specifying how to opt out from all of them (the culprit there is credit rating agencies selling your data). That might be CA specific? Anywho, if you jump through a few hoops you can opt out from that particular source of spam for life.

my email

If you don't need to receive inbound connections from unknown sources (e.g., recruiters) then switch your email to whitelist mode and just allow your contacts. Otherwise, at least create a few accounts to compartmentalize that part of your life. Logins and promotions go into a bucket you never read unless you're expecting an auth code or something, and you can keep your personal email filtered to a whitelist. Depending on your skillset this can be much easier to manage and customize if you host it yourself.

my phone

I have no practical advice here; nothing I've tried yet has an appropriate balance of usability and effectiveness. Whitelist solutions aren't as great because it's uncommon for one phone to support multiple numbers simultaneously, and voip solutions can have prohibitive drawbacks depending on your use habits.

As a partial solution, Google's dialer (disclosure, noogler, but I liked this product before starting too) is decent at detecting spam if you're using a new enough version of Android that you can install it. It still clutters up your call history till you manually mark calls as spam, but in the moment if you're expecting a new number to call you can have high confidence that if Google hasn't marked it as likely spam that it's probably the call you're expecting.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibitory_Order

raverbashing• 5 years ago

USPS should make bank by raise the price for marketing mail, it seems disproportionately cheap (p. 18 here https://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/manuals/dmm300/Notice123.pdf )

bshep• 5 years ago

For my phone Robokiller works well, spammers have pretty much given up on me. Used to get 1-2 calls/week, now i get maybe 1 a month or less.

zo12• 5 years ago

Don't forget web ads - I would classify them in the same set as the examples you pointed to. They basically "blast" content at you to convince you of something.

katbyte2• 5 years ago

This baffles me as a Canadian, I get maybe 1 spam call a month, no flyers, pihole blocks most ads, and gmail seems to filter out most email I don’t want to see.

How come robocalls and junk mail are so much worse for you?

refurb• 5 years ago

Really? I gave family in Canada and they get a ton of random spam calls on their phone and a ton of spam email. I'll give you the lack of flyers though.

Frost1x2• 5 years ago

From what I've read about the research here, there is something around 1% of the population that regularly answers and interacts with spam calls. Obviously, there's a lower rate for which portion of those follow through and result in a transfer of money. Apparently, the cost of robocalling is less that that fraction of 1% penetration rate. Since almost every aspect of America is about money anymore, that's why we have so much robo call spam: there's enough money to be made doing it by those who do it that it's economically viable for them... so they do it, everything else be damned.

Note, this was about 6 years ago. I don't know if the current market is the same.

jjav5• 5 years ago

With some numbers it is absolutely unbearable. I have a landline I've had for a very long time and it gets the infamous "extend car warranty" spam call about every other week. On my ~15 year old cell phone# I get that same call also about every other week on average.

But last year I got a new phone with a new number.. wow! It is completely unusable as a phone. Relentless nonstop spam calls every hour as well as continuous SMS spam. I've had to mute everything and send everything straight to spam except for a couple known numbers that I allow through. Nobody except family will ever be able to call me on the new phone because there's no way to enable unknown calls on it without having it ring nonstop.

saalweachter• 5 years ago

Personally I am most offended by the calls offering website and SEO services for the domain I purchased a decade ago without masking the registration, because I've professionally worked on (a) making a website, (b) search ranking and (c) SEO.

It's the one call that makes me want to shout, "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?", but since there is no reason anyone would know who I am, I'd just feel silly, and I'm not the sort of person who shouts into telephones anyway.

MivLives• 5 years ago

This is terrible especially when you're applying for jobs. All calls from unknown numbers have to be answered because you never know who's calling you back.

space_ghost• 5 years ago

Every other week? I get "extended warranty" spam calls a dozen times a day on average. Like many commenters here I don't answer my phone unless I know the number.

Black101• 5 years ago

It’s not just robocalls, as it’s also spoofing numbers.

I get a phone number that is outside of my area code so if I get a phone call from that area code, I know 99.999% that it is spam (and probably spoofed).

flyinghamster3• 5 years ago

I have received many phone calls from average joes who said they were returning a call from my number, but I had never called them.

I've run into that, and don't get me started about phone companies being unwilling to insure Caller ID is accurate, even when they charge you for it. I'm looking at you, AT&T. The VoIP service I ported my landline out to costs less per month than what AT&T wanted just for Caller ID.

Everything in life has turned to spam. My physical mailbox, my email, and my phone is bombarded by spam and there’s practically nothing I can do about it.

Also add your cell phone (if you run Android) and your desktop OS (if you run Windows 10).

I host my own email, and block a number of TLDs on sight simply because they've been nothing but spam cannons.

