Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls?
I get between 2-5 spam phone calls every day. Often, the callers' numbers have the same area code as my own number. I believe the calls are automated there are many identical messages and on the occasion that I do answer, it's usually a recording.
I've blocked dozens of phone numbers but the calls and voicemails don't stop. I keep my phone perpetually on "Do Not Disturb" excepting calls from favorites and repeat callers. Sometimes I pick up the phone and repeat "Put me on your do-not-call list" a couple times. Sometimes the recording says to press a number to stop receiving calls, and I do that as well. I've also added my number to https://www.donotcall.gov/
Nothing seems to do the trick. It's really annoying and time-consuming to check my voicemails for real messages. The red notification badge is no longer a useful way to know if I've missed a call from someone I care about.
I don't want to get a new phone number either, and I don't know if that would even solve the issue.
What can I do?
78 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadI had the same types of calls. Changed the phone number on my domains to an old number of mine and the spam calls stopped a few weeks later.
The bot will waste the telemarketers time, which is the most expensive thing that these companies are paying for. Do this enough times and the calls drop off rapidly.
I once got an Indian Dell "virus" guy to be mad at me after 1+ hour when I got him to my VMWare Windows XP with a super inappropriate wallpaper -- before that I just told him to hold because I need to get my laptop from another building, need to poop, asking stupid questions, etc, and went back to work and pick up the phone after 25-30 minutes as a break. But the lower-tier guys often don't understand many references and attempts that you trick them, so it's not as fun as you thought. After a while, I got kinda bored, because they actually fell for my bait too easily. Tier-1 guys are garbage, if you want to have fun you have to bait them to give you tier-2.
I got a fun call last time.
I have been receiving calls from the FBI lately. A guy with Indian accent was demanding to speak to Mister so-and-so, and I was teasing him (pretending to be dumb, can't hear, fart, etc) to the point he got mad.
Then I was just listening to him going at me. After a while trying to eff my mom, he actually transferred me to another guy (tier-2) who speaks really good English. The conversation went something like this:
- Well, see, I know too well you're not FBI. What you're gonna do?
- Sorry man, I was just doing my job.
- I know I can't know where you're calling from. So tell me, your English is good, and you seem pretty calm and collected, why do you have to stay up at 12 AM to do this shitty job?
- No, I'm not in India. I'm in Texas.
- For real?
- Yeah, I'm a student. Someone asked me if I want to make some extra bucks over the break. It pays pretty well, better than normal jobs in here.
- Oh, interesting.
- Do you want to do it too? I can refer you.
- No thanks, I have a job that pays me OK, but good luck with your ''''job.''''
- OK, nice talking to you.
- Nice talking to you.
Take it for what it's worth, but that seems to be the most successful scam call that I have ever received. I actually don't receive any more calls after that.
From what I’ve read, without trying it, nomorobo seems to be recommended. I was going to give it a whirl before I found t-mo will blocks the calls now.
So far it's had three false positives: the robocalls from my kid's school related to snow days and bus delays, the reminder calls from my doctor, and a fraud alert from Capital One to confirm or deny a flagged charge.
I only caught those ones because the numbers were already saved in my phone as contacts. I would have never even known about these call attempts with the Block on, whereas with Scam ID they have the option to leave a voicemail when I deny the call, plus I can look up the number later if I feel like it.
Short story: calling your cell phone with automated dialing equipment and automated messaging (“press 1 to talk to someone”) is illegal per the TCPA. I’m not a lawyer but it’s fun to be amateur attorney for a day. Definitely a time suck though...
https://s.ai/presentations/tcpa.pdf
Outside of that, "Do Not Disturb" 24/7, whitelist all your contacts, change your voicemail message to "I don't check my voicemail because it's constantly spam, text me", and ignore your voicemail.
Here's their page detailing how they rotate through buckets of local numbers to present a new one on each attempt: http://www.nobelbiz.com/solutions/telco-services/localtouch-...
I got to meet these shitlords not too long ago and one them explained how the local calls were great for collection agencies since the poor bastards thought the agency was just down the street. They're also regularly in court defending their patent (google for "NobelBiz v."). So you could call them to report the spammer, they might be able to add your number to their blocklist, or in the case the number isn't operated by one of their customers then they should be interested as it would indicate another company to sue.
It's not your imagination - these types of calls are out of control. According to our data, 40% of all calls made in the US are illegal, unwanted spam/scam robocalls. And those "neighbor" spoofed calls (same area code and extension) are especially prevalent now. Beginning last summer, they started to account for ~20% of all robocalls. Before that they were only about 2% of all robocall volume.
The Do Not Call list is almost completely ineffective against these types of calls. It was created 15+ years ago to stop legitimate companies from telemarketing. But today's robocallers are criminals that don't really care about the law. They have one goal - scam people and take their money.
Manually blocking calls will also get you nowhere. And please, for the love of god, don't press a number to get on their alleged "do-not-call" list. That will guarantee that you will get even more robocalls - they know you're a live number now.
On the technical side, our landline service (free) is powered by Twilio and our mobile product is available in both app stores (14 day free trial, $2 bucks a month after that). We're a PHP/Laravel shop and our team is completely remote.
To do the actual detection, our algorithm analyzes over 70M calls per month and adds over 1,300 new numbers to the blacklist every day. We built the world's largest commercial telephony honeypot (300k+ lines) and can detect new attacks within minutes of them starting (even with spoofed numbers). Just last month, Nomorobo stopped over 27 million from reaching people's phones.
