I get at least one call a week now. Always from the same area code, often one a few digits off from my number.
I wonder how long it will take for the goverment to start enforcing the do not call registry laws. What’s the threshold of annoyance before it’s worth spending taxpayer money to enforce?
If you are seeing spoofed numbers from your area code/prefix, there is also a good chance that others in that area code/prefix might be getting calls with your number as the spoofed number.
I talked to someone who received such a call when he star-69'ed it.
Right. And then, if the carrier pursues really aggressive enforcement, they end up making false positive mistakes with no way for the affected individual to remediate them.
The carriers could do something about it. I'd consider switching service to a carrier that demonstrated they block these kinds of calls. Just like a big part of gmail's popularity is how effectively they block spam.
The difference may be the t-mobile account instead of the phone. IIRC, they are rolling the "Scam Likely" feature out starting with t-mobile one plans.
They (Samsung) appear to have some kind of crowdsourced database of spam callers in the default phone app (there is an option built in to report). It works amazingly well and was a surprise when I got this phone, coming from a Nexus 4. It seems to work very well indeed.
I like to pick up so I can decide for myself if it's a spam call. If it is, it gets blocked and reported (Android). Not sure if Google does anything with the report but at least it is tagged on the next call in.
For the past few years the odd spam call I get has been my number with one digit changed. This came as a surprise when my ex-wife's phone number popped up. I didn't realize it was spam until I listened to the voicemail re: the cruise I won.
I noticed I end up with a pretty high hit-rate; maybe 1/2 of calls come in already tagged. Maybe I'm just lucky the volume is low enough to answer the calls; if they happened more often it wouldn't be practical.
Some sort of "law" probably comes into play with respect to junk phone calls. If there were a lot more, the phone system would simply become untenable. Instead, between legal, economic, and technology limitations, junk calls (including those that are actually legal) have seemed to hover in the annoying but not a lot worse than that rate for pretty much as long as I can remember.
Because there are some good reasons for spoofing Caller ID (e.g. providing a master extension for a call made from a company) and, historically, it was hard/expensive to do. That difficulty pretty much went away with VoIP and other technology changes.
I'd say do not put your number on a do not call list. That just lets the robocallers know its a real number, and they are likely outside the jurisdicition of enforcement for these laws.
I'd soon change my number before resorting to most apps. Unless it's like uBlockOrigin where I just feed blacklists into it, I'm not really okay with giving an organization besides my service provider my call history. Read Nomorobo's TOS sometime, it's a doozy.
> 1.2 Data Privacy. You understand and agree that some of your call information (including, but not limited to, a log of all phone calls made to your subscribed phone line(s) and any requested additions to any customizable phone number blacklist or white list) may be viewable by you, the Company, and by any other person having a phone line subscribed to the Nomorobo Service through the same user account as you.
I don't know that that is actually possible on iOS, though, as iOS doesn't give the call log to the blacklist provider.
>1.3 Contact. From time to time, the Company may need to send e-mails, in-app messages, and/or push notifications to you and automated voice calls and/or text messages to all phone lines that are subscribed to or otherwise using the Nomorobo Service.
Could be innocuous now and be much more annoying later if they decide to change their business model.
>Binding Arbitration. If the parties to the Agreements do not reach a solution through the informal resolution process described in Paragraph 6.3(ii), then any controversy or claim arising out of or relating to the Agreements, shall be settled by arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (the "AAA") in accordance with its Commercial Arbitration Rules, and judgment on the award rendered by the arbitrator(s) may be entered in any court having jurisdiction thereof or having jurisdiction over the relevant party or its assets.
Must go to arbitration if anything goes wrong and you want to sue.
Overall, not the worst I've seen. There was another one that you had to grant permission to post to your Facebook wall and/or Twitter account. I don't recall which one it was, though.
This is how the call blocking API on iOS works. The blocker app can only provide a static, pre-set list of numbers to block to the OS, and that's it. It has no access to call history, awareness of calls being received/made, etc. The OS handles all the blocking, referring to the blacklist the app provided earlier, and provides no feedback to the app itself about this.
Of course, this means that call blocking apps have less features than on Android. For example, apps can't dynamically look up a number when a call is revived and make an on-the-fly decision. This is in keeping with iOS' philosophy of "privacy/security over features", vs. Android's "everything is completely open to developers, for better or worse".
It also means that the ultimate call blocking mechanism I've always wanted isn't available on iOS: Only allow calls from known numbers in my address book. Frustrating, because to achieve such a concept I've had to resort to DND mode in iOS which then also blocks all push notifications.
I would add, if you do answer the phone, don't say "Hello" or anything like that. The automated callers are looking for hints that someone is on the other side of the line and give up easily to get to the next number, where a person would usually spend a couple of seconds to check if someone answered the phone properly.
Nowadays if I pick up to a silent line I usually just hang up.
That's kind of a dick move to normal people that are calling you because making the caller say "hello?" first is the complete opposite of the normal flow.
Yeah, I usually answer and put the mic on mute to see if there's anyone on the other end. Usually it's a robot waiting for audio from the other side to proceed, so it hangs up after several seconds without ever saying anything.
As I did mention a month or so ago in a post related to robocall I decided myself to tackle a solution to help fight those calls. I am still working on it as a side project, and 90% of the backend system is done, and probably 50% of the iPhone app done (considering to add Android support later).
It will add a twist on the way to fight such calls do it has at least a feature that differentiate it from similar apps.
If anyone will want to help beta test when it is ready (require an iPhone with iOS 10 or 11), ping me! (Email info in profile)
I'm interested in helping you finish the iPhone app and potentially the android app also as a side project. I don't know how much good I'll be on the back end but I'm open to talk through ideas and help where possible. No money or really even credit needed. I just really think robocalls need a proactive easy to use cross platform solution. That and I want to get better at everything while doing as much good in the process.
I have had the same phone number for 15 years, and I have been getting A LOT of robocalls lately.
I tried stopping them with NoMoRobo on iOS. It worked OK, but it can't match "Unknown caller" or blocked numbers, which made it kind of worthless for me. Sigh.
Nomorobo has been hit/miss for me. 75% on catching robocalls, and I've had a false positive that belonged to a caller I wanted to talk to. I'm not enthusiastic about the results, but will be continuing to use it.
I was just poking around in the settings for my new Android phone and found Settings > Applications > Phone > Call blocking > Block list > Block anonymous calls. Would that be helpful at all? I haven't tested it myself.
TL;DR Don't pick up calls from unfamiliar numbers.
It did help confirm a sneaking suspicion I've had, which is that robocalls spoof a caller ID number with your area code and prefix, to make it seem more familiar.
Stories about people who manipulate telemarketers are amusing, and mobile minutes are mostly no longer scarce, but who has the time? Time and attention are the scarcest resources.
"robocalls spoof a caller ID number with your area code and prefix, to make it seem more familiar"
I discovered this pattern from robocalls on my cell phone. But it has exactly the opposite effect as intended: since I don't know anyone who has the same area code and prefix I do[1], I have 100% confidence that any call with a number like that is spam.