More and more, I find myself forgoing consumer tech products in general, or looking before I leap. Consumer routers suck, consumer NASes suck [0], I sure as hell don't want my heating system connected to the network in any way, nor my car. Smart lighting? Only if it doesn't depend on someone else's computer to function (so, IKEA for me, and even there I'm considering firewalling it so it doesn't auto-update).

[0] Cross-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26800062

enominezerum• 5 years ago

protip is to get an area code far away from where you live. If you get a call from that area code, chances are you can ignore it. If it is serious enough, they will leave a message.

Butm regarding spam, yea, it is pretty bad. My HOA piles on by sending letter about "canning spam" with links to spam removal sites and such that I just trash because I am not trying to fight that war.

briffle• 5 years ago

I used to live in another state, just over a line for a different area code then where my work and friend were. I know nobody in the 920 area code, but I get about 4-5 calls a day from random numbers in that area code. Makes filtering much easier. Plus the Pixel's automatic screening of suspicious numbers is pretty awesome.

miohtama• 5 years ago

Why does this problem manifests in the US only? The rest of the world is close to zero spam calls and texts.

frosted-flakes2• 5 years ago

Large, mostly homogeneous population that speaks a single language.

throwaway8943452• 5 years ago

The more troubling problem to me is that my government (United States) will drag their feet on just about any issue that matters to ordinary people--spam, climate change, overfishing, healthcare, etc--provided at least one corporate lobby of virtually any size at all advocates for the problem. Using this spam case to illustrate, it's taken a decade of multiple daily spam calls to virtually every single American for the government to budge on this issue (and still no solution is even on the table for snail mail spam); how are we ever supposed to tackle issues that only really affect a subset of Americans (e.g., healthcare), or which affect us all but invisibly/intangibly (e.g., overfishing, climate change, etc)?

If I had one policy wish it would be to completely eliminate corporate lobbying. Concerned citizens can lobby individually or in groups, but corporate donations, perks, etc to such people/groups would be tightly regulated with steep fines for trespassers.

amelius• 5 years ago

Democracy should be more direct when it can be. A referendum with the question "do you want spam?" would quickly solve the problem.

cma• 5 years ago

Verizon lobbied against govt stopping spam calls because they sold an anti spam service at high profit margin.

DennisP4• 5 years ago

A friend of mine is working on a book, arguing that the root problem is public votes by members of Congress. Prior to 1970 or so, Congress used secret ballots. You could lobby them but you wouldn't know whether they voted your way. A new law changed that in the name of "transparency" and corporate donations and lobbying took off in a big way after that.

We insist on secret ballots for individual voters so they can't sell their votes, but for our legislators whose individual votes are far more consequential, we've given up on it.

In exchange, we get to see how they voted and "hold them accountable." But we can't do that nearly so effectively as corporate donors. Most of us don't look at voting records at all; our information mostly comes from attack ads taking votes out of context.

lainga• 5 years ago

provided at least one corporate lobby of virtually any size at all advocates for the problem.

It's the Golden Liberty of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, except instead of the szlachta, we have corporations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Liberty

It did not work out for the PLC's democracy, which entered a state of perpetual deadlock, and became a cautionary tale taken into account by the framers of the US Constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland

suifbwish2• 5 years ago

Pretty simple. Create an expensive corporate lobbying tax that pays for the people’s lobby

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

Even junk mail through the US mail is a travesty.

The US Government acts like your US mail is a sacrosanct communication channel that if they send you something it doesn't get drowned out by junk mail.

Basically, our society says: any communication channel you will have to deal with a 10% to 90% ratio of useful communication vs forced against your consent advertising and fraud, even in _the_ constitutionally mandated/provisioned official government communication channel..

DennisP4• 5 years ago

What's a bit amazing about physical mail spam is that the post office gives it a discount.

hooande• 5 years ago

the underlying problem is that spam of any format is very cheap. if just 1% of people respond, it pays for sending out all of the robocalls/texts/emails. it's very difficult to legislate against economics like that

what we need are better spam filters for calls, texts and physical mail. allow people to pay to blacklist numbers that have a high probability of being spam. I'd imagine that "real" numbers get an average level of incoming calls, messages and push notifications that a spam number wouldn't

it might also make sense to allow private or government white listing. ie, prove that your phone number belongs to a "real" person potentially by paying a one time application fee. with enough adoption, that could change the spam economic equation

bkandel• 5 years ago

FWIW I get almost no spam on my email at all these days. I use disposable addresses (via Yahoo) for all stores and aggressively filter emails from listservs and stores, but after that I get next to no spam. What spam I do get is picked up nearly perfectly by Gmail's spam filter. Agreed about phone spam though, it's pretty terrible.

devchix• 5 years ago

Even your email? I feel like in this one domain, we have pretty much won the war against spam. Gmail does a great job of spam filtering, and I expend some effort to guard my email address against 1) other people's mistakes, and 2) real spam. Wrong/spammy things that come to me get an unsubscribe or a Gmail filter, or right into the spam bucket. Have you looked inside your spam folder lately? My God!! The only thing people want to sell is money and sex.