I'm happy to answer any other questions that you have about robocalls. I'm kind of the "robocall guy". I won the FTC Robocall challenge back in 2013 and grew Nomorobo to be the leading robocall blocker on the market. I've even testified in front of the US Senate about the robocall epidemic.
You're blocking 1300 numbers a day. I assume the spammers rotate numbers, so if someone gets a recycled number that was on your list, what happens?
These spammers get connected to the telephone system somehow. Is there nothing that can be done to force the telecom providers to more carefully check the companies they lease mass lines to?
I tried your service before, but the calls spoofed as if they come from my area code and exchange were never blocked. Why is that?
Spam calls infuriate me like little else. I'm glad you're working to stop them but it seems to be something that will require a larger industry and/or government intervention.
Thanks for sharing any insight you have!
You could just download the app directly
As for getting connected to the phone system - Yeah, they have to jump on the phone network somewhere and, in theory, the best way to stop these guys would be to at the ingress point.
The problem is that the phone system is built for interconnection. Even just one bad actor letting the traffic on spoils the system. Layer on top of that the way the network routes calls through multiple hops through multiple carriers and tracking the calls back to the source is nearly impossible. Throw in common carrier regulations (you can't just willy nilly block calls coming over the network) and it amps up even more. Finally, allow all this to be done for fractions of pennies and you get the perfect storm for robocalls.
As for the neighbor spoofed calls, make sure that you enter your phone number in Nomorobo so that we can make sure we protect the correct number block ([Area Code]-[Exchange]-[0000-9999]). In our initial release, we were only able to identify these calls but not block them. It had to do with blocking calls from families with sequential phone numbers. But, in our last release, if you give the app contact access, we can now scrub those numbers and fully block the neighbor spoofed calls.
It's been a bit of a balancing act between being privacy conscious (not needing your email/phone number/invasive contact access) and getting the job done. The balance that we've struck is this - you don't have to give us any of that and you'll get really good protection. But, if you try out the service and start to trust us more, we can do an even better job.
And finally, yes - it's going to take a lot of effort to tackle this problem. While Nomorobo isn't perfect - admittedly, the sim ring landline version is just a crazy hack that the carriers can't stop - the past 4 years have seen some great progress in the fight.
As more and more people become aware of robocall blockers and we show that it's actually a very safe way to protect people, only then will the larger industry come along (kicking and screaming the entire way).
However, I still get the neighbor scam calls, and it’s one of the most annoying things I deal with on a daily basis.
I’ve been thinking that I should write my own whitelist-only call screening app on top of twilight, and maybe becoming one of your biggest competitors.
That is, unless you want to take this idea and implement it yourselves, and saving me the trouble. ;)
There's a business called Pindrop that conduct an analysis of audio data to guess where a call is originating from. The idea being, if a call originates from somewhere like India it'll take roughly a certain route that will produce certain audible artifacts on the line.
They also score a bunch of other stuff. I'd recommend reading the patents their CEO filed if you're interested. It's interesting.
I wondered if you could share, roughly, what your algorithm is doing? Are you also analyzing audio data?
In our case, we don't/can't analyze the audio stream of consumer calls. We can only work with the meta data of the call.
Our algo comes down pretty hard and fast on calls that come into our honeypot. These numbers have been out of service for years and no one should be calling them. Since these phone lines belong to us, we can do anything we want with them - there's no privacy concerns like there would be with consumer calls.
We answer, record, transcribe, analyze, and classify almost 10k calls per hour coming into our honeypot. Check out https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup. There's been a ton of health insurance scams running this week but the scam du jour changes every day.
When we analyze the call data coming into consumer lines, we have to be a little less aggressive so that we don't accidentally block schools, police, doctors, pharmacies.
The only thing left for humans is to help correct the decisions the algo makes. Sometimes it misses robocalls and sometimes it stops things it shouldn't. People just report them through our app and website.
For historic analysis, we also ingest the FTC & FCC robocall complaint data sources. But it's not really a great data source for the real-time detection algo - It's just too slow to be actionable.
You really have to be detecting robocalls at the moment they come in to have a successful blocking product.
But, the response to our sampling system has been really strong so we're expanding that to grab one recording per day per number. That way you can also go back in time and see the different scams that have been sent from the same number.
We're also building some deeper analytics so that you can see call volume by robocaller and graphs that show the changes over time.
Since I made that post, the system has filtered 100% of the spammers and 0% of my actual contacts. I think the non-bot spammers started to get sick of hearing my audio prompt because the number of spam calls that come in has dropped dramatically.
[1] https://andrewchidden.com/defeating-spam-callers-with-speech...
For example... A call from a garage to say your car is ready to be picked up, or perhaps some kind of emergency service? I imagine their calls would start with similar wording to sales calls. "Hello, can I speak to so and so?"
>Would it possible to package all this in mobile app instead?
Unfortunately the limiting factor would be background processing here; iOS isn’t permissive enough to really replace the server. I think it might be possible by using a background service on Android though.
Not sure if it works but I tried to waste as many minutes as I can. I pick up every number. If I know it's a robocall, I leave phone on my desk without saying anything until they hang up. Maybe they realize you're a dead end and stop calling.
Another way I look at it, is how can I develop my social skills? I might string them along, make up a story. Make them so angry or become friends. You can learn how you perform in these situations. :)
It depends on your situation, but it may be possible to turn lemons into sparkly lemonade!