And if I don't recognize the area code, or it's from a toll-free area code, it's also spam with 100% confidence.
Fortunately, it's very rare for the spammers to leave a voicemail when I don't answer.
[1] My city has 7 area codes and thousands of cellular prefixes - the odds of meeting someone with the same area+prefix are slim.
Same for me, since my phone number is more than a decade old and I haven't lived in the city where I obtained the number since 2012.
I know people with numbers in the same area code, but definitely not with the same prefix. That said, just about every actual person I know texts before calling, if at least to check when might be a good time to call. Almost nobody calls outright, and if they do and I don't answer, there's always a follow-up text.
The same code and prefix thing really seems to have picked up significantly in the last couple months. I have an app that catches most known spam calls, but tends to let these through, which I assume is one of the the underlying reasons for this type of spoofing.
Surely telcos can do something to block calls coming from sources that don't own the number they are providing as caller id. Internet provides started doing this years ago with alien packets.
They often can't. A call can come in from any number of sources. Not to mention call forwarding and all that stuff. Telcos would love to kill robo dialing, but they usually do it by requiring a certain percentage of calls to complete and last longer than 6 seconds. If you want to hurt them, answer and hangup immediately.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons why a call from a number isn't coming from where you would be directing the call, so it's hard to fix it with a simple policy. What would be useful though is requiring something analogous to email received headers, combined with a real time method to report calls as spam/unwanted.
If spam volume from an interconnecting carrier is too high, cut them off.
Telco routing is a lot of twisty passages, but there are many fewer players than internet routing, so it should be easier to get bad apples off the network, as long as there is desire and some users are willing to provide feedback on calls.
So this is what was happening... I have a "desirable" prefix and had been getting tons of calls from numbers with the same prefix - was wondering why the heck they would be calling me.
One thing that this doesn't mention, but which I heard somewhere, is don't call that number back and ask "Why did you call me?" In case it isn't obvious, the caller IDs are spoofed using random numbers, and the person who has the number listed doesn't know their number is being used this way.
One amusing anecdote from the NPR piece is the person who received a call with a caller ID of ... their own phone number!
Oh the joys of government systems. I received this when verifying my number is on the do not call list.
"Due to system difficulties, your request was not processed. Please try your request again later or call 1-888-382-1222 to submit your request by phone. We are sorry that we are unable to process your request at this time."
I have never once had an unsolicited call on my cell phone number. I suspected it was because I simply never use it as a phone (data and text only) and therefore somehow stayed off the radar. This seems to validate that thought.
It's been an interesting decade, that's for sure. The whole world kind of expects you to have a phone number if you want to do business. Some people are confused, but more often than not it's their software or processes that insist I give a phone number. I leased a car recently and not giving out a number was perplexing to the sales Dept. I explained that I simply don't have one. They ultimately still wanted my business. I wasn't so lucky with getting a credit card.
Your suspicion is correct. Your number gets out there because you give it out, and then 10 years later the company goes under and liquidates their assets which includes a load of customer phone numbers; or because you give it out when you open a credit card or buy a mortgage or car, and you legally can't limit the sharing of your personal info to third parties, who can share your personal info as widely as they want... point is, not having a phone number will be tantamount to not having a social security number in many situations.
> point is, not having a phone number will be tantamount to not having a social security number in many situations.
I think a phone number is shifting to be a replacement for social security numbers in customer databases.
My grocery store/gas station relationship, Guitar Center, jewelry store, and oil/lube service station. And that's just the last week-or-so interactions. They don't know my social, but they're using my phone as a primary key for their rewards/lookup.
For a while, a membership card number would have sufficed, but since no one carries that around, the retailers are assigning your phone number to your identity. Much like social security numbers did for the government back in its inception.
A great observation by tacostakohashi a year ago was that "peak telephone" was the mid-1990s and its success is what kills it, following the same pattern as postal mail, fax, email, usenet, and facebook:
Now you can often get so much more done talking to online chat for whatever utility or organization. I guess it's only a matter of time before you're talking to a robot there too (or is it happening already?) So have we perhaps reached "peak communication"?
At least until the direct neural implant, when we can express or receive the information we need by joining minds. But then will there be frustrating computer minds that we have to interface with?
You think emailing or chatting your common utility will get your change order processed in a reasonable timeframe? I've got bad news for you, knowing a few people who work at local utilities, those emails you send in get to sit for months in some cases before being processed, meanwhile an order put in when you call in gets processed within days.
Many utilities just opened up the floodgates to email and other forms of customer service, without adding any staff to handle said workload, hence the severe backlog at many of these utilities. Same deal with meter readers, most utilities have stopped hiring them because within 2 to 3 years, the utility will have a new smart meter system implemented across the board, and they'd rather not fire a whole team outright. Letting the employees churn without replacing them is much less dramatic.
The only time spammers leave me voicemail, it's an automated recording, I doubt any human spammer is evening listening to your "law offices of..." voicemail recording.
One of the sad things that broke when number porting became a thing was there was no definitive answer of which phones were cell phones and which were land lines. This was unfortunate because if you were called on your cell phone for a long time it would cost you money, and if someone called in an unsolicited way, you had 'damages' that you could sue for on the theory that they knew it was a cell phone and they called it anyway. Now however they have reasonable doubt and so they call whenever.
I wrote the FCC once and suggested that a good use of some of those fees I pay would be to create a service that would instantly back trace and log a complaint on a number using telemetry from inside the phone system. That combined with a federal criminal statute which allowed for jail time for masking the origin of a phone call and I think you could make to fairly costly for the owners and enablers of this stuff.
Then existing 07x numbers would be made 071x numbers, and repeat.
But the existing 07x range is effectively 9 digits long, (with a few chunks out of it)
so we're probably good for a while.
We've not started 072 and barely touched 076 (and 071 is currently unused but that's sensible if the existing might ever be bumped to start 071).
Our population count is a good way way away from being 9 digits.
Already (because of number porting) you have numbers from networks now home in the middle of number ranges of their competitors.
But I think we're more likely to see a separation of number/device before that 071x happens. Devices or SIMs will have an IPv6 address and your number is separate but accessible. Time will tell.
Surely you can just add more digits? Once 07XXX XXX XXX is exhausted, you could start issuing 071XXX XXX XXX numbers. It's been done with POTS numbers before (e.g. Sheffield - transitioned to 6-digits in 1965, 7-digits in 1995)
>One recent scheme involves getting consumers to say “yes” and later using a recording of the response to allow unauthorized charges on the person’s credit card account, the F.C.C. warned in March.
I doubt banks are using voice recognition on the single word "yes" to verify charges. Does this make any sense?
That's a case where it has happened a small number of times, complaints were filed, the FCC & Co. picked up on the scam, and they view it as their responsibility to keep the public safe so they generalize. Although I suppose given the speed at which AI is improving, the roboscammers will be utilizing more and more advanced methods soon when it comes to voice sample manipulation.
