In some better, brighter universe, I like to think that Tom Wheeler is laying the smackdown on those scamming assholes (and hopefully doing something to limit the non-scam-but-still-annoying calls as well).
I receive 3-5 robocalls per day, and answer none of them, and only pick up if the caller is in my contact list. Robocalls are ruining my trust in the phone system. Both email and the telephone networks are saturated with spam.
It would be nice to be able to microcharge callers like in one of those old pay-per-email schemes, to reduce some of this noise.
From ads, to emails, to phone calls, these mass unsolicited efforts to compel our attention will ultimately result in the "cord-cutting" we've seen in the TV space.
It's coming to SMS and probably other "chat systems" too. It's quite easy to build a robocall system on top of Twilio now and they offer much more than just calls.
I have my own frustrations with Twilio but one cool feature is to just flat Reject a call. I porteted numbers I needed into Twilio and made a greylist app. You can rotate numbers in/out to de-spam them (a bit)
I have a theory that phone companies are letting these crimes happen because they want to tank the old phone system so they can sell more data, or something along those lines.
They're cutting their own throat, then. Even though my Asterisk system blocks (and records) multiple robocalls daily, I finally got off my butt and ditched my AT&T landline for good. I should have done that a decade ago. Bonus: I'm paying less for VoIP service than what AT&T charged just for Caller ID. My monthly home phone bill has gone from about $45 to under $10.
I also got my parents to ditch their landline as well... so that's two customers that AT&T no longer has.
I guess it's time to yank the FXO modules off my TDM400P card and sell them to someone who could use them. :)
Any recommendations for hardware, software and good service provider for home VoIP?
I've used an Obihai OBI110 in the past and it was super reliable, the only maintenance was an ~ once yearly power-cycle. Had it setup with Google Voice (was free* for US calls) and Anveo for e911 (~$10/Year). Porting the existing landline # to Google Voice required porting to mobile first, as GV would only accept ports from mobile #'s. Ordering a Ting SIM card [SIM and port were free, line was $6/mo, only needed one month] and then to Google Voice [$20 fee] accomplished this for $26 total. With recent updates to Google Voice service combined with the OBI110 being past EOL, I need a new setup. It would be nice to ditch GV for a paid provider.
*Google records your calls, monetizes the data with ad targeting, selling your voice profile, future blackmail, etc.
For my folks, I got them an OBI300, and so far so good. My own setup is an old Atom-based Mini-ITX board and a Digium TDM400P card, with Asterisk handling the calls. We went with Callcentric for service, and we've been happy with it.
Awesome, thanks for the reply. I've tinkered with roll my own Asterisk setup a few times over the years but I just ordered an OBI300 since I always loved having a portable, canned landline-in-a-box device for traveling, etc. Given the ever increasing volume of spam/scam calls, a couple hundred $ or less can probably get me through to telephone obsolescence!
On my last visit to the U.S. I decided to go with Ting as a carrier. They have a pay as you go offer and that seemed logical for me as I only intended to use my sim card for data. On a daily basis I was not only receiving calls and messages, I was also being charged for them! There is no way they are not in on it!
I ended up removing the sim card and not paying for the $20 bill that they racked up.
I used Ting for a while, if I had better home coverage I'd still use them as my primary mobile provider, but I'm not in a great coverage area and it seems Verizon's 700MHz/Band 13 is my only consistently reliable service option at the moment. Adding lines for $6 with Ting was nice, I would use them with a dumbphone for a dedicated 2FA SMS line. It appears you can turn off the ability to recieve calls and texts, and with Ting that would probably take a whole 2 minutes since you can call and talk to a real person, usually with no hold time.
From Ting support forum:
"If you're looking to get a new SIM card to use mobile data, it requires a phone number... but it needs a phone number to be able to communicate with the tower...you can turn off calling and text messaging to it"
Most people have a Google email address these days, it would seem. Google has made spam nearly a non-issue, insofar as its detection rates are 99.9%. First question: Who is still making enough money from email spam to be worth the effort? Second question: Who's going to step up to solve the phone spam problem? Bonus question: How long till spammers start texting like this?
I think traditional spam (the "Nigerian price" type stuff) is on the outs these days, but phishing/spear-phishing is definitely more popular than ever.
