David Frankel is a man on a mission against robocalls

https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-to-stop-robocalls

by rbanffy • 2 years ago

188 111 2 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

Scarjit• 2 years ago

I wonder why this is such a large problem in the US. Here in Germany i don't even remember the last time i got a robocall (if ever).

erehweb• 2 years ago

Maybe because of (from the article)

"At the Federal Communications Committee, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests."

bediger4000• 2 years ago

I hope the modest amount of money it took to bribe the FCC commissioners is worth it to them. The FCC allowed 10 or 20 sociopaths to make modest amounts of money while ruining a communication network used by billions.

flerchin3• 2 years ago

I don't have data, but it seems plausible that niche languages receive geometrically fewer attacks. I'm US, and looking at my call history 3/11 of the most recent inbound calls were spam which was correctly captured by google and I never saw it.

Symbiote2• 2 years ago

German is hardly niche, it's the 12th most-spoken language [1].

Anyway, Britain and (as far as I know) Ireland also don't suffer from these robocalls.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

ljf• 2 years ago

I believe (historically at least), local calls in america were free - setting up a robocaller could take advantage of this - the only cost was energy. In the UK/EU the same calls would cost the robocaller money.

Similarly, I understand it is free to send SMS in the states, you pay to receive them. Again this is a cost in the UK - though with a headless mobile phone and a SIM with 'unlimited sms' this can be worked around, though the SIM need to be rotated.

bluGill• 2 years ago

SMS has been free for most people in the US for a long time now. For a while Europe was cheaper, but things have changed over the last 20 years, and they will continue to change. When SMS was cheaper in the EU, voice calls were vastly cheaper in the US, so when the EU would use SMS, the US would just make a voice call (at the time the US spent 2x as much for phone service, but used the phone 5x as much - I'm going to call that cheaper but you can read the numbers several ways).

Robo calls make sense in the US in part because we used the phone more (remember historic), and in part because "everyone" spoke English and so you could ignore language and reach a lot more people.

WarOnPrivacy2• 2 years ago

in the states, you pay to receive SMS.
Again this is a cost in the UK - though with a headless mobile phone and a SIM with 'unlimited sms' this can be worked around, though the SIM need to be rotated.

The 2 scenarios seem to be:

1) SMS is included in the service. This makes sense. Original SMS were 0-cost to provide; they rode on existing control traffic.

2) Honest people pay per SMS. Spammers don't. As ever, this disproportionately effects honest poor people.

rootusrootus5• 2 years ago

I understand it is free to send SMS in the states, you pay to receive them.

That has not been true in many years. Most people have unlimited everything. Cost conscious consumers do opt for plans with limits, but that's on data, not calls and/or SMS.

sambazi• 2 years ago

a few years ago i received a week of robo calls after renewing a domain lease. don't remember which registrar but i do remember that my number was redacted in the whois record and concluded that their process must be leaky. (also german)

Barrin92• 2 years ago

Because of the legal situation. In Germany commercial cold calling without consent is flat out banned and heavily fined. (up to tens of thousands in fines). I'm also German and had I think, one robocall in 20 years.

rootusrootus5• 2 years ago

This exact claim gets made in every single robocall conversation on HN. I've never looked, maybe it's always the same people making it? Pretty soon someone else from Germany will be along to tell you about how many robocalls they get. And someone from the US will mention they also get no robocalls.

shellfishgene• 2 years ago

No, it's true, I was surprised to get a robocall a few months ago, because it was the first ever (I think) and I have had my number since >10 years now. It's just not a thing here, I've never heard anyone complain about robocalls.

gwd2• 2 years ago

And as an American who lives in the UK, I always make the exact same response, and I'm continually surprised that people still don't understand.

In the US, the person receiving the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone. So sending out a million text messages costs almost nothing, because the expensive part is borne by the receivers.

In the UK and EU, the person sending the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone. This price is defined by a government regulator is owed by the sender's network to the owner of the cell tower.

So if some random person sends a text to me, and I'm using an O2 tower, that person has to pay O2 something like £0.20; meaning to send a million text messages would cost you £200k.

The result is that I do get spam messages, but they're always far more directed: normally organizations that I've actually interacted with in the past. Sending a message to a thousand previous customers is a lot more cost-effective (I presume) than sending a message to tens of millions of random phone numbers.

Ironically, the absolute easiest way to solve the US's spam call/text problem is actually market-based: make the caller pay for the entire path of the call, all the way to the receiver.

cess11• 2 years ago

It's only a couple of years ago that I learned that "robocalls", which I'd seen mentioned for, what, a decade or more?, are actually fully robotic and not just a telemarketing department using an autodialer for more or less cold calls.