Most of this criminal activity is coming from outside the US, courtesy of Twilio & Co. having turned the phone number system into an API such that it's now easy to rapidly buy and ditch numbers for cheap. The only practical solution for the end-user point is to insert greater intelligence into the system at the carrier level or at the phone level.
We're facing a problem where very large numbers of phone numbers will be black listed given enough time, unless we insert a greater cost into the system to make the spamming unprofitable (or make it much harder to get a phone number via services like Twilio). The US could try targeting the criminal organizations and individuals operating these scams on the other end; of course that's expensive and slow, and those people will just keep popping up so long as it's easy to do and profitable. The improving and cheapening AI will make it more and more profitable, as the scammers learn to snake into new, more lucrative financial outlets using authentications / identities they steal.
Why would they need Twillio et all to give them new numbers, if as everyone (including in this thread) says they can spoof the number, even showing as the receiver's number itself?
It's a whack-a-mole problem. You could never move quickly enough in the banking world to squash how this thing works. The methods are going to get more and more advanced, as AI tech gets better very rapidly in the next few years. The carriers, FCC, and banking system are entirely unprepared for what's coming next.
If you really wanted to smash it, make it harder for the roboscammers to abuse the relatively new API systems of inexpensively buying phone numbers in the US market. That either has to occur at Twilio & Co's level or it will have to be government action.
If Twilio & Co are smart, they'll get on this soon rather than allowing their business to be destroyed by heavy handed or inept government moves. There are few things more ripe for bad and unintended outcomes than the US government moving rapidly into something they don't understand in the name of safe guarding the people.
It amazes me that most of you don't question the fact that you (north americans?) are paying to receive phone calls. Here (Spain, but I think it applies to all the euro zone) we just do not pay to receive calls, which seems much more sensible to me.
How would you feel if some random mailguy knocked at your door and when you opened it he threw a package at your hands and immediately charged you for (part of) the delivery? This is exactly how charging to receive phone calls feels to me!
How do telcos justify this to you? What's the reasoning behind it?
What kilburn is referring to is that the business model that telco's use more or less stimulate this type of calls.
If a telemarketeer has to pay for setting up a call, rather than the end-user for accepting it (no matter how small the charge is), then placing millions of automated calls all over a sudden start costing money to the marketeer.
Think of it: the caller has the will to talk to someone - why should (at least in the past) this someone pay for that? The Euro-zone does it the other way round: you want to talk, you call, you pay.
Either way, in both situations with call volumes going down and people switching to data-type connections you see the price of calling/receiving calls drop sharply and as listed above the money telco's make comes from the data plans.
> If a telemarketeer has to pay for setting up a call, rather than the end-user for accepting it (no matter how small the charge is), then placing millions of automated calls all over a sudden start costing money to the marketeer
They do have to pay money; initiating a call isn't free.
The receiver has to pay a tiny amount of money if they're not on an unlimited plan, but it's so small that it's not worth considering separately from the annoyance of receiving these calls in the first place.
Back when I didn't have any money my phone budget was $8 a month. Minutes 10 cents a piece, IIRC. People didn't really text very much back then but those were 10 cents a piece as well. Each dime mattered to me very much.
There's also people with plans that only allow X minutes a month.
This isn't true anymore since pretty much all the wireless carriers in the US offer unlimited voice minutes (and often SMS as well) as their standard postpaid plan.
True, but presumably your carrier is still paying for the call. If the transaction were reversed, then the robocaller or their "carrier" (or whatever the equivalent is in robocaller land) would have to pay, and the profits would crumble.
The access tandem is where long distance calls are switched into the local phone network for a given LATA. Local phone companies and long distance providers all buy into the same access tandem in order to connect into the geographically fixed market. When calls are switched across an access tandem in the US, it's the initiator of the call that is billed per minute. The receiver at the other end of the tandem switch may pay a fee to the switch operator to receive the RECORDS of which other company initiated a call in to them. That way, they know who to go after and bill for each incoming minute! Tandem operators typically don't provide this info during the call signalling, even though they could.
As you can imagine, per-minute call billing is not always settled between tandem players. They can block each other based on company ID alone, and often this requires cooperation from the tandem operator as well. Some of the per-minute rates are incredibly high. The flat-rate long distance phone providers are obscuring the fact that some areas are extremely high-cost to terminate. This system has sprung into high per-minute cost billing in high-cost areas (rural LATAs) so that people operate free dial-up (in the 90s anyways), free phone conference lines, and even "free international calls" all taking advantage of the incredibly high per-minute rate by billing the maximum rate permitted in their LATA (typically not higher than the highest per-minute tariff posted by the incumbent local monopoly).
This highly regulated old-school system seems so antiquated in the face of the Internet, but it survives because the tandem is the one place where all providers can interconnect, and this turns out to be the hardest part of the puzzle to work around. In the age of the internet, we could come up with something better :)
This is a great point - and was the primary idea behind charging for sending email by the message to combat spam. Someone years ago proposed that if we just charged 5 cents per message sent, most people would pay less than $5 a month while spammers would have to pay millions of dollars of the course of a year, making the business unprofitable.
You could probably charge 0.1c and it would still work. But maybe make companies more aware of what to send. Every Amazon order automatically causes 4 emails (ordered, dispatched, out for delivery, delivered). If fulfilled by Amazon even 5 because then the seller will ask for a review a week later.
Of course not, but they shouldn't. They let me modify my email preferences and choose which emails I receive. I am happy paying $20/year for email storage.
People on prepaid or pay as you go plans don't get unlimited minutes. You can't really just dismiss this segment of the population. It's a bit like saying "coffee is a free beverage for everyone because most offices provide coffee for employees."
I suspect people on extremely limited plans know to screen their calls or manage in some way.
If not that is unfortunate but hardly justification to upend cellular calling because a few people paid $0.10 / minute extra answering calls from spammers.
There are advantages and disadvantages to those types of plans, and that is one of the disadvantages.
Sure I can. Many pre-paid plans also offer unlimited minutes, and even in the case of those that don't, you can absolutely just choose not to answer the phone if you don't recognize the number, or just flat-out don't feel like answering.
Look, I get that the US is different in that it charges for incoming calls, and that's weird to you. That's fine. I think it's weird that Spanish people voluntarily let themselves be chased by enraged bulls, but hey, I let people choose the risks they want to take[1]. Would I prefer free things over not-free things? Sure. But that's the model that US carriers chose, and, absent government regulation to the contrary, it's absolutely their right to choose that model. And I honestly just don't care enough about it to lobby the gov't to change those regulations, and it seems that a majority of Americans feel the same way, so... so what?
[1] Modulo unethical treatment of the bulls themselves, but that's another issue.
>How do telcos justify this to you? What's the reasoning behind it?
They spend big on politicians, for even bigger profits. Just look at the mess our Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is creating with Net Neutrality at the moment (and for the last few years, over-and-over).
Nearly all of the crap that consumers have to put up with in the states is due to lobbyists, and the telecom industry doesn't cut corners in that department.