I also ignore most of those calls now. It saves a lot of my time. I sometimes just Google those numbers and block them in the end without even talking to them. I have also read a nice article regarding this topic at https://www.lemberglaw.com/what-are-robocalls/.
A landline phone, at $10 a month, is a pretty decent investment for anyone who spends a lot of time at home. I almost exclusively only take interviews, meetings, etc calls from my landline, solely because of call quality issues!
I tried Robokiller on my iPhone. It wasn't even catching half the calls. I ended the trial before I got charged. Anyone know of an app that actually works?
I’m paying for RoboKiller and it has gotten signifantly better over the last couple of months. I think because it is learning based in my address books and who I typically call. I absolutely love the app and swear by it now. Especially since it also intercepts my VOIP business line as well.
It used to be bad but using apps like MrNumber solved it for a while but not anymore. The last six months it got horrible. Now it is more difficult because they are local numbers and you never know who is who.
You've hit the nail on the head- thats the problem- the number isn't real. I have gotten at least half a dozen callbacks/texts asking "who dis" or "why did you call me"? when the reality is my number ended up in the robodialer spooferator 5000 number generator. The only way to really stop it would be for everyone to stay on the line and waste the telemarketers/scammers time until they realized they had no viable business. Unfortunately, that is a really hard problem to solve.
This is exactly what I do and it does appear to reduce the number of calls significantly - I get two or three a day between my two cell numbers and work phone but not every day. I also noticed scammers are trying to counter it by asking to press multiple keys e.g. a recent "final courtesy call about your extended car warranty" first asked to press 1 to talk to the operator, than it asked to press 3 if my car had some number of miles then it just asked to press 8 without any other prompts. So people getting to the operator seems to hurt them if they are willing to drop a certain number of potential chumps who will mess up multiple phone prompts.
Many voip services just fucking make up a number (or derive it somehow, but incorrectly) when numbers show as blocked or 'unknown' on normal lines. It's incredibly misleading and annoying, so even legitimate calls from blocked numbers get people calling some random person back.
A lot of the robocallers just play a pre-recorded message asking you to call back.
That’s when the flooding works.
A lot of the scammers are just call-centres that outsource the lead generation. By flooding the call-back number, their campaign that they paid for goes down the drain.
I don't know for certain, but my guess is that it does not.
I don't quite know what the purpose of the spammers using neighbor spoofing is, because generally if you actually respond to those calls, they hang up on the other end. Maybe it's fishing for potential victims that they'll target with another method?
The nature of the scam spam though probably relies on the ability of the victim to call back, so those numbers are not spoofed.
Did they make the script's source public? I'd love to run this for myself on some of the numbers pretending there is a warrant our for my arrest because I owe some ridiculous amount of back taxes.
In Canada, also get a few of those every day, even though I barely ever give my number out. I noticed that some of those numbers are within the same area code as mine, but not the area I live in. I attempted to call some of these back on occasion, and was surprised to have an actual person on the other end of the line, absolutely clueless as to why I was calling them. I'm not sure whether hijacking a caller ID could allow that, or if some those phones have been compromised and become part of one of the great botnet...
Meanwhile, I'm still dealing with large organizations (BestBuy, Fido/Rogers, TD, etc.) still sending promotional offers through all possible media, despite Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation being in full effect since 2017 and me having never explicitly consented to that garbage in the first place.
Maybe we ought to bring the hammer down on all spammers, "legitimate" or not...
Spoofing Caller-ID is easy. So they use familiar looking numbers to appear local to get you to answer.
They seemingly call numbers at random (at least, there's zero reason to call me in Chinese). The Chinese language scammers once hit my employer and made it hard to call them for a few hours because the scammers were dialing sequential numbers, and un-assigned numbers were sent to switchboard...
Though sometimes the calls seem to be targetted. Some immigrants have gotten calls from "Immigration Canada", while non-immigrants I've spoken to have not. So maybe there was a leak/theft that hasn't been detected.
This happened to my work number the other day. I received hundreds of callbacks, and a full voicemail box, before I had my employee disconnect the number.
The ease of spoofing caller ID will be the downfall of POTS. Imagine what the web would be like if it didn't have HTTPS, that's where we're at with the telephone system. It's not just broken, it's actively hazardous.
I (Vancouver-born) get the calls from Immigration Canada too - I only know this because I have to ask my Chinese coworkers what the recording on the other end of the line is saying. You'd think they'd at least throw in a little English or French to make it sound convincing...