That's how weird this phenomenon is to a european. To me it was a solid "WTF?" moment. Since then I've wondered why I've never heard about US:ians tracking down these operations and destroying them.

Symbiote2• 2 years ago

Normally it's American exceptionalism — assuming the USA is better than every other country. I think this is the first time I've seen someone assuming that since America has a problem, other countries must have it too.

atoav• 2 years ago

Person living in Germany: I got 10 spam calls in my life, from actual human beings. I got zero automated non-human calls in my life.

timthelion• 2 years ago

In Czechia I get about 10 a year. Hardly what I'd call a big problem... My grandparents in canada get about 10 a day. My grandpa in the us got like 10 an hour before he died, many time live humans who knew his name and that he was an old man in a nursing home....

This is %100 a North American problem.

codemusings• 2 years ago

Consider yourself lucky. I too am in Germany and and I get calls on almost a daily basis. Robo and otherwise. Same with WhatsApp messages. I have my number for close to 20 years now though.

Unless this gets regulated Telcos will continue to enjoy their profits.

flerchin3• 2 years ago

Any details on what he did? Any details on the total magnitude of calls?

I agree that lead-gen is also part of the problem, but fraud seems especially dire. The new fraud vector seems to be SMS initiated.

WarOnPrivacy2• 2 years ago

The interviewee discusses why robocalls weren't reduced decades ago.

Well, regulations are really, really tough for a couple of reasons. One is, it’s a bureaucratic, slow-moving process.

There's also this notion of regulatory capture. At the FCC, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests.

The regulatory capture of the FCC has been discussed for 20 years - just not by major news orgs (or telco industry press, or most tech press).

ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Atechdirt.com+robocalls+fcc+...

earlier ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Adslreports.com+%22karl%22+%...

gregmac2• 2 years ago

At the Federal Communications Committee, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests.

This, plus the monetary incentives are the root reason it's still a problem. Ignoring the actual scam part, the companies terminating the calls (that is: your phone provider) is making money on two ends: they get paid by the originator, and they get paid by the consumer they're delivering the call to (you). The telco originating the call is getting paid by the spammer. Spam is profitable for everybody.

I think that we’ll be able to push the genie a long way back into the bottle. The measure of success is that we all won’t be scared to answer our phone. It’ll be a surprise that it’s a robocall—instead of the expectation that it’s a robocall.

I think a different genie is out of the bottle that won't go back in: the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention. I almost never answer my phone for that reason, not just because of spam. I'd just rather interact asynchronously via text or email, without interrupting whatever I happen to be doing. If I'm able I'll reply quickly, and I'm happy to switch to a synchronous phone call if it makes sense (I'd still prefer that over dozens of back-and-forth texts where nuance is tricky and it's easier to misunderstand each other).

It's at the point if my spouse or most close family/friends actually phone me, my reaction is "Oh no, what's wrong?"

criddell3• 2 years ago

they get paid by the consumer they’re delivering the call to

That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t have the phone so that I can receive spam calls. If they were able to eliminate all spam calls overnight, people wouldn’t cancel their service.

nordsieck• 2 years ago

If they were able to eliminate all spam calls overnight, people wouldn’t cancel their service.

Are there many people without any phone service?

gregmac2• 2 years ago

Depending on your plan, you may be either paying for minutes or they're using up your allotment, which in some cases means you could end up paying a premium rate for going over. If you're on an "unlimited" plan, this bit is irrelevant but at the same time, the marginal cost of delivering calls is essentially zero once the network capacity exists.

If you're roaming on another carrier's network, I'm not sure how the economics work there, but I suspect the other carrier gets paid regardless.

wilkystyle• 2 years ago

I think a different genie is out of the bottle that won't go back in: the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention.

Definitely agree with this. Over the past five or so years I have adopted the following approach that ensures have control over 95% of the interruptions:

- I have "silence unknown callers" enabled in iOS

- Focus mode is on 100% of the time.

- I disable notifications for all apps except for Reminders (interruptions I have configured) and the Phone app (calls from people in my contact list).

To your last point, the people I am actually interested in talking to only call if something is too important/time sensitive to do via text, so this works well. Any other callers will leave a voicemail if it's actually important.

Scoundreller• 2 years ago

This doesn’t work if you’re on-call (and don’t have a very specific set of numbers that calls could be received from), run a business, looking for work or awaiting vendor calls.