I'm annoyed by McDonald's France, someone who presumably lives in France made a mistake and subscribed my email to their list, and when I tried unsubscribing using their link, I get a "you're not in our geographical service area" nonsense, so I can't unsubscribe truly. Right into the trash filter they go. On my shitlist are all companies that allow subscription or signup w/o an email verification.

My phone is on answer-only-if-known. It makes me hard to find, true, but I like it that way. If someone really needs to find me, they will. Dentist, contractors, recruiters, applies to all.

My mailbox is next to the paper recycling bin. Garbage gets sorted in there immediately. It hurts me to see resources get wasted this way, and I wish the USPS would raise the price for this garbage. I've read somewhere that first class mail subsidizes junk mail, I don't know if that's true. I'm all for the USPS making tons of money off commercial mailers. Do you ever see junk delivered by UPS/FedEx? Even one bulky envelope? Never!

psychlops2• 5 years ago

I see Gmail as one part of Google. It's hides the ads from one part and displays them elsewhere. I minimize my contribution to the whole process whenever possible. My spamassassin filter doesn't have a junk mail folder, it all goes to /dev/null.

The USPS is the source of your snail mail spam, not the solution.

trident50003• 5 years ago

If every call cost 5 cents to originate we would no longer have a spam problem.

PenguinCoder3• 5 years ago

You're incorrect, and underestimating the potential profit vs cost. 5c per outbound call, but even if the scammers get 1 or two people a day for $100 (and likely MUCH more), it's just a drop in the bucket to operating costs.

trident50003• 5 years ago

I doubt I'm incorrect. There were 46 billion robocalls in 2020. That would be a $2.3 billion operating cost. Make it 10 cents and its 4.6 billion. Robocallers are not making 2-5 billion per year scamming people.

yboris• 5 years ago

$100 / $0.05 = 2,000

Do you think the scammers have a better return than $100 / 2,000 calls made?

inglor_cz• 5 years ago

I am in a country where outbound calls are not free yet. Our robocall problem is, in comparison to the U.S., negligible.

runako• 5 years ago

If a person averages 5 calls per day, that comes to $7/mo. That's an additional 20% above T-Mobile's cheapest plan.

We would want to design a system that acts as a deterrent on spammers without acting as a communications tax on the poorest.

KingMachiavelli• 5 years ago

Is the average number of daily calls even 5? The poorest are probably not on the high end of that distribution in any case. It also doesn't need to be applied to regular mobile numbers - just VOIP numbers. At the call volumes these spammers use there is no way they are using diverted SIM/mobile numbers.

Another solution is to make the call cost $0.05 or some nominal cost unless the call duration is longer than 20 seconds. Or make calls that are unanswered cost more, etc.

trident50003• 5 years ago

Make it per contact per month. Most people reoccur calls to the same few people. Theres a way to get creative to penalize spammers but keep it cheap for customers.

ALittleLight2• 5 years ago

Do people really make 5 calls a day? I'd be surprised if I make 5 calls a month.

na852• 5 years ago

How could the telcos enforce this if they can't even stop spammers from spoofing numbers?

kalleboo• 5 years ago

Just charge higher termination rates?

gogopuppygogo4• 5 years ago

We use algos to block spam. We can do the same for robo dialers.

pjc502• 5 years ago

Hey, I remember when calls used to cost money!

But then again I'm in the UK where the robocall problem is much smaller for some reason.

consp• 5 years ago

Not from my perspective: I keep receiving UK phone number spam calls, and I do not even live in the UK. So far I blocked all UK numbers using a blocker app.

This is due to the some UK numbers being "reusable" as well and location bound. There are numbers from businesses who went bankrupt and are now being used as they sometimes show up as "named numbers".

ta_robocall• 5 years ago

another one. A calls B, A now owes 9999.. to B (via phone company, billing), if B calls A back at least once, we now know there is a link and every call between these two numbers goes as usual. two birds with one stone. punish robocallers, awards those affected by them.

curryst2• 5 years ago

Doesn't the system to bill people's phone lines still exist? I presume telcos have made that immune to number spoofing since there's money on the line.

Just make it so that reporting the call as spam triggers a $1 charge to the caller. Something that won't ruin anybody's life if their ex-spouse decides to be a shitty person, but enough that it makes spam calling no longer profitable.

cryptonector• 5 years ago

Or -hear me out- if every call was authenticated... then abusers could get locked out of the network, fined, etc.

marshmallow_12• 5 years ago

i don't get too many here in uk. And most of them are the 'guys themselves' phoning.