There’s an English language Immigration Department scam that seems to be targeted. The Chinese one is not targeted at all.
I find the CRA generic English names funny. Typical scammers go by “James Morrison” or “Derek Johnson”. The real feds have names more like Jean-François Pelletier.
Long before I ported out my AT&T landline, I started using a prepaid VoIP provider in Canada for outgoing long distance. One bonus was that they provided a free number in Winnipeg.
So far, I've never received an actual spam call on the Winnipeg number, only a very rare legitimate wrong number.
Hmmm... next time a store wants my phone number, I should give them that 204-xxx-xxxx number. I don't actually live in Canada. :)
I get robocalls that leave messages about once a day. These days it's some message in Mandarin. A few months ago it was something about health insurance plans (same message every day).
Robocall leave me messages. I get the Mandarin calls spoofing the SF consulate number, I get calls about lowering my rates, sometimes the contractor spammers leave me messages too.
I get a phone call about once a month from someone claiming I called them and asking what I want. I've had only varying success in convincing them I didn't call them, even after explaining what's going on.
Its too bad that the phone companies don't offer a service where you can get real metadata on where calls to you are originating from. I think that being able to block by the region of call origination would solve a lot of these problems. I know its technically infeasible especially with VOIP but a guy can hope.
Billing systems for phone lines have been sophisticated and detailed for quite some time.
The Telco knows exactly who is originating the call, at least for the last leg of it, and could trivially issue marks against them, till they get booted off the network.
But alas, why would you boot the entity giving you 100x the revenue than the target?
Why can't my provider, Telus, block spoofed caller Id. For email we have SPF and Dmarc, I haven't had an email with spoofed from address hit my inbox in years. Similar to the internet the phone system is connected through peering, sources of spam should be dropped like bitcanal.
They can't block it because it costs them nothing; there's no incentive to get them to build the capability. Currently it works like old school (physical, postal) mail -- the sender writes something on the envelope that says who they are.
If every robocall received gets you five cents off your phone bill, it'll be solved within a year.
The fact that this is even a thing that people need to cobble together is a sign of market failure in the POTS business. It's also a sign of total abdication of duty on the part of regulators. They made a big show of busting software pirates, but I have yet to see any robocallers getting frog marched. This, despite the serious threat they pose to the integrity of a vital telecommunications system.
Software pirates threatened corporations. Thus, the corporations paid the politicians handsomely to pursue them to literal ends of the Earth (Laos and Cambodia for Gottfrid and Fredrik at Pirate Bay)
Robocallers just threaten consumers. Corporations truly could not care less, it seems.
Heck, some of the biggest tech corporations run communications platforms; they don’t care if phones become an unusable toxic wasteland, they could probably benefit from people using their services more, as long as it doesn’t attract regulatory attention.
I hope instead though some software companies treat this as a technical problem and sell solutions.
The corporations profit from it. Robocalls are almost the majority of all calls made, and a huge chunk of the profits of all companies offering voice service.
I've contemplated an Asterisk-like system that intercepts all incoming calls, and uses very long extensions (e.g., 7 or more digits.)
Every time I needed to give somebody my phone number, I would select an unused extension, add it to a white-list, and tell the recipient they could reach me at that particular extension.
Any incoming call that failed to enter a white-listed extension would be routed to a voice response menu that a real human could easily navigate, but a robocaller could not.
How about a system that picks up and plays this message "if you're a human press 7 (or other digit)". Then wait a few seconds then hang up. If they press the right digit, the phone call gets patched through otherwise it hangs up.
Years ago someone made a script where Asterisk would answer immediately with a short burst of number unavailable tone - too short for a human to hang up, but long enough for robo caller to detect and hopefully take off it's active numbers list, in the hope of reducing automated calls... not sure if it's still around, or if the robocallers got wise to it.
I set my Android phone to only ring for callers in my contact list. It pisses me off that the robocallers have won but my life is better without unwanted phone interruptions.
I use custom ringtones for groups. Anyone ringing with the default ringtone is immediately obvious as unknown, and I can easily decide to ignore/accept a caller. In practice, that means ignore. I should just drop a silent MP3 into my phone and use that as the default ringtone.