As others have already pointed out, carriers nowadays mostly do flat rate voice service. When cellular bandwidth is more limited cellular carriers did usually have per minute charges.
It wasn't actually receiver pays. It was each person pays their phone company for carrying their end of the call. It didn't matter if you were the receiver or the initiator.
Note that this is the same model that is used in most of the world for internet service. I've never understood why people find it weird to use that model for phone service but not for internet service.
> I've never understood why people find it weird to use that model for phone service but not for internet service.
I think its because an internet connection has to be initiated by you at which point you give your consent to be charged for it. On the other hand you can get a phone call from anyone really without you previously agreeing to paying the cost of the call.
>I think its because an internet connection has to be initiated by you at which point you give your consent to be charged for it.
This isn't true. You still get charged for random stuff scanning you over the Internet (unless you are behind NAT); or even worse, being on the receiving end of a DoS.
I'm not from the US, but I have worked with the US telecoms industry. The original reason for this was due to the numbering plan. In most countries a special 'area' code was chosen for mobiles, however in the US they decided to just allocate mobile numbers in the existing area codes (NPAs). At least in the early days of cellular it cost the providers more to connect a call to a cell phone and so someone has to pay it. In a numbering plan where it is possible to tell a number is mobile just by looking you can put that cost onto the caller, but if it looks like a landline then the caller would feel hardly done by getting charged extra. So that extra cost was put onto the cell phone user accepting the call.
This is hearsay from colleagues so may not be 100% accurate, but it makes sense to me.
Well, it's supposed to be "hard done by", but that doesn't make it much better. I'm personally pleased to see a more sophisticated way to phrase something, but unfortunately it's not a common idiom these days (at least state side), so it can be a little confusing.
I own a little telco provider and for some time I had a landline UK number as my primary number on my cell phone - it's definitely possible and easy. The only reason I went back to a mobile number is that some web forms insisted on entering a mobile number and wouldn't accept my "landline".
Yes UK is in Europe and I think will be for the next few million years - oh you meant the Political body - the European Union. Oh yes we're still in that and will be for a few years at least.
As to the landline number, you can keep your landline number if you don't move into an area where the phone numbers 'region' code is not applicable.
Just like I am sure that is the case for every other country in the world (or thereabouts).
I am curious to know with regard to USA phone numbers where I cannot tell a mobile from a landline by just looking at the number (e.g, UK Mobile numbers can be identified because they are 07xxx numbers) but US mobile numbers look like landlines and have the same area code.
Can you move to a different state and keep your number even if the area code for that state is completely different?
Yes, and many people do. Hence this comic: https://xkcd.com/1129/ (the first three digits being the area code).
Edit: keeping my number when I moved also made it really easy to filter out these phone calls. Any number calling me from my old area code that I don't recognize is either a spammer or a wrong number. Any number calling me from my new area code is probably legitimate.
Well with BT which is the national provider in the UK you can't keep your landline number when you move if you are moving to another exchange (which is most likely).
If you are roaming (for example, you take your Spanish mobile to the UK) and receive a phone call (from a friend in Spain) you pay for that (because your friend can't be expected to know you're abroad).
This always seemed weird to me when texting someone. How am I to know that this will cost me a euro for 160 characters instead of being free, when it's to a national number, just because they chose to have a holiday in Bangladesh this weekend?
But as for the receiving end, paying for receiving calls and texts only applies during holidays. It's not the standard case so whatever. Apparently that's different abroad.
The converse is that in Europe the caller pays (or used to pay?) more based on whether they're calling a cell phone or a landline. Why should I care what kind of phone the person on the other end has? That seems like their burden, not mine.
This whole line of argument is about ten years stale, anyway.
The upside of cellphone calls being more expensive in the EU (or at least in my country) is that this makes mobile telemarketing calls much less convenient, to the point I can't remember the last telemarketing call I received, if I ever received one on the cellphone. OTOH, my land phone stays disconnected 24/7 because of telemarketers.
The only mobile telemarketing calls I receive are actually from my phone company. Whenever someone calls me and upon, answering, they say the magic words "Mobilcom-Debitel" (the company's name), I immediately hang up without saying anything else and block the number. They change numbers about once a month, though.
When I was in Europe 15 years ago it amazed me that people there asked if I had a cell phone: friends told me they were not going to call me on my cell phone (work provided with a Europe number) because they were caller pays and they didn't want to pay that much. Do you still have such a strange system where you will refuse to call someone because you pay who knows how much?
In truth caller pays makes some sense in a world where call time is expensive. However the world is different: call time is dirt cheap. Caller pay means (unless of course the government steps in) that you have no idea what you are going to pay for a call and thus don't make them.
Last I heard in the US the average person pays twice as much [per month] for their cell phone plan, but in turn they talk on their cell phone 5 times as much.
Look at this way, do you have a set of free numbers (like 0800 or some prefix)? Every country has a prefix of free numbers, prefixes for local call numbers nationally etc. Basically you know how much you're going to pay for calling someone based on the number you dial.
Yes I agree if you don't know what you are going to be charged just by calling is wrong. But that's not the system, calling a specific set of prefixes let's you know what it's going to cost. So calling a mobile you know it's going to cost more since it had a mobile prefix.
Calling international costs more because of a prefix.
I have free calls to anywhere in the US, Canada or Mexico. I can call any number in any of those 3 countries and talk as much as I want for no extra charge. (except for a few pay per call "services" but that is not a phone fee that is the caller collecting the money and easily blocked). For a small fee I can get the same for both "cell phones and land lines in 30 countries"; and land lines in 70 countries. The reason I don't get cell phones cell phones in those 70 countries is they are caller pays.
Once again, caller pays used to make sense. However now it is just a money making scheme for cell phone companies that hurts those of you who have it.
You're confusing call for free vs calls included. You're not calling people for free, your calls are included. You are paying for your calls with your monthly fee. I don't see how you can't see that and think you're actually calling for free.
If you went to a payphone for example, you could dial free call numbers (and know they are free by the prefix). The point is that you know what you will be charged based on the prefix.
You're not calling for free, you're paying a subscription and your telco has included a bunch of prefixes under that plan.
> Once again, caller pays used to make sense. However now it is just a money making scheme for cell phone companies that hurts those of you who have it.
You haven't actually put forward any argument for this statement. How does receiver pay make any sense at all? The receiver is already paying for his number by keeping his plan active (either a monthly subscription or with pay as you go you have to top it up regularly to keep the number). Caller pays makes more sense. Especially in the world we are in where people are using calls to make sales. If you call me to sell me something, why should I pay for that call. It's your call, you pay for it.
That's like saying we should pay for the gas used by door to door salesmen. We already pay for our house (which in analogy is our phone number). We shouldn't have to pay for people coming up to our door.
what makes you think we pay to receive calls? there are different service plans but the vast majority of them are either flat-fee unlimited calling, or they bill you to make calls (prepaid minutes, for example).
Here in America, we drive on the right side of the road, which is the only logical way and totally not just an arbitrary thing that seems right to me because that's what I'm accustomed to. I always wondered, in countries that do it the other way, how do the governments justify that to their people?