Now, do I charge my employer when I get a scam call on the work phone while I’m on-call? Technically I should.

Also doesn’t help that callerids get forged to be similar to your own number, which looks like the corporate block of phone numbers we have. Tho I think the networks have someone cut down on the ease of doing that (or at least tagging them as likely fraud).

matthewdgreen2• 2 years ago

It's lousy for the elderly, who really suffer from this. Many older people spent their lives with a working phone system, don't really use texting, and expect things to work. So our decision to allow the phone system to descend into fraud is really harmful to them. I dread to think what our society will look like by the time I'm really old.

matheusmoreira5• 2 years ago

the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention

Needs to end as soon as possible. Calling on the phone is one of the most rude things someone can possibly do.

https://jameshfisher.com/2017/11/08/i-hate-telephones/

xp84• 2 years ago

Looking at that article, it’s pretty obvious that the author is experiencing something like severe anxiety (as are some people close to me who share this aversion). While we should be compassionate and accommodating of such people, there are others who are much better able to communicate using voice than with text (heck, including the blind), and we shouldn’t force them to only communicate the way the anxious ones prefer. The telephone already supports two-way “consent” - it doesn’t answer itself and some people choose at their own risk to never answer it.

Edit: my point is it’s already not a demand, it’s a notice: somewhere out there, someone thinks either you know something they should hear ASAP, or vice versa. What you do with that is up to you.

Night_Thastus• 2 years ago

This feels like such a bizarre take.

I love getting calls! I love hearing a human who actually wants to talk about something! Voices are much more pleasant than flat text. Voices have inflection and emotion and you can hear people laugh at jokes and anecdotes!

Via text things like sarcasm are harder to recognize and it's not obvious how the person on the other end actually feels about what they're writing about - which makes some text conversations very confusing without lots of clarification.

In a way, it's like getting a hand-written letter. It's more effort but it also feels more genuine and less sanitized than a text.

I used to incessantly get the Car Warranty scam call, but that's been gone for years at this point. Now essentially the only calls I get are from real people.

If I'm really busy or stressed or whatever (or at work), that's what voicemail is for. Then a reply can go out via phone, text, email or whatever.

coldpie• 2 years ago

This, plus the monetary incentives are the root reason it's still a problem.

I'm skeptical. I think "our network eliminated spam calls" would be a major, major selling point for a mobile network. Like I would definitely consider switching carriers if one of them genuinely solved the problem. Given the amount of mobile network advertising I see, there's gotta be way more money in actually fixing this and gaining new users, than there is in getting a couple fractions of a cent per completed call.

It's not even a hard problem to fix. Just have calls sourced internationally set to default-deny for every account. If a user actually wants to receive internationally-sourced calls, they can turn it on. The number of people turning it on would be so small, spammers wouldn't bother at all anymore. Then, prosecute anyone sending spam calls from within the US (I assume we are already doing this). Boom, you've solved the phone spam problem.

Now someone go implement it so I can start paying you for your superior product.

gosub1002• 2 years ago

Make the "report as spam" button or notification cause the spammer or their sponsor to incur a $0.01 charge payable to the mobile provider. The money would be a rounding error for false accusations, but would decimate anyone sending massive spam calls.

singpolyma3• 2 years ago

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

dspillett• 2 years ago

I think "our network eliminated spam calls" would be a major, major selling point for a mobile network.

If you genuinely had free choice of multiple otherwise similar quality options, which is not the case in all markets/areas.

Also, I wouldn't put it past the networks to promise to try to eliminate cold calls (to make it look like they are on your side), make a perfunctory amount of effort (the minimum to be able to say they are making an attempt), and still make the money they can from the other side.

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

But that makes sense.

I am a cynic, and I believe the real reason that nothing is being done, is because telecom companies love robocallers (they make a lot of money, and don't get bothered too much for customer service -I saw the same thing with spam emailers and fraudsters. Hosting providers love them, because they buy a lot of product, and don't ask for much customer service).

I also think that politicians don't want to address it, because they use them, and people really don't like political robocalls, because they can be downright noxious.

soco• 2 years ago

An idea which works for me: the 5 close contacts are set to buzzing, everything else is on silent thus has to wait for when I feel like looking at the phone. I also have the answering robot on for those who really have something to tell me (the few). This makes for a quiet day.

6DM• 2 years ago

Only problem I see is that now that everyone is ignoring calls and focusing on text messages, there's now a lot of spam text messages and that is only going to grow.