Mr Number and automatic blocking of known spam has helped me significantly while still letting through numbers when I am expecting a call but don't know the number they will use.
But then you need to add each new contact to a group that rings. I use an app that blocks anybody not in my contact list. That's the single feature I use for that app. They probably mine all of my all history. Why can't this feature be a simple checkbox in the phone or contacts app?
this probably says more about the Android marketplace and user base than anything else, but there are easily 100+ apps designed to reduce spam phone calls one way or another. and we (myself included) still feel like the solutions are not really great. maybe i'm just not looking hard enough or expect too much.
but i keep thinking: it's a phone with a computer builtin -- it should be able to do "the phone call thing" super efficiently out of the box without any extra work from the user. i don't know...
On my phone I open the dialer, tap the menu button then Settings -> Calls -> "Blocked caller list". Then I click the cog icon in the top right, tap "Unknown numbers" and check "Block incoming calls". This blocks all calls from numbers not in my contact list but they can still leave a voice mail.
Can someone explain what are the (technical) challenges to solving this? I feel like it shouldn't be too hard, and should go hand in hand with modernizing the phone system.
The standard excuse is "Wharrgarbl! My PBX needs to be able to send the extension making the call!"
F*ck your PBX. Phone companies a) won't insure that companies only send Caller ID data that actually belongs to them, and b) won't cut off providers that don't do likewise.
the ability to blacklist a range of known offenders would help quite a lot. Further, being able to whitelist numbers would help. But it would be great if foreign nations' governments would stop turning a blind eye to these scams. India is a well known hotspot. The Nigerian scam is so named for a reason and is practically a national sport. To show just how pervasive it is, there was even a hit song about cheating Westerners ("I go chop your dollar").
Caller ID that isn't trivially spoofed wouldn't hurt, either.
Curiously, I had two "microsoft tech support" robo-voice robocalls just tonight. The bastards.
Lyrics
I done suffer no be small /
Upon say I get sense /
Poverty no good at all, no /
Na im make I join this business /
419 no be thief, it's just a game /
Everybody dey play em /
if anybody fall mugu, /
ha! my brother I go chop em /
National Airport na me get em /
National Stadium na me build em /
President na my sister brother /
You be the mugu, I be the master /
Oyinbo man I go chop your dollar, /
I go take your money and disappear /
419 is just a game, you are the loser I am the winner /
The refinery na me get em, /
The contract, na you I go give em /
But you go pay me small money make I bring em /
you be the mugu, I be the master… /
na me be the master ooo!!!! /
When Oyinbo play wayo, /
dey go say na new style /
When country man do him own, /
them go dey shout: bring em, kill em, die! /
That Oyinbo people greedy, I say them greedy /
I don't see them tire /
That's why when they fall into my trap o! /
I dey show them fire"
Translated by Azuka Nzegwu and Adeolu Ademoyo.
I am suffering greatly /
and I get this idea (or wise) /
poverty is not good at all /
and I decide to join this business (scam) /
419 is not a criminal act but a game /
Everybody will play /
but if you are fool /
I will chop your money /
Chorus:
I own the National Airport /
I built the National Stadium /
The president is my sister's brother /
You are the fool and I am the master /
White man, I will eat your dollar /
I will take your money and disappear /
419 is just a game, you are the loser and I am the winner /
I own the refinery /
I will give you the contract /
But you will have to pay me a small fee before I bring them /
You are the fool, I am the master /
I am the master!!!! /
When whites scam /
it is said that it is a new style /
But when the country man does the same /
White people shout: bring them, kill them, die! /
White people are greedy, I say they are greedy /
I have seen through them deeply (or very well) /
So, when they fall into my trap /
I will show them fire (or showing someone who is the real boss by treating them harshly)
I think I've said this before here but this sucks for individuals (I get these) but this is also dangerous for certain sectors as well. I work at a hospital and we will have consecutive robocalls tie up all the ER lines, ringing at the same time, for anywhere from 5-15 minute periods. I don't work on the telecom side of things but they say all they can do is report it to the FBI. This has been going on since I've worked there (6 months or so) and occurs at least once a month across the entire hospital.
That might bring the wrong kind of attention and doesn't really resolve the issue. Given that the past few months has seen a lot of posts of articles about this, hopefully attention is reaching the people that should be taking a look at it in the government - FCC, FTC, etc.