SapporoChris• 5 years ago

When I was in Japan, I had an account with DOCOMO (local cellphone service). I used the number frequently delivery services, bank services, hotels, etc. I never received a single unwanted phone call.

I return to USA I get new cellphone service and same day I get dozens of unwanted calls and immediately have to block all numbers not in my contact list.

Since the problem of unwanted calls doesn't exist in some countries, I have to assume that it is a solvable problem. Countries where it is a problem simply don't wish to solve it. I suspect it is simply some countries favoring corporations over individuals.

mprev• 5 years ago

It’s better now the PPI crap is over but I get plenty on our business line from robots claiming to be BT, HMRC, and Amazon.

maccard2• 5 years ago

I had't had one in 12 months in the UK. It's time to renew my car insurance and I entered my number for a quote into one of the major providers websites, and I've had 3 in the last week. I hate to make assumptions, but it's just too coincidental.

Causality12• 5 years ago

It's easy to write spam off as a minor annoyance, but you're not the intended target. Your parents and grandparents are, and your immigrant neighbor who doesn't speak English well, and the intellectually disabled woman who waves to you at the grocery store. These are predators who prey on the vulnerable and ignorant and ruin lives on a daily basis. They are the absolute scum of the earth.

devmunchies3• 5 years ago

These are predators who prey on the vulnerable and ignorant and ruin lives on a daily basis

most companies want to do this. the rub is that most advertising makes you think it was your choice or that it was a good deal.

knodi1235• 5 years ago

you're not the intended target. Your parents and grandparents are

A significant number of the spam calls I get are just dead air. Like, ring ring, I pick up, I say hello {myname} here, and I hear nothing.

I wonder if they're filtering out young voices? If I said hello in a quavery weak voice, would they start their pitch? Or is it some hapless scammer who just can't figure out how to set up his robocalling software?

ALittleLight2• 5 years ago

I think these are calls with a potentially live person at the other end. Their system dials X numbers simultaneously and then hands off any answers to an operator. If there's no available operator then you'll just get dead air.

habeebtc2• 5 years ago

Exactly so.

I talk to scammers regularly. To waste their time, and also learn about what they do and how they operate.

When I answer a call in my normal voice, they might hang up right away. They hang around more if I try and sound like an old person, or talk slower (like I may have lower cognitive or language skills).

orev2• 5 years ago

We need to start targeting the companies who profit from it: the telcos who deliver the calls (i.e. AT&T, Verizon, etc.). That’s the only way to get a solution.

Telcos get a multiple benefits from spam: they charge fees to the originating carriers, and in the long term it kills voice service which they have been eager to shut down for at least a decade. Data is clearly the future and that’s where they make most of their money. People giving up on wireline voice allows them to more easily make the argument to shut down all that old wireline infrastructure.

nostromo• 5 years ago

Telcos don’t have the legal authority to block spammers. They are required to fulfill the call. Think of it as a voice version of net neutrality.

This is a legal problem that requires a legal solution.

Just two years ago the FCC gave telcos the ability to block spam texts (over Twilio’s objections). But no permission was given to block voice.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna94...

Broken_Hippo• 5 years ago

I don't think they have to fulfill the call. I can block a number from calling me - and they don't have to let the call go through. They don't have to let folks harass.

It isn't even a technical issue: "mobile companies can in fact block most robocalls but choose not to, in large part because it costs money to do so and at the same time they make money from those calls." (from the article).

In other words, they can still allow me to choose to block those calls, but it seems they only really offer it to non-prepaid customers, charge a fee for the service, and don't exactly advertise that they have the ability.

Frost1x2• 5 years ago

That's not entirely true: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/151...

There's an authentication piece (sec 4) that allows telecos to block calls that are unauthentic in origin.

darkarmani• 5 years ago

Telcos don’t have the legal authority to block spammers. They are required to fulfill the call.

Can they block callers that spoof their phone number? That's all i need.

webinvest• 5 years ago

I just need a block against people that spoof their phone number. The rest I can prosecute in court

bogidon3• 5 years ago

One hack if you get those robocalls that match your area code. Get a new phone number for an area code you think you’ll never go to and use a smart blocking app[1] to block the entire area code.

It’s a brutalist solution that’s not for everyone, but it has restored my sanity.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wideprotect-spam-call-blocker/...

heliodor• 5 years ago

Anyone know of an Android app for blocking an entire area code?

lots2learn• 5 years ago

I use Hiya for this purpose

devmunchies3• 5 years ago

i used to live in seattle and have a 206 area code. now live in cali and it does help me ignore calls.

knodi1235• 5 years ago

I used something just like that for a year, and then iOS changed the rules about whether apps are allowed to intercept calls before they ring, and it just stopped working.