That's a terrible "analogy". The logic of "don't pay for events that you have no ability to control" is apparent to everyone, as is the arbitrariness of road direction.
You don't pay when the phone rings. You pay once you decide to answer it and the call is established. That requires positive action, so you certainly have control.
I could just as well say that being able to receive calls at any location is a great convenience, so the logic of paying for that is obvious. But I won't, because there are a lot of different ways to see it, and none is obviously right or wrong.
There's only a few people that I want to have the ability to have real-time interrupt-driven access to me. My phone is pretty much always set on do-not-disturb, and those folks are whitelisted through. The only time it's off do-not-disturb is if I'm expecting a call. Otherwise, leave a message or use some other asynchronous way to contact me.
I have slightly different way of dealing with them. I pick up, and either ask them to hold on because I'm outside/on the other line/doing something etc.. or if it's a robot I select option they want me to press to connect to the operator. Next I put them on hold and wait to see how long it takes them to disconnect. Record holder was 7 min 51 sec.
When I have time I will also talk to them, feed them incorrect information, put them multiple times on hold etc.
This wastes their time and money. Maybe if more people started doing that they it would no longer be profitable. :)
I am at the point where I no longer answer my phone if it isn't one of my contacts. If it is important, they will leave a message. I just press the hang up button on my watch immediately, if it shows an unrecognized number, local or not.
It turns out to be really hard to have a medium that A: allows people you have not whitelisted in a advance to contact you and also B: prevents intelligent adversaries from abusing that.
There are numerous examples of this: The phone system, the email system, any large IM system that gets beyond a certain size, the physical mail system (reigned in by charges there, though), social networks...
It would be easy if the adversaries were not actively using their intelligence to get around whatever solution you think might work. If all the spam phone calls came from the same number, which never moved or changed, this would be easy. But even before you account for the unauthenticated nature of caller ID that allows spammers to trivially forge any number they'd like, the mere fact that they're willing and able to buy up large blocks of numbers and would switch them around a lot would make this a difficult problem. Stopping intelligent, adaptive adversaries willing to dedicate time and resources to this is a very hard problem.
You can also attack this problem by trying to hit the first clause I gave, but that creates a very different kind of system. And in general, you need some sort of system that you don't have to prewhitelist people, so that your doctor can call you even though you didn't whitelist them, etc.
I don't actually need to prevent intelligent adversaries from calling me though - I just need a legal way to go after them if they do. That means I need useful identification. Many of these calls are illegal today, but the law doesn't know how to find them so they get away with it.
Anonymous communication is useful, but it has been abused enough that I want to opt-out of it.
I want this to work, but I need Do Not Disturb to silence everything when I'm actually asleep, and there's no way to have it change between those on a schedule.
The tips in the article don't work in my case. I do all of them and get about 3-5 robocalls per day.
One of the most prolific robo scammers that calls me just about every weekday spoofs their number to match the first 6 digits of my own phone number (area code included).
Wtf. At that point I'd just get rid of a phone number altogether. Or turn on flight mode (which I modded to be a GSM toggle, so wifi and bluetooth stay on) and turn it off when people ask (via chat) to call.
May I suggest that you guys are in some sort of bubble?
My mom's a 60 year old with a flip-phone, and her husband's nephrologist, neurologist and audiologist isn't going to ask her via chat to kindly turn on her phone.
I assume they're not on hacker news. I was speaking from a hacker's viewpoint (the person I'm responding to and myself), not for every person on the planet.
Do hackers not have doctors? Do hackers not have children? Is our daycare going to "chat" me to ask me to turn my phone on if my kid falls down and breaks her arm? Is my doctor going to "chat" me to tell me that the test came back, and that I need to go to the hospital and check myself in right now?
Your solution doesn't just not work for some small, irrelevant section of the population like "old people", "parents", or "anyone outside of SV".
For that matter, if people are chatting you and asking you to answer the phone, why not just use that app to talk?
Try answering and saying no/pressing the no button.
The article asserts that most robocallers are then somehow selling that information to other robocallers, but I doubt it (plus, uh, "pressed no" isn't a steaming hot sales lead).
Is there a reason not to block that 10,000th number? I'm having a hard time imagining circumstances under which you'd get a legitimate call from your own telephone. In fact, that seems like it might even be a good way to confuse people into picking up, at least once.
While traveling in Europe, my mom got a SIM card so she could have Internet access. It came with a phone number, which she didn't tell anybody. A couple days later she got a call from a number that matched the first 6 digits of her home number.
Therefore: The SIM card vendor in Europe shared not only her number, but additional personal data allowing the robo-caller to determine her home number in the US.
I think you might be too paranoid, and the explanation is simpler: if you dial enough numbers, eventually you'll find some idiot willing to hand over control of their computer, or their credit card number, or social security number.
Yes, she received a European number a few days prior, and then received a call from a number matching the first six digits of her US home number. It was the only call that she received on this number. I was there.
Granted you could be correct, but it was a weird coincidence, with one in a million odds. She's quite tech savvy -- taught CS in the early 80s.
Ah, if someone faking a number like hers called her on an otherwise unconnected european number, that's definitely... shady.
I'd contact her service provider for that sim card. They'd probably like to know that an employee is selling numbers, or that a retailer is, etc. (Unless they're doing it themselves.)
Or the device which the sim card slots into leaks some other type of identifying information which can be correlated to her home region. One could do an experiment where you place the sim card into another device associated with a different area...
> spoofs their number to match the first 6 digits of my own phone number
I had one call me a few weeks ago that spoofed my wife's number. We have consecutive numbers, but I forgot about that for a bit and thought they somehow had my contact data.
The vast majority of my robo call match the first 6 digits of my number. They try hard to look local. My number is from Google voice, so it isn't really like the normal local numbers - so I'm safe ignoring them. I have yet to have a legit call that matches the first six digits.
But what about the people who really do have a local number? Any call from a neighbor or local business is likely to look like the robo calls. Ignoring those can be a pain.
Do not call list? Any bets that it is harvested and used as a call list be companies out of the country?
This. Exactly. The spoofing of the first 6 numbers started about a year ago. It's been relentless. When I'm not working and angry, I will keep them on the phone for 20 minutes acting like a mark, then tell them why I did it. Sometimes they hang up, sometimes we have a short conversation, sometimes they get angry and start yelling (and I hang up). I do get less calls now, after having done this about 20 times. In fact, I just realized I only got 2 in the last week (instead of 15+).
Why is caller id spoofing even allowed. Do we need to legislate a technology change for this? Couldn't technology to validate with a signed certificate of ownership of a number be required from a legal standpoint?
In the United States, it is a violation of federal law for telemarketers to block or fraudulently spoof caller ID information. I emphasize 'fraudulently' because there are some legitimate reasons for spoofing, such as substituting a central callback number (e.g., a legitimate customer service number) for the desk number of the employee making the call. Those legitimate cases are why it is allowed at all. Whether this constitutes a 'good enough' reason, given the rampant abuse, is valid question.