In Europe, you pay to call a cell phone, but receiving a call is free (for pre-paid voice anyway). Problem solved - except that in the US we like to charge both sides for having a phone call, so we end up here.
On the other hand, legit companies often call as a private/unknown number, and I never pick up. Don't Apple, insurance companies, etc., realize that no one's picking up their phones anymore?
Forget land lines, I'm considering just not having a POTS phone number at all anymore. Just sell me data and I'll take it from there, thanks.
Spam callers spoof residential numbers so they're not blocked by rules and filters at the telcos. Apple has called me twice once it popped up Apple Williamsburg because I had their number in my phone, and the other time was a 800 number based on a scheduled call. What legitimate companies call from private/unknown numbers? Even HSBC my bank calls me for fraud from the exact same 800 number that I call them for fraud.
I Europe you can tell if a number is a mobile phone or not just by the prefix, hence you can decide if you want to call this number and be charged extra. In US that is not the case, landlines and mobile phone share the same number pool, so it would be much more difficult to implement the European call charging system.
Wow, I didn't realize receiving a call isn't free anywhere on the planet (assuming local, not roaming)!
> On the other hand, legit companies...
I suppose they're technically legit, but I refuse to recognize as legit the third-party call centres subcontracted by service providers I use. A legit company itself almost never calls. Which makes not picking up a phone a correct strategy.
> Don't Apple, insurance companies, etc., realize that no one's picking up their phones anymore?
People might be picking up simply because any given day you may be expecting some call from an unknown number. I often end up picking up in the days I expect a package, because delivery drivers here get confused by the layout of the neighbourhood I live in.
So, AIUI the US got this crazy situation through the following chain of circumstances:
1. The US has long had very geographic numbering. Most cities have a single area code for everything in that city, in bigger metropolitan areas it may be a few codes instead.
2. Americans took longer than almost everybody else to get used to giving their "full" number, after all everybody you know in Springfield is in the same area code so why not skip that part when reading numbers?
3. But most of the code space is sparsely consumed this way. Most area codes have free space, but there are few whole area codes, let alone groups of codes, free.
4. So, in most countries cellular telephones were assigned separate area codes, but in the US they'd just be assigned numbers in a local area code where they were purchased.
5. But, in other countries the different area code provided a clear signal to consumers when cellular calls were expensive. This is the same pattern as knowing the 1-800 prefix is free to call. Re-using geographic area codes meant Americans didn't have this signal...
6. It wouldn't be right to charge extra with no way to know in advance, and cellular phones were for rich folk anyway, so why not charge the phone's user for the extra cost?
The ban is not 100 percent effective - I receive a robocall maybe once every year - but it's pretty efficient. From the numbers I read here, it's some 99.9 percent effective. I have lived in 3 different EU countries and it wasn't a big issue in any of them.
Different countries in the EU have implemented the ban differently. But generally, businesses that use robocalls are fined on a per call basis. So it is an issue that can be dealt with by regulation. Companies breaking the rules are fined and the risk of being reported is high so it's not a viable business model.
I still receive spam emails, which is the same and is also illegal, but - and I don't mean anything else than to state the fact - almost all spam I receive is from outside the EU, such as America, Russia, Africa or Asia.
In the US it seems to be folks from India/Asia spoofing numbers that are registered as residential numbers. Not sure a) the laws matters and b) the tech at the US telcos is good enough?
I am a US resident. My cell is on the Federal Do Not Call list, which makes unsolicited calls to my number illegal. I get about 5-10 spam calls a day. Phone calls originate from random numbers, about a third of which share the first six digits of my cell phone, by design.
My understanding is that robocalls are illegal in the U.S. if you opted into the Do Not Call list. Unfortunately caller I.D. is entirely forgeable. So good luck enforcing that.
I figure that Every. Single. Phone. Call. is fraud.
One of the general patterns is that spam calls happen to originate from the area code where your phone was purchased from initially. This is nice because, I ended up moving to a new are code. And the only people from the old area code are in my contacts list. Another useful thing I noticed is that my provider labels the calls as "Likely Scam", so then I know as well not to pick up. But even with that I get about 1 or 2 calls every few days.
I think this is a brilliant use case for the ML/AI voice avatar technology that is becoming popular now. Feed it a few scripts, and write a shim application that will allow you to let your avatar answer the robocall and waste time...