CamperBob2• 2 years ago

Does anyone know what "Delete and report junk" actually does on iOS? Is it a placebo button like "Close elevator door" and "Push button to cross street," or does Apple actually do something useful with those reports?

janalsncm2• 2 years ago

the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention

I agree, and the fact that there are so many other things demanding my attention is crazy making.

If I had to guess, a few generations ago this was probably a complaint about the advent of telephones, even without robocallers and telemarketers. Now that spam has reduced the signal to noise ratio, it’s amusing to see this pop back up.

briffle• 2 years ago

For a few months in 2008, i was renting a house just over the area code boundary. I switched carriers just before porting became a thing. I still have that area code, and the only other person I know with a number in that area code is my spouse. I used to get many calls a day from that same area code (trying to appear as a local call) even though I now live about 2100 miles away. iPhones are great at sending them directly to voicemail if they are not in your email, address book, or recent calls, and I get one voicemail every few weeks that is mostly static now.

resource_waste3• 2 years ago

Area codes...

There is a tri-county area. The poor county that few people live, the working class county, the professional class county.

At one point I realized that myself and my 2 coworkers had the working class area code on a phone number list we created... and we were in the professional county doing business. I'm not sure if it was mental insecurity, but I felt ashamed that my entire team was from the working class area. The fact that we were all 'top of our class' didn't matter. Money didn't matter, we probably were making more than the client since we were profit centers.

I need a new phone number. Seriously, in my area its judgeworthy.

BenjiWiebe• 2 years ago

It's mental insecurity, 99%.

buildsjets• 2 years ago

2 Skinnee J's had a great rap about the topic. They even managed rhyme "Ridiculous" with "Moby-Dickulous" in it.

https://genius.com/2-skinnee-js-718-lyrics

senkora• 2 years ago

If there is a possibility that this might impact your business, even a small one, then it is probably worth getting a new phone number and I would encourage you to do so.

So much of business is based on perception and you don’t want to give clients any reason to doubt you.

jjcm• 2 years ago

The best thing I ever did was get a phone number from another state. I have a Hawaii number from the couple years I lived there. Even better is because it’s such a transitory area, most of the friends I had in Hawaii had numbers from out of state. Because of that any time I see an 808 number, I know very confidently it’s a spam call.

criddell3• 2 years ago

Why hasn’t STIR/SHAKEN fixed the problem? I thought those protocols were supposed to be the TLS of the phone system and eliminate spoofed caller id. It would be nice if, when a number appeared on caller id there was also an A, B, or C to indicate the signing level.

RajT883• 2 years ago

Anecdata, but I've gotten less outright scam calls this past year.

These days, it's just local shady companies. Think: "Expired Vacation" package timeshare pitches and lately callers asking if I have Medicare A and B.

The Medicare stuff, I assume is some kind of fraud, but the kind where they talk you into being a customer for some service so they can bilk the government for that service (which they may or may not deliver). Fraud, but a more insidious kind - not unlike the auto warranty sales calls (which I seem to no longer get either).

So mostly lead generation for shady domestic companies is what I seem to get. You can always tell, because when you ask the name of the company they hang up on you.

criddell3• 2 years ago

All the calls have spoofed caller ID so I would consider them all to be fraudulent and scammy.

zamalek• 2 years ago

I've gotten less outright scam calls this past year.

Same, close to zero if not zero (I might have received one late last year or early this year). I do also try to make a bloody nuisance of myself; I'm snoot sure if they have some internal denylist, but I try my hardest to get onto it.

jabroni_salad• 2 years ago

For me, it's political texts from Illinois, which I moved away from 6 years ago. They seem to be doing this thing where you can unsubscribe from a given campaign, but when some other politician wants to do a campaign they will acquire that list without scrubbing the optouts.

I was led to believe that this is technically allowed so I've been using an app (buzzkill) to junk any text containing the name of a politician.

evilantnie• 2 years ago

STIR/SHAKEN doesn't prevent spoofing. It can verify in certain cases when a call is not spoofed but it's fairly limited and almost entirely mobile-to-mobile phone calls. It requires IP based network connectivity end-to-end, which just isn't possible in the US. If a call gets routed through a rural network and switches back to TDM, it will drop all STIR/SHAKEN data. It will still take years for US infrastructure to be entirely IP-based. Robocallers sign their calls with STIR/SHAKEN just fine, the originators do this for them, so it's not going to be a strong deterrent in my opinion.