Do you vouch for this app working within the last 6 months?

bogidon3• 5 years ago

Yes. I do not get 803 calls at all anymore. Am on iOS 14.4.2. I also use T-Mobile Scam Shield so I can see all the calls that have come in from the carrier’s perspective, so before iOS blocks them.

It’s interesting, of the last 24 calls from the 803 area code (most recent was yesterday) only 9 were identified as spam by T-Mobile and blocked by them. The others were blocked by the WideProtect app. Certain all of them were spam.

(I lived in SC 10+ years ago. The only people I met there are in my contacts and excluded from the blocklist.)

zippergz• 5 years ago

These apps do not intercept the calls. All they can do is call an API to tell the OS a list of numbers to block. This is good from a privacy standpoint but bad from an effectiveness standpoint, because apps can't do any real-time analysis of incoming calls to make a decision. They just have to periodically update a static list of blocked numbers.

post_break• 5 years ago

I'd fucking hug you if I could. Finally an app that does what I want.

neogodless• 5 years ago

This is a technique I largely stumbled into. My phone number is from when I lived in a different area, close to family. I've since moved to a new area code. Anyone that I know from that area code is already in my contacts. But a large portion of the spoofed spam numbers use my area code, and while I don't block them wholesale, it's easy to ignore any numbers from that area code.

AdrianEGraphene• 5 years ago

I see a few answers here touting the use of a fee and I couldn't help but ask for feedback on my in-production solution with a few thousand users. It uses a refundable $0.05 fee, which is refunded if a call lasts more than 25 seconds. [1]

A business model we're pursuing is to let legitimate callers pay willing recipients $/min according to the recipients predetermined rate. [2] I'd love more users/feedback/customers. iOS is in the works for Summer 2021.

[1] https://karmacall.com/

[2] https://thecompanybrief.com/briefs/rhntb

imwillofficial• 5 years ago

By siding with Facebook?

devmunchies3• 5 years ago

It would be nice if there were an Adnauseam[1] that answered calls for me and carried on a life-like humanoid conversation with the spammer or asked a question as a CAPTCHA.

[1] https://adnauseam.io/

function_seven• 5 years ago

There's something like that:

https://old.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

Read the sidebar. You can set your phone up to forward to that number. It's not as automated or foolproof. But it's fun.

danparsonson• 5 years ago

That's wonderful - my favourite moment from the video I picked was when 'Lenny' was invaded by ducks :-D

ChrisMarshallNY• 5 years ago

RoboKiller. Works a treat.

https://app.robokiller.com/

rPlayer6554• 5 years ago

The Google Pixel has a feature which can answer a call for you with a recording. It then asks why they are calling and shows a transcript on the screen for you. You can ask some preset questions as well. That way you don't have to actually pick up unless they are someone you acctually need to talk to. A lot of robocalls auto-hangup when they get to this assistant for some reason anyways.

dmckeon• 5 years ago

Try nomorobo.com - free for Voip numbers, $20/year for mobile. Not 100% perfect, more like 95%, but it will suffice until the FCC improves the situation ... soon. Other similar services exist, and would likely be as effective.

gogopuppygogo4• 5 years ago

Buy a number on Twilio and forward it to your cell. It’s $1/month for the number and if you don’t get many calls it’ll be pennies a month to get calls.

Plus, you can setup a greeting and have an AI speak to your callers. Basically vanishes all robocalls.

chris_wot• 5 years ago

Is it just me, or did Arjit Pai seem to be actively avoiding the Robocall issue?

mminer2372• 5 years ago

I think that's what SHAKEN/STIR was supposed to address largely, but he gave carriers a couple years to get it implemented.

stjohnswarts7• 5 years ago

June 30th, 2021. We'll see if everyone is actually done by then. I really hope they are.

habeebtc2• 5 years ago

Avoidance was sort of his signature move.

varispeed3• 5 years ago

I would love that someone investigated why Google pulled call recording API from Android 9 onwards. Given that I was scammed by insurance companies twice over the phone and I could have lost substantial amount of money if I couldn't prove the scam, I think call recording feature is essential for a consumer to be able to protect themselves from distance selling scammers or even honest mistakes. There are other benefits like being able to record your parents or other family members and keep their voice forever or simply being able to listen again your conversation with a doctor, so you don't have to bother the clinic if you forget something about dosage etc. The official reason is that it is for privacy (oh good lord...) and that in some countries it is illegal and basic narrative is that they don't want people to secretly record others. This falls apart quickly - you can record someone secretly using your built-in phone camera and microphone, but somehow that's okay, they won't disable the camera and in my country, for example, call recording is perfectly fine. So who lobbied Google? Removing such API is not a trivial task, it takes time, planning, resources, developers and then dealing with the fallout. Who wanted people to be defenceless against phone scams?

kaali12• 5 years ago

The API was never removed, it's just behind a system permission (only system apps can be granted this permission).