The search utility included in Microsoft Word provides a very easy way to search for all kinds of things in a document, not just text. There's a basic search tool that's easy for anyone to use . Visit to download the Microsoft office 2016 and office 365 for your PC and MAC.
https://getofficesetup.com/
If we're using Quality-Adjusted Life Years as an economic metric for evaluating health care, then we should seriously start considering robocalls and telemarketers in general as a public health hazard.
I've wanted to solve this problem. I think employing a similar method to what the call centers are doing when you call them back (e.g. press a number of keys) is the answer. When you receive a call from a number not on some whitelist, the dialer has to enter some numbers to even get your phone to ring. The problem is, I can't find any APIs to access your phone at the operating system level to access the call before your phone already is ringing. It'd be very easy to randomly generate some audio with a random sequence of numbers (ala 2FA).
If anyone knows how to do this, please, please, please let me know. I'm dying to fight back, as are some people on my team.
One way without using the phone API directly is through Twilio using their APIs for handling DTMF tones and call forwarding.
This would probably cost something like 2 cents per minute [1] plus whatever your phone service charges (if you're just calling your existing phone) and hosting costs for your server. I was originally tempted to say you could save on this cost by hanging up on verified callers and calling them back directly, except I realized that's about the same as rejecting all calls and calling back the ones who leave meaningful voicemails / texts.
I think you could get it down to 1.2 cents per minute (+server costs) if you also write a mobile app to handle all your calls via VoIP. Then you also need to factor in your cost for data if not using wi-fi.
And also possibly of interest - a few days ago, Google also announced a call screening service for the Pixel [2] which transcribes call audio in real-time for you to read and possibly pick up and join the call. This one has the advantage of being able to screen out actual humans working in call centers to spam you with calls (which is less common than the robocalls in my experience).
Yeah, but that would require a person use a different phone number, right? Or are you saying the customer just forwards all of their calls to Twilio which... somehow forwards it back without the call getting forwarded?
I'm in the UK and many years ago I was working for a US company over here.
(This happened in 2000 so my memory isn't 100% on it)
One of my managers asked me to call him at home (either in the US or Canada) and when I dialled, I was hit with a message along the lines of "I do not accept unsolicited calls" before I got through to him.
Now, this is the hazy bit, I am sure it asked me to press a key to continue.
Assuming I'm not talking nonsense here, how hard would it be to have a service like that where the message asks you to type in a number it reads out in order to continue: It would wipe out the current generation of robocalls immediately.
Like popups and tracking blockers, it would obviously start an arms race but it would at least be a start.
103 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadIt would be nice to be able to microcharge callers like in one of those old pay-per-email schemes, to reduce some of this noise.
From ads, to emails, to phone calls, these mass unsolicited efforts to compel our attention will ultimately result in the "cord-cutting" we've seen in the TV space.
I also got my parents to ditch their landline as well... so that's two customers that AT&T no longer has.
I guess it's time to yank the FXO modules off my TDM400P card and sell them to someone who could use them. :)
I've used an Obihai OBI110 in the past and it was super reliable, the only maintenance was an ~ once yearly power-cycle. Had it setup with Google Voice (was free* for US calls) and Anveo for e911 (~$10/Year). Porting the existing landline # to Google Voice required porting to mobile first, as GV would only accept ports from mobile #'s. Ordering a Ting SIM card [SIM and port were free, line was $6/mo, only needed one month] and then to Google Voice [$20 fee] accomplished this for $26 total. With recent updates to Google Voice service combined with the OBI110 being past EOL, I need a new setup. It would be nice to ditch GV for a paid provider.
*Google records your calls, monetizes the data with ad targeting, selling your voice profile, future blackmail, etc.
I ended up removing the sim card and not paying for the $20 bill that they racked up.
From Ting support forum: "If you're looking to get a new SIM card to use mobile data, it requires a phone number... but it needs a phone number to be able to communicate with the tower...you can turn off calling and text messaging to it"
CPR Call Blocker Protect - White List Call Blocker - Protect Vulnerable Adults - Block All Apart From Who You Want To Speak To.
https://www.amazon.com/CPR-Call-Blocker-Protect-Vulnerable/d...
For a ton of people, I'd bet most people on HN, phone is a medium of last resort, used exclusively for emergencies, delivery drivers, and grandma.
You have