Devices support attestation level A display (green or grey check marks in your call logs designate this). If you haven't seen that check mark, then you probably haven't seen many A-level attested calls to your device. As far as device manufacturers go, they only care about A-level attestation, which makes sense as it has full traceback capability.

sannysanoff• 2 years ago

I envision the app on the phone that implements AI secretary and answers unknown phone numbers on my behalf, and calms down calling party with various measures, with sort of captcha of various degree of offense. This will hold them off until they find a workaround.

kxrm• 2 years ago

The Pixel 8 does this, it's called "Call Screen" and since getting it I never receive unscreened calls from outside my contact list. It's been very nice to have.

imzadi• 2 years ago

I have such an app. It's called RoboBlocker. I used to use a different app called RoboKiller, but recently switched. Both work basically the same way. They automatically block known spammers/scammers and screen the rest.

Bloating2• 2 years ago

I'm surprised Its Lenny has been ported to a cell phone app. At least we can have some fun with this

Bloating2• 2 years ago

Regulatory capture isn't just an issue with the FCC. Big Companies benefit from Big Government

herodotus• 2 years ago

My landline provider offers a "call-control" feature. When someone calls, if the caller number has not been accepted before, a voice asks the caller to enter a randomly selected digit. Only after this has been correctly done is the call permitted to go through. Probably deflatable, but it has eliminated my robocalls. The only downside is that legitimate robocalls (eg: doctor's reminder) might be blocked if I have not whitelisted the number.

Simple solution, and I am surprised at how well it works.

rootusrootus5• 2 years ago

Implement the technology to reliably identify what source country and/or provider a call was initiated from. Give me the ability to choose what countries or providers are allowed to make calls to my phone. Pretty soon the shady providers will go out of business and the rest will try harder to prevent robocalling on their service.

johnwheeler• 2 years ago

I opened the front page of HN, my eye was drawn to this headline. I instinctively gave it an upvote because this is the Lord’s work this man is doing.

CivBase2• 2 years ago

Why not just give up on the legacy telephone system?

Decades ago we had dialup internet - a service entirely unrelated to the telephone system, built atop the existing telephone infrastructure. The US or EU or whoever could simply design a new service built atop that existing infrastructure.

Telecom companies could double as Certificate Authorities for the new system, providing and signing certificates used to authenticate both sides of a call and encrypt traffic between them. It doesn't even have to be limited to calls. They could also support text or even arbitrary data. It could be a revolutionary new platform for instant communication, separate from the internet and backed by major nations across the world. And the best part is the infrastructure is already built!

Or they could keep playing cat-and-mouse games with spammers for all of eternity.

cynicalsecurity• 2 years ago

This would break and complicate things. Make things incompatible. Look, we already have WhatsApp and it's still got spam. Granted, only message spam, but still. A new system might not solve the spam problem, but break and complicate a lot of things.

CivBase2• 2 years ago

What makes you think it would break things? We seemed to get by fine with dialup.

WhatsApp is a private service facilitated over the internet. No government would (or should) trust Facebook with their communication infrastructure.

whywhywhywhy2• 2 years ago

Every cell phone should have an option to block off calls by the country code or area code.

lreeves• 2 years ago

How would that help? All the spammers spoof the numbers - hell a lot of them even make their spoofed ID just one or two digits off of mine, presumably to make me curious enough to answer.

whywhywhywhy2• 2 years ago

How would that help? All the spammers spoof the numbers

Mine don't, it's either from Pakistan or from 2 towns in my country which presumably are the places that provide a forwarding service to them. If I could block +92 and those two towns i currently would get no spam calls.

Also why shouldn't I just be able to block things with a wildcard rather than every individual number.

MiddleEndian• 2 years ago

Every mobile carriers should be required provide all known hops (and eventually block all carriers who do not do this so there are no weak links) so that we can block calls uBlock Origin style or similar. Blocking anything with any non-US hop would work for me.

notact• 2 years ago

I see a lot of calls for being able to block an area code. That does not seem to be useful to me, living in a major metro area lots of legit calls (doctors office etc) share the same area code as spammers/political organizations.