The problem with these regulations is that they are difficult to enforce. How does one report calls with spoofed caller ID when they do not know who actually placed the call?
I don't think that feature is precluded by a technological enforcement of some ownership authentication for caller ID. On the other hand, the addition of call number ownership authentication may or may not solve the spam call problem either...
>The scam begins when a consumer answers a call and the person at the end of the line asks, “Can you
hear me?” The caller then records the consumer's "Yes" response and thus obtains a voice signature. This signature can later be used by the scammers to pretend to be the consumer and authorize fraudulent charges via telephone.
In other words they splice together "do you want to authorize these charges?" And your "Yes" and present this as "proof" to the credit card company you authorized the charges you are disputing.
I should have added a caveat, I actually agree with you and I, too, was skeptical of the fact this has been happening. However, since the FCC released an official document about it I figured it was worth mentioning as a theoretical possibility. I am unaware of many cases where the FCC spread urban legends without getting actual complaints, so people presumably have actually been complaining about this happening to them to the FCC, or at least them believing it's happened to them.
The "can you hear me" call would have to take place AFTER a scammer had already charged your card for a dubious service. They would (probably?) have to have a merchant account with a payment processor for that.
310 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadI wonder how long it will take for the goverment to start enforcing the do not call registry laws. What’s the threshold of annoyance before it’s worth spending taxpayer money to enforce?
I talked to someone who received such a call when he star-69'ed it.
The carriers could do something about it. I'd consider switching service to a carrier that demonstrated they block these kinds of calls. Just like a big part of gmail's popularity is how effectively they block spam.
T-Mobile blocks a lot of spam callers, but they do not seem to block these spoofed caller ID calls.
Thankfully these spoofed calls are so easy to spot that they aren't even a real annoyance to me.
They (Samsung) appear to have some kind of crowdsourced database of spam callers in the default phone app (there is an option built in to report). It works amazingly well and was a surprise when I got this phone, coming from a Nexus 4. It seems to work very well indeed.
Summary:
- yes there are more robocalls
- Don't pick up
- Put your number on do not call list
- Get an app to block them
The numbers are often spoofed, so you'll end up blocking some random local numbers instead.
Once in 2014, I got a spam call that spoofed my own number.
This week, I got a spam call that spoofed the number of a family member.
Don't block without being sure.
I'd soon change my number before resorting to most apps. Unless it's like uBlockOrigin where I just feed blacklists into it, I'm not really okay with giving an organization besides my service provider my call history. Read Nomorobo's TOS sometime, it's a doozy.
http://www.nomorobo.com/pages/privacy
Some highlights from the legalese:
> 1.2 Data Privacy. You understand and agree that some of your call information (including, but not limited to, a log of all phone calls made to your subscribed phone line(s) and any requested additions to any customizable phone number blacklist or white list) may be viewable by you, the Company, and by any other person having a phone line subscribed to the Nomorobo Service through the same user account as you.
I don't know that that is actually possible on iOS, though, as iOS doesn't give the call log to the blacklist provider.
>1.3 Contact. From time to time, the Company may need to send e-mails, in-app messages, and/or push notifications to you and automated voice calls and/or text messages to all phone lines that are subscribed to or otherwise using the Nomorobo Service.
Could be innocuous now and be much more annoying later if they decide to change their business model.
>Binding Arbitration. If the parties to the Agreements do not reach a solution through the informal resolution process described in Paragraph 6.3(ii), then any controversy or claim arising out of or relating to the Agreements, shall be settled by arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (the "AAA") in accordance with its Commercial Arbitration Rules, and judgment on the award rendered by the arbitrator(s) may be entered in any court having jurisdiction thereof or having jurisdiction over the relevant party or its assets.
Must go to arbitration if anything goes wrong and you want to sue.
Overall, not the worst I've seen. There was another one that you had to grant permission to post to your Facebook wall and/or Twitter account. I don't recall which one it was, though.
Of course, this means that call blocking apps have less features than on Android. For example, apps can't dynamically look up a number when a call is revived and make an on-the-fly decision. This is in keeping with iOS' philosophy of "privacy/security over features", vs. Android's "everything is completely open to developers, for better or worse".
Nowadays if I pick up to a silent line I usually just hang up.
I have never verified the above though...
If anyone will want to help beta test when it is ready (require an iPhone with iOS 10 or 11), ping me! (Email info in profile)
I tried stopping them with NoMoRobo on iOS. It worked OK, but it can't match "Unknown caller" or blocked numbers, which made it kind of worthless for me. Sigh.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nOG...
It did help confirm a sneaking suspicion I've had, which is that robocalls spoof a caller ID number with your area code and prefix, to make it seem more familiar.
Stories about people who manipulate telemarketers are amusing, and mobile minutes are mostly no longer scarce, but who has the time? Time and attention are the scarcest resources.
I discovered this pattern from robocalls on my cell phone. But it has exactly the opposite effect as intended: since I don't know anyone who has the same area code and prefix I do[1], I have 100% confidence that any call with a number like that is spam.
And if I don't recognize the area code, or it's from a toll-free area code, it's also spam with 100% confidence.
Fortunately, it's very rare for the spammers to leave a voicemail when I don't answer.
[1] My city has 7 area codes and thousands of cellular prefixes - the odds of meeting someone with the same area+prefix are slim.
I know people with numbers in the same area code, but definitely not with the same prefix. That said, just about every actual person I know texts before calling, if at least to check when might be a good time to call. Almost nobody calls outright, and if they do and I don't answer, there's always a follow-up text.
The same code and prefix thing really seems to have picked up significantly in the last couple months. I have an app that catches most known spam calls, but tends to let these through, which I assume is one of the the underlying reasons for this type of spoofing.
If spam volume from an interconnecting carrier is too high, cut them off.
Telco routing is a lot of twisty passages, but there are many fewer players than internet routing, so it should be easier to get bad apples off the network, as long as there is desire and some users are willing to provide feedback on calls.
http://www.npr.org/2017/07/31/540515367/familiar-looking-num...
One thing that this doesn't mention, but which I heard somewhere, is don't call that number back and ask "Why did you call me?" In case it isn't obvious, the caller IDs are spoofed using random numbers, and the person who has the number listed doesn't know their number is being used this way.
One amusing anecdote from the NPR piece is the person who received a call with a caller ID of ... their own phone number!
"Due to system difficulties, your request was not processed. Please try your request again later or call 1-888-382-1222 to submit your request by phone. We are sorry that we are unable to process your request at this time."
It's been an interesting decade, that's for sure. The whole world kind of expects you to have a phone number if you want to do business. Some people are confused, but more often than not it's their software or processes that insist I give a phone number. I leased a car recently and not giving out a number was perplexing to the sales Dept. I explained that I simply don't have one. They ultimately still wanted my business. I wasn't so lucky with getting a credit card.
I think a phone number is shifting to be a replacement for social security numbers in customer databases.
