FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest

http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/08/ftc-announces-winners-zapping-rachel-robocall-contest

by klous • 12 years ago

22 17 12 years ago

mey• 12 years ago

The ease at which caller id is spoofed could be solved by the carriers. If sent called id information doesn't match line termination information (geo location and owned phone numbers) block the call.

devicenull• 12 years ago

This, just like IP spoofing is something that should be straightforward to correct. However, the carrier in both cases has incentives to continue allowing it (getting to charge for minutes, or bandwidth).

bkruse5• 12 years ago

I wouldn't say that carrier's have a large incentive. Dialer or robocall traffic is normally frowned upon in the telecom community. We charge per minute, and dialer traffic is the worst offender or taking up large amounts of resources, while providing very little minutes. To give you an idea, a typical robodialer user may have 30% of their calls answered, and an average call length of 16 seconds. Whereas a "retail" or normal long-distance customer has an 85% answer ratio (ASR) and a 2+ minute average call length/duration (ACD). All of the tier-1 telecom carriers have strict rules AGAINST this type of traffic. From a business perspective, a single T1 (23/24 channels), I can get ~200-300k minutes/month worth of usage. With a dialer customer, I can expect about 40k minutes/month

MichaelGG5• 12 years ago

Actually, most carriers aggressively turn down customers that send dialer traffic, due to increased overhead versus total minutes (most dialer calls go unanswered or last only a couple seconds). Carriers would LOVE a magical way to distinguish, in real-time, a dialer call from non-dialer. But since they can appear from any number to any number, there's no way to know.

Instead, the carriers look at aggregate stats, and if it's too bad, they raise rates, charge fines, or disconnect customers. Some companies take a hard line and just cut any customer off if they appear to have any dialer. Others don't want to throw away an entire customer for only one fraction of the traffic. So everyone dances this line, trying to jam as much dialer in as they can get away with.

MichaelGG5• 12 years ago

No, it actually cannot. The phone network is a massive bunch of criss-crossing and mutually-dependent relationships. It is intractable to know if a given company is "allowed" to send a certain calling party number.

Not to mention such a restriction would break many applications that depend on the source caller ID being forwarded. Call forwarding applications, some 911 implementations, etc.

droopyEyelids• 12 years ago

So the underinformed get a better idea of what you mean by "criss-crossing and mutually dependent relationships" I'll say that there are many, many phone companies, and they constantly buy and sell DIDs (phone numbers).

They all run different hardware and software, and can't even keep track of who owns what DIDs. During the average day there are several phone network outages throughout North America as certain sets of numbers become unroutable from certain networks. Carriers often end up sending CSVs and excel files with their latest updates around, frantically.

In this system, Caller ID is a fourth class citizen. No one can spare the time to care about it, no systems are standardized, and no networks are responsive in anything like the time you'd need to maintain a system that monitors what caller ID information is allowed to originate from what place.

bkruse5• 12 years ago

I work in the telecom space. I was previously over the carrier network at MagicJack and oversaw about 600 million minutes a month of telecom "traffic". I can say that the awareness is a step in the right direction, but these "solutions" are anything but a solution.

I don't think it's as simple as people think - for example, simply make sure the person owns the CallerID. At what point in the call stream would that be validated? You have to think that, when a call is made through a typical VoIP provider, it is most likely passed through 10 carriers (through arbitrage long-distance, then IXCs, then tandem/CLLI/POI CLLI).

I believe a good step would be to simply let the FTC trace using the CIC code that all carriers send over the PSTN/traditional telecom network. That way, the FTC could track a particular call or number through all the carriers until it reaches the originating information. The FTC has the capability to do that now, and based on the number of subpoena requests I've received (about 10/day), they actively do it.

The problem is that the companies doing the "illegal" robocalling (business to consumer/DNC or TSR violations) are overseas. There is no way, IMHO, that it can be stopped as long as long-distance providers exist.

MichaelGG5• 12 years ago

Yeah, if these were real solutions, I'd pay a lot more than $3K to get the details on them. I've spent far more than that on the problem.

At one point we were doing around a billion calls a day by a customer that swore they had nothing to do with dialer. They mixed the traffic very skillfully, so they always kept their overall statistics just at the contractual limit.

Blocking repeated source numbers just means people start making up numbers. At that point, you can't really block things. You could perhaps get a score of the likelihood of a call being legit, and perhaps retroactively you could determine a bunch of calls had a high amount of dialer. But I don't think it's possible to find an algorithm that has a good-enough accuracy rate to do real-time blocking.

Of course, from a telecom perspective, I don't really care about the content of the call. I just want the avg duration to not be so low that other carriers get upset. To that end, simply making sure dialer customers don't hangup immediately seems to suffice.

bkruse5• 12 years ago

Michael,

You are exactly right. All the traditional means (like blocking a callerID) is far past it's useful time. The dialer companies are getting smarter as well. It's BIG business for them, so it's worth the money to figure out solutions.

Also, it's very difficult to error on the side of caution - you do not want to block a normal phone call, or your upstream will stop sending you calls and you lose money.

Typically, a dialer customer will hangup once an answering machine is detected (usually around 2 seconds into the call) - causing lots of short duration calls. What the dialer customer's are doing now, is simply holding the call open for longer, to raise their overall ACD. It's a tough game. The moment telecom carriers start caring about what the call is (call types, information in the call, etc) - they become liable.

bdonlan• 12 years ago

Why not just fine the provider that brought the call into the US? They would suddenly have a strong financial incentive to find a way to pass these fines onto the originator.

bkruse5• 12 years ago

How does ATT know it's a robocall? Also, the FCC (not FTC) mandates that ATT or any tandem-interconnected company accept ALL CALLS that come into their network via a tandem

aetch• 12 years ago

Interesting prize money amount of $3,133.70. I assume this is supposed to reference leet?

js2• 12 years ago

My home phone routes callers not on a white list to a message to "press 1 to ring the line", then drops them into voice mail if they don't do so. A blacklist requires callers to "press 1 to leave a message." Voice mails are transcribed and e-mailed to both me and my wife.

Since implementing this about a year ago, I've had zero robocalls actually ring my home line. Previously I was getting 7-10 per week.

Implemented using Anveo call flow.

akeck• 12 years ago

I personally find the following low tech method effective for me:

o All home calls go to voicemail without exception. We pick up if we recognize the voice or the caller. No one seems to mind except my mother-in-law. She's gotten used to it though. I've also noticed everyone below a certain age rarely uses voice.

o I've added every number with which I regularly interact to my cell address book. If a call comes in from an unknown number, it goes to voicemail without exception.

YMMV.

Being both a math and a tech person, I would like to do a cost and effectiveness study comparing the purely technical solutions from the contest with solutions like the above.

FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest

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