Before Marshmallow (2015), recording phone calls was behind the same permission as recording the mic. This was obviously bad as voice calls are much more privacy sensitive than the mic. In Marshmallow, phone calls recording was updated to be guarded by a new permission, a system one, so only system application can access it.

Nevertheless, there were multiple ways to bypass the new system permission, which call recording apps made use to continue recording calls even without the system permission. Those ways were fixed one after the other as part of securing and refactors of the audio stack. The last such bug was fixed in Android 9.

Any OEM can bundle a call recording apps, it's just that many don't.

varispeed3• 5 years ago

This is interesting - there is plenty of recording apps and suddenly users no longer can use them and Google killed their business. I wonder if that broke any anti-trust laws. It's kind of like Google disabled features that let apps like Whatsapp work and then only allowed phone manufacturer to install their own chat app...

Does it mean if I had a rooted phone I could get the call recording working on latest Android?

I am still going with 2018 phone and it's a bit worn now. Only thing that stops me from buying a new phone is that missing feature and when I ask about call recording the sellers would say yes there are plenty of apps in Play Store, but they don't know these apps don't work. I don't know how reliably I can find out if the phone at least has a manufacturer's call recording app.

unsignedint• 5 years ago

I may have written this in the past, but I still don't get why we still use PSTN where identifying caller is next to impossible, and very easy to be exploited (allowing mass dialing easily)

E-mail is not perfect, for example, but at least its address provides bit more context than the seemingly random number showing up, legit or not.

If we are insisting to use the current system, norm really should shift to a strict white list at least for residential inbound. The current system is simply not sustainable, and more and more people are not taking the call from the number they don't recognize anyways.

tenebrisalietum• 5 years ago

- PSTN is well-established. The phone network has had global reach for a very long time, probably longer than the Internet. Phone numbers have been part of people's lives for a century.

- Some locations in some countries are probably still using mostly analog switching equipment and can't upgrade to cellular or anything more modern/secure for various reasons.

- PSTN has government-agency or at least a subsidized/privileged monopoly status in most countries, so it won't die a natural death.

I just wonder why it took until iOS 12 or whatever for my phone to be able to drop calls from unknown contacts.

stjohnswarts7• 5 years ago

shaken/stir is supposed to go in July, I hope that the tools that come on phones for that allow you to just immediately drop the call. No voice mail, no "silent notice", just let them sent their crap to /dev/null and give them nothing to waste my time.

iamthemalto• 5 years ago

Interesting that seems to be an exclusively American problem (as far as I know). I’ve experienced exactly 0 robocalls in all the other countries I’ve lived. My friends and I are constantly astounded when our American friends complain about spam calls, it’s just unheard of here and everywhere else I’ve ever lived.

yalogin• 5 years ago

These are very easy to illustrate to the law makers. It costs almost nothing to incessantly call the phone numbers of the most influential lawmakers. All someone has to do is do it for a week and we would get a new law against it. Wonder why no one did it till now.

dejawu• 5 years ago

I think we've all taken the wrong approach to the phone spam problem.

Whenever I get a scam call, I always answer. I let the guy do his spiel about the free vacation he's got for me, then when he asks me for my credit card, I hit him with one of the ligma jokes [0] and hang up. Never takes more than five minutes of my time and it's a source of great joy for me. I've gotten the same guy three times and he's fallen for it every single time; at this point I'm starting to develop a bond with him.

If we pushed a social movement that popularized this, we could basically DDOS phone scamming out of being viable.

[0] https://github.com/tphecca/awesome-ligma

CivBase3• 5 years ago

That wastes a lot of my time as a call receiver. I'd rather the telephone companies do this for me instead.

They could put together an automated service to receive calls from blacklisted numbers instead of just blocking them. That service would play along with the scam and keep them on the line as long as possible. A YouTuber my wife watches, Kitboga, tried something like that about a year ago[0].

Unfortunately, something like this isn't quite as effective for robocalls.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hx5R0Vnp6w4

clan• 5 years ago

Around here I mostly get calls from "Microsoft Support". I tell them I need to get to my computer and put the phone down on the table. They are surprisingly patient. When they get desperate to talk with me I'll spout a little giberish which keeps them connected a little longer.

It does not take much effort keeping them busy. It works for me as it is not a problem to block the line for 5 - 10 minutes.

If I am bored I engage with the call. But that spiel is getting old.

mgleason_3• 5 years ago

About frickin’ time, the amount of money that has been scammed from some of those who are most at-risk is ridiculous.