What I think would be useful is to be able to block based on incoming carrier. During the last election season, most calls were coming from various VoIP services (Twilio, etc), none from normal retail cell carriers. If I could block an entire carrier who specializes in providing text/voice marketing services, problem solved? Legit business users of those services would hopefully migrate away to more ethical providers when their calls start failing to connect.

emeril• 2 years ago

I took the nuclear option of signing up for a new number in a area I don't live or know anyone and use "numbershield" on ios to block the entire area code

now I get almost zero spam calls and virtually every call which comes through is legitimate

afavour• 2 years ago

I'm surprised we don't see this as an issue in politics. Semi-seriously, any presidential candidate that pledged to stamp out robocalls would win a good chunk of goodwill from voters.

callalex2• 2 years ago

Almost 100% of scam calls are run out of India. There is no political will to hold India responsible because they are economically and geopolitically important to the USA.

metabagel2• 2 years ago

I make political donations to a few officeholders and candidates. I get a seemingly never-ending deluge of text messages from across the country requesting donations. I usually send a "stop" message, but the word is out.

callalex2• 2 years ago

I learned very quickly as a university student that engaging in the political process is heavily punished by the exact people you thought you were trying to help. I have never donated or campaigned again and it took 10 years to get off of all the spam lists.

ipython• 2 years ago

My wife was at dinner with a bunch of other women the other night. Of a party of about 15, at least 12 of them had stories of their parents being scammed for a large amount of money. Even the scams that start online end up leveraging the phone system in some way. In total, the single table she was sitting at had lost over $10 million dollars to scammers - almost $1m per person. It's sickening.

The phone system is entirely broken. It comes down to economics- there's zero cost to make millions of calls, so your economic benefit formula is obvious- you can make millions of calls because one of them will pay you back mega-$$$. There is no accountability and no way to automatically filter out spam (as we do with email, although to be honest, spam filtering isn't great either). I don't know what to do other than to increase the cost to make phone calls in order to address the perverse incentives at work.

Edit: I’m curious about the downvotes. If you follow the links to the automated system that David built (a honeypot for robocallers) you see the top offenders are Medicare and end of life services. That jives with my own experience. So clearly they’re targeting the elderly and therefore the solution is - ask them to look for a little stir/shaken attestation checkmark before answering their phone?

NelsonMinar• 2 years ago

The most important feature of my phone is to make it very difficult to make a phone call to me. Google Pixel is quite good at this with about three layers of protection before a call gets through. It's absurd that we have to take these measures against criminals abusing our communications network.

CatWChainsaw• 2 years ago

Sadly ironic that the original use of the phone is now one of the most detested.

kazinator• 2 years ago

The measure of success is that we all won’t be scared to answer our phone.

Robocalls aren't what makes people actually scared to answer their phone.

Depending on their specific situation, it's rather people like, oh, crazy exes, tax/bill collectors, police investigators ...

Also, in general, any time people are in a situation in which bad news might arrive at any moment.

Robocalls are nothing.

geor9e2• 2 years ago

I answer every call, no matter what the caller ID says. In the last decade, I've probably gotten maybe 10 total spam/robo/telemarketer calls or texts. Strangers like recruiters or doctors never seem to have trouble calling me. My cell phone is posted all over the internet. On my website and my resume. I put it into probably a thousand forms online. What am I doing different? I've had the same Verizon plan and Google voice number the whole time. Are old numbers immune to this problem? Is the Google Voice-Verizon-Samsung combo of built-in spam filters just wildly efficient? I keep hearing about spam calls being an epidemic - are people just rawdogging their cell plan without turning on any spam filtering?

kjs3• 2 years ago

I got a half dozen obvious spam calls in the last 72 hours; by "obvious" I mean they had the same area code+nxx as my number. There's at least another 10+ that were flagged by AT&T as 'telemarketer' or 'probable spam' (according to voicemail, I have many home and car warranties that are about to expire). And there's a handful political calls, which maybe aren't spam technically but I don't want, and will only get worse later in the year.

I don't advertise my phone number, tho I'm sure you could find it if you really want to. If you've really only gotten 10 spams in the last decade, I question whether we are living on the same planet.

geor9e2• 2 years ago

I question whether we are living on the same planet.

I feel the same way when I see a friend ignore a call. I am curious what the difference is. What filters do you have in place? As far as I know, here's what I have:

My number that I've been giving out freely for a decade > Law-abiding spammers check donotcall.gov > Google Voice checks it's known spammers list and forwards legit calls to my Verizon number (whatever that is, I never wrote it down) https://support.google.com/voice/answer/115089 > Verizon checks its known spammers list (free, I think default?) https://www.verizon.com/solutions-and-services/call-filter/ > My Samsung phones have always come stock with a spam filter baked into their Android image https://www.hiya.com/products-smart-call > I get the call

Someone in that pipeline is doing a fantastic job I guess.

David Frankel is a man on a mission against robocalls

Related Stories