My grocery store/gas station relationship, Guitar Center, jewelry store, and oil/lube service station. And that's just the last week-or-so interactions. They don't know my social, but they're using my phone as a primary key for their rewards/lookup.
I maintain a home landline partly so I can give out that number when I have to without giving out my cell.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12551566
At least until the direct neural implant, when we can express or receive the information we need by joining minds. But then will there be frustrating computer minds that we have to interface with?
Many utilities just opened up the floodgates to email and other forms of customer service, without adding any staff to handle said workload, hence the severe backlog at many of these utilities. Same deal with meter readers, most utilities have stopped hiring them because within 2 to 3 years, the utility will have a new smart meter system implemented across the board, and they'd rather not fire a whole team outright. Letting the employees churn without replacing them is much less dramatic.
I changed my voicemail recording to: "You've reached the law offices of X and Y, please leave a message..." It seems to have worked so far.
Might want to make sure they haven't hung up thinking wrong number.
I wrote the FCC once and suggested that a good use of some of those fees I pay would be to create a service that would instantly back trace and log a complaint on a number using telemetry from inside the phone system. That combined with a federal criminal statute which allowed for jail time for masking the origin of a phone call and I think you could make to fairly costly for the owners and enablers of this stuff.
https://www.neustar.biz/risk/compliance-solutions/tcpa
France started with 06 and is now using 07… but 08 is already taken for some other purposes.
But the existing 07x range is effectively 9 digits long, (with a few chunks out of it) so we're probably good for a while.
We've not started 072 and barely touched 076 (and 071 is currently unused but that's sensible if the existing might ever be bumped to start 071).
Our population count is a good way way away from being 9 digits.
Already (because of number porting) you have numbers from networks now home in the middle of number ranges of their competitors.
But I think we're more likely to see a separation of number/device before that 071x happens. Devices or SIMs will have an IPv6 address and your number is separate but accessible. Time will tell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0114
I doubt banks are using voice recognition on the single word "yes" to verify charges. Does this make any sense?
Most of this criminal activity is coming from outside the US, courtesy of Twilio & Co. having turned the phone number system into an API such that it's now easy to rapidly buy and ditch numbers for cheap. The only practical solution for the end-user point is to insert greater intelligence into the system at the carrier level or at the phone level.
We're facing a problem where very large numbers of phone numbers will be black listed given enough time, unless we insert a greater cost into the system to make the spamming unprofitable (or make it much harder to get a phone number via services like Twilio). The US could try targeting the criminal organizations and individuals operating these scams on the other end; of course that's expensive and slow, and those people will just keep popping up so long as it's easy to do and profitable. The improving and cheapening AI will make it more and more profitable, as the scammers learn to snake into new, more lucrative financial outlets using authentications / identities they steal.
If you really wanted to smash it, make it harder for the roboscammers to abuse the relatively new API systems of inexpensively buying phone numbers in the US market. That either has to occur at Twilio & Co's level or it will have to be government action.
If Twilio & Co are smart, they'll get on this soon rather than allowing their business to be destroyed by heavy handed or inept government moves. There are few things more ripe for bad and unintended outcomes than the US government moving rapidly into something they don't understand in the name of safe guarding the people.
I wonder if there are similar cases or ways to create a test.
Ultimately, this is a Telco problem. And they're going to have to address it or people will desert them.
(As I have.)
How would you feel if some random mailguy knocked at your door and when you opened it he threw a package at your hands and immediately charged you for (part of) the delivery? This is exactly how charging to receive phone calls feels to me!
How do telcos justify this to you? What's the reasoning behind it?
If a telemarketeer has to pay for setting up a call, rather than the end-user for accepting it (no matter how small the charge is), then placing millions of automated calls all over a sudden start costing money to the marketeer.
Think of it: the caller has the will to talk to someone - why should (at least in the past) this someone pay for that? The Euro-zone does it the other way round: you want to talk, you call, you pay.
Either way, in both situations with call volumes going down and people switching to data-type connections you see the price of calling/receiving calls drop sharply and as listed above the money telco's make comes from the data plans.
They do have to pay money; initiating a call isn't free.
The receiver has to pay a tiny amount of money if they're not on an unlimited plan, but it's so small that it's not worth considering separately from the annoyance of receiving these calls in the first place.
Back when I didn't have any money my phone budget was $8 a month. Minutes 10 cents a piece, IIRC. People didn't really text very much back then but those were 10 cents a piece as well. Each dime mattered to me very much.
There's also people with plans that only allow X minutes a month.
These phone calls are no longer expensive, generally speaking, which is one of the reasons it is now cost effective.
As you can imagine, per-minute call billing is not always settled between tandem players. They can block each other based on company ID alone, and often this requires cooperation from the tandem operator as well. Some of the per-minute rates are incredibly high. The flat-rate long distance phone providers are obscuring the fact that some areas are extremely high-cost to terminate. This system has sprung into high per-minute cost billing in high-cost areas (rural LATAs) so that people operate free dial-up (in the 90s anyways), free phone conference lines, and even "free international calls" all taking advantage of the incredibly high per-minute rate by billing the maximum rate permitted in their LATA (typically not higher than the highest per-minute tariff posted by the incumbent local monopoly).
This highly regulated old-school system seems so antiquated in the face of the Internet, but it survives because the tandem is the one place where all providers can interconnect, and this turns out to be the hardest part of the puzzle to work around. In the age of the internet, we could come up with something better :)
If not that is unfortunate but hardly justification to upend cellular calling because a few people paid $0.10 / minute extra answering calls from spammers.
There are advantages and disadvantages to those types of plans, and that is one of the disadvantages.
Look, I get that the US is different in that it charges for incoming calls, and that's weird to you. That's fine. I think it's weird that Spanish people voluntarily let themselves be chased by enraged bulls, but hey, I let people choose the risks they want to take[1]. Would I prefer free things over not-free things? Sure. But that's the model that US carriers chose, and, absent government regulation to the contrary, it's absolutely their right to choose that model. And I honestly just don't care enough about it to lobby the gov't to change those regulations, and it seems that a majority of Americans feel the same way, so... so what?
[1] Modulo unethical treatment of the bulls themselves, but that's another issue.
They spend big on politicians, for even bigger profits. Just look at the mess our Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is creating with Net Neutrality at the moment (and for the last few years, over-and-over).
Nearly all of the crap that consumers have to put up with in the states is due to lobbyists, and the telecom industry doesn't cut corners in that department.
Most North Americans are not paying to receive calls.
It wasn't actually receiver pays. It was each person pays their phone company for carrying their end of the call. It didn't matter if you were the receiver or the initiator.
Note that this is the same model that is used in most of the world for internet service. I've never understood why people find it weird to use that model for phone service but not for internet service.
I think its because an internet connection has to be initiated by you at which point you give your consent to be charged for it. On the other hand you can get a phone call from anyone really without you previously agreeing to paying the cost of the call.
This isn't true. You still get charged for random stuff scanning you over the Internet (unless you are behind NAT); or even worse, being on the receiving end of a DoS.