And get your ass in gear and require companies implement a positive ID system that makes call spoofing impossible.

cik• 5 years ago

This is incredibly solvable, and it costs me $2 per month. I use a VOIP provider and give out that phone number. I ban all incoming calls from numbers not in my phonebook.

The phone number plays an IVR - and you can leave a voicemail which is e-mailed to me. If you're someone I know (friend, bank) you have my extension - unlisted in the IVR, and you can enter it.

I've received zero unwanted calls in the 2 years I've been doing this.

dwheeler• 5 years ago

There are so many robocalls, typically for scams, that our phones have been effectively stolen from us. We can often no longer practically use them for their intended purpose.

I hope the FCC gets serious.

jmann99999• 5 years ago

Google Voice’s call screening feature has made robocalls a non event for me. I have Voice set to screen calls, so when the robocall comes in, it usually hangs up when it encounter’s Voice’s questions. I get one ring on my cell phone and nothing else. It’s somewhat satisfying every time it happens.

js2• 5 years ago

I get 7-10 spam text messages/week to my GV number. Most of them are addressed to someone named "Miller." It's been occurring for over a year and GV never detects that it's a spam text message. "Miller, you've won this. Click on this link." GV obviously doesn't do any spam detection on SMS if it isn't catching these.

RickJWagner• 5 years ago

It seems it would be very easy to accept a robocall, follow the money to the advertiser and begin the investigation there.

Follow the money and fine the living fire out of the dirtbags that do the robocalling.

It seems we're taking a different tack, though.

faded242• 5 years ago

I met Ajit shortly after he started in his role. I specifically told him how we can track and trace back these robocalls via SS7 (at least once they hit the PSTN - SIP ingress even easier to track back to the trunks they originate), and I even had proof of concept code and examples. He seemed really excited, then did nothing. No follow-up, etc. It would only work if mandated by the FCC because there is no financial incentive for the telcos to do it.

hulahoop56• 5 years ago

Here in India, the telecom authority (TRAI) has prescribed various measures to curb unwanted calls and messages[1], with mixed success. They also have an app released[2], which essentially uses a template to send SMS to the number denoted for complaining about spam.

After a lot of action for around nine months, I got junk SMS and spam calls (both automated and otherwise) to a bare minimum. It did take some time and there were a lot of frustrations along the way, but was completely worth it.

Some good practices I figured from all this:

1. For spam calls where there is an actual human speaking to you, try and get them to reveal the name and location of their call center. Most of the time, the culprits are the same for different types of calls. Requesting to speak to their manager and having a friendly chat about the TRAI penalty system helped a lot in reducing the calls. Having a log of when they had called you in the past is also helpful; at least it conveys that you aren't some buffoon shouting at the clouds.

2. For SMS spam where the sender is a bunch of letters (eg. ZZ-ABCDEF), iPhone isn't able to add that contact to the block list. Using T9 to figure out those numbers and adding them[3] to the blocklist that way works. This is mostly for your telecom service provider who feels free to send you spam with no way for you to complain to TRAI, because you're using their service, and they don't care about do-not-disturb for such cases.

3. Naming and shaming on Twitter and email helps, especially for companies depending on their brand name. Funded startups in particular are abusers of spam calling and SMSes, but are also fearful of complaints on social media going viral.

4. This might be anecdotal, but I found I actually received fewer spam calls after removing my number from TrueCaller[4]. Ironically the service is used to figure out who's calling you, but I found that I don't need it at all, and not having my number in there has somehow proved beneficial.

5. Certain mobile service providers are more serious about acting on spam complaints than others. If you find that your provider is not heeding complaints about spam, definitely switch to another service if possible.

6. Some services do provide a DNC (Do Not Call) registry on their website. Do use those and keep a record of you having added your name to it.

[1] https://www.trai.gov.in/sites/default/files/RegulationUcc190... [2] https://apps.apple.com/in/app/trai-dnd-do-not-disturb/id1443... [3] https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/features/iphone-how-to-bloc... [4] https://support.truecaller.com/hc/en-us/articles/212063089-H...

Alex5899• 5 years ago

I wish there was a way to stop this bs. Robocall numbers used to be easily identifiable. Nowadays, robocalls shows up as a random-similar number of a third party person, which is never repeatedly dialed, so even blocking the number won't stop calls from coming it (as it'd just dial from a different similar number...)

CivBase3• 5 years ago

Legal threats and spam blacklists are an endless game of whack-a-mole. I'm not convinced robocalls will ever disappear until the telephone protocol is updated so a receiver can confidently verify the identity of the sender. Once calls are authenticated, the problem will evaporate practically overnight.

rapht• 5 years ago

I'm always flabbergasted at seeing how these things are handled in America.