This was a tricky bit of grammar but I believe it's 100% correct.
You can't even keep your landline when you move house.
You can if its within the same exchange area.
As to the landline number, you can keep your landline number if you don't move into an area where the phone numbers 'region' code is not applicable.
Just like I am sure that is the case for every other country in the world (or thereabouts).
I am curious to know with regard to USA phone numbers where I cannot tell a mobile from a landline by just looking at the number (e.g, UK Mobile numbers can be identified because they are 07xxx numbers) but US mobile numbers look like landlines and have the same area code.
Can you move to a different state and keep your number even if the area code for that state is completely different?
Edit: keeping my number when I moved also made it really easy to filter out these phone calls. Any number calling me from my old area code that I don't recognize is either a spammer or a wrong number. Any number calling me from my new area code is probably legitimate.
The relevant rule: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/faq/frequently...
But as for the receiving end, paying for receiving calls and texts only applies during holidays. It's not the standard case so whatever. Apparently that's different abroad.
This whole line of argument is about ten years stale, anyway.
In truth caller pays makes some sense in a world where call time is expensive. However the world is different: call time is dirt cheap. Caller pay means (unless of course the government steps in) that you have no idea what you are going to pay for a call and thus don't make them.
Last I heard in the US the average person pays twice as much [per month] for their cell phone plan, but in turn they talk on their cell phone 5 times as much.
Yes I agree if you don't know what you are going to be charged just by calling is wrong. But that's not the system, calling a specific set of prefixes let's you know what it's going to cost. So calling a mobile you know it's going to cost more since it had a mobile prefix.
Calling international costs more because of a prefix.
Once again, caller pays used to make sense. However now it is just a money making scheme for cell phone companies that hurts those of you who have it.
If you went to a payphone for example, you could dial free call numbers (and know they are free by the prefix). The point is that you know what you will be charged based on the prefix.
You're not calling for free, you're paying a subscription and your telco has included a bunch of prefixes under that plan.
> Once again, caller pays used to make sense. However now it is just a money making scheme for cell phone companies that hurts those of you who have it.
You haven't actually put forward any argument for this statement. How does receiver pay make any sense at all? The receiver is already paying for his number by keeping his plan active (either a monthly subscription or with pay as you go you have to top it up regularly to keep the number). Caller pays makes more sense. Especially in the world we are in where people are using calls to make sales. If you call me to sell me something, why should I pay for that call. It's your call, you pay for it.
That's like saying we should pay for the gas used by door to door salesmen. We already pay for our house (which in analogy is our phone number). We shouldn't have to pay for people coming up to our door.
I could just as well say that being able to receive calls at any location is a great convenience, so the logic of paying for that is obvious. But I won't, because there are a lot of different ways to see it, and none is obviously right or wrong.
I did the same in Europe and calls lowered.
There are numerous examples of this: The phone system, the email system, any large IM system that gets beyond a certain size, the physical mail system (reigned in by charges there, though), social networks...
It would be easy if the adversaries were not actively using their intelligence to get around whatever solution you think might work. If all the spam phone calls came from the same number, which never moved or changed, this would be easy. But even before you account for the unauthenticated nature of caller ID that allows spammers to trivially forge any number they'd like, the mere fact that they're willing and able to buy up large blocks of numbers and would switch them around a lot would make this a difficult problem. Stopping intelligent, adaptive adversaries willing to dedicate time and resources to this is a very hard problem.
You can also attack this problem by trying to hit the first clause I gave, but that creates a very different kind of system. And in general, you need some sort of system that you don't have to prewhitelist people, so that your doctor can call you even though you didn't whitelist them, etc.
Anonymous communication is useful, but it has been abused enough that I want to opt-out of it.
Do Not Disturb + allow calls only from contacts = whitelist of callers.
https://www.imore.com/how-receive-messages-specific-contacts...
One of the most prolific robo scammers that calls me just about every weekday spoofs their number to match the first 6 digits of my own phone number (area code included).
Wtf. At that point I'd just get rid of a phone number altogether. Or turn on flight mode (which I modded to be a GSM toggle, so wifi and bluetooth stay on) and turn it off when people ask (via chat) to call.
May I suggest that you guys are in some sort of bubble?
My mom's a 60 year old with a flip-phone, and her husband's nephrologist, neurologist and audiologist isn't going to ask her via chat to kindly turn on her phone.
Your solution doesn't just not work for some small, irrelevant section of the population like "old people", "parents", or "anyone outside of SV".
For that matter, if people are chatting you and asking you to answer the phone, why not just use that app to talk?
The article asserts that most robocallers are then somehow selling that information to other robocallers, but I doubt it (plus, uh, "pressed no" isn't a steaming hot sales lead).
I block numbers on my Android and my landline phone has a one button screening function.
Maybe my phone numbers are in area code backwaters or something.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scam-calls-spoofing-your-own-...
Therefore: The SIM card vendor in Europe shared not only her number, but additional personal data allowing the robo-caller to determine her home number in the US.
I think you might be too paranoid, and the explanation is simpler: if you dial enough numbers, eventually you'll find some idiot willing to hand over control of their computer, or their credit card number, or social security number.
Granted you could be correct, but it was a weird coincidence, with one in a million odds. She's quite tech savvy -- taught CS in the early 80s.
I'd contact her service provider for that sim card. They'd probably like to know that an employee is selling numbers, or that a retailer is, etc. (Unless they're doing it themselves.)
I had one call me a few weeks ago that spoofed my wife's number. We have consecutive numbers, but I forgot about that for a bit and thought they somehow had my contact data.
But what about the people who really do have a local number? Any call from a neighbor or local business is likely to look like the robo calls. Ignoring those can be a pain.
Do not call list? Any bets that it is harvested and used as a call list be companies out of the country?
In the United States, it is a violation of federal law for telemarketers to block or fraudulently spoof caller ID information. I emphasize 'fraudulently' because there are some legitimate reasons for spoofing, such as substituting a central callback number (e.g., a legitimate customer service number) for the desk number of the employee making the call. Those legitimate cases are why it is allowed at all. Whether this constitutes a 'good enough' reason, given the rampant abuse, is valid question.
The problem with these regulations is that they are difficult to enforce. How does one report calls with spoofed caller ID when they do not know who actually placed the call?
"So, what official was impersonated, exactly?"
"Well, not directly ..."
"And how did this impersonation happen to come about?"
"Well, I was robocalling about a million households all on the Do Not Call Registry ..."
I'm not too worried about that risk.
>The scam begins when a consumer answers a call and the person at the end of the line asks, “Can you hear me?” The caller then records the consumer's "Yes" response and thus obtains a voice signature. This signature can later be used by the scammers to pretend to be the consumer and authorize fraudulent charges via telephone.
In other words they splice together "do you want to authorize these charges?" And your "Yes" and present this as "proof" to the credit card company you authorized the charges you are disputing.
The "can you hear me" call would have to take place AFTER a scammer had already charged your card for a dubious service. They would (probably?) have to have a merchant account with a payment processor for that.