Long ago in the country where I live, the regulator:

- set up an opt-out central register where the owner of any phone number can freely declare they do not want any unsollicited calls

- made this register freely available to all businesses

- required from telcos that they make it easy for customers to report infringing calls

- made telcos liable if they do not swiftly take action whenever they have 'sufficient' reports (10s not 1000s) that one of their clients is infringing on the opt-out list, including by cutting off all of the client's numbers.

... does not seem such a big deal to set up.

jjcon• 5 years ago

Nobody is talking about sales pitches - the FTC in the USA also has a do not call list.

This is about scam callers that set up pop up operations make a few bucks close down and repeat. This happens just as much here in the EU. Most of these calls do not even come from the EU/USA though they do have operatives here. The vast majority of victims are older people that don’t understand they are being scammed.

CivBase3• 5 years ago

All of the scam/robocalls I get come from India and use spoofed numbers. We have do-not-call lists, but why should a telco across the world care about it? How can we even identify the relevant telco when the scammers are routing VoIP calls through spoofed numbers?

MiddleEndian5• 5 years ago

Phone companies know if it's spoofed or VOIP. They could just not forward spoofed numbers, or inform your cell phone that it's a spoofed number so you can silently block it on your end (or auto-respond with your own bot that pretends to be a person lol).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803498 seems like the FCC is doing something like this, how it will work is TBD I guess.

nichohel• 5 years ago

The two companies named are of course receiving PPP "loans". So they are literally being paid, by you (American taxpayer), to annoy you.

https://www.federalpay.org/paycheck-protection-program/r-squ...

https://www.sba.com/ppp-funded-companies/florida/tellza-inc-...

achenatx• 5 years ago

my dad (80 YO) has a PhD in computer science and has been scammed multiple times.

I have had multiple employees buy about 7K in gift cards for scammers.

I personally bought a $200 electric surfboard that ended up being a $20 boogie board (facebook ad). I immediately realized it was a scam but paypal wouldnt let me cancel the transaction. They said I had to receive the item first. Then when I received the item the refund link wouldnt work (errored out). I ended up just giving up and eating the $200.

A retired friend had all bank accounts and investment accounts drained (millions). Im not sure how this happened, but 2FA is a must for big accounts.

Im pretty sure scammers make a lot of money.

These days I mainly get car warranty calls.

Dumblydorr• 5 years ago

I got in trouble for not answering my phone when HR was trying to call, because the number was unknown and I get about a dozen spam calls every single day. It's ridiculous, my actual work productivity greatly suffered due to the spam flying in daily.

fallingfrog• 5 years ago

The FCC should not only force them to block all robocalls, but fine them an amount in the billions for what amounts to pissing in the well of public trust for decades. I mean, I don’t ever answer a number I don’t recognize anymore. If the doctors office calls, and I don’t remember the number, they are going to have to leave a message and play phone tag. What is the social cost of an entire population of people who basically don’t trust their phone or anyone who calls them? Some survey company tried to call me last year, and I didn’t answer it because I assumed it was some kind of scam. It doesn’t have to be this way. The way phone companies have conducted themselves constitutes gross negligence and betrayal of the public trust. I want to see jail time, not a slap on the wrist.

criddell• 5 years ago

I use Google Fi and I wonder if these changes are responsible for my recent problems with caller ID when I call somebody. My phone number is 512-xxx-yyyy and when I call anybody in Canada and some US phones I've been told my number shows up as +51-2xx-xyy-yy or just as unidentified caller.

When I text my daughter, my incoming texts show up under that number but she can't reply on that number. It's very frustrating.

curryst2• 5 years ago

That is weird, it's ringing as an international number. +1-512-xxx-yyyy is your international number. Seems like it's making it an international call, but not actually using the country code.

thesis• 5 years ago

It takes me far more time to sort through all the crap I get in my mailbox delivered by USPS. I either don't answer the call, or hang up 5 seconds after answering.

In general I worry that blocking legitimate "robocalls" will make people miss important events. My mortgage company was trying to contact me and the phone was displaying "Spam Likely". Another instance last year was my city sending out an emergency alert for a hurricane.

brewdad• 5 years ago

Like a lot of you, I don't answer my phone ever unless the number is in my contacts or I am expecting a call.

Today I got my first ever porn spam via SMS. So glad to have that to look forward to over the coming months/years. eyeroll

makecheck• 5 years ago

It’s funny, I remember when the iPhone was announced Steve Jobs said “the killer app is making calls!” and then proceeded to show (correctly at the time) how hard making calls with phones was, and how much better it was going to be.

And now? I literally don’t use this feature.

I turn on Do Not Disturb and “block unknown callers”, and turn on emergency-mode for anyone I actually care about, and receive no other rings on my phone. At this point, I refuse to spend even a moment considering any call that does not leave a voice mail.

FCC finally starts tackling America's robocall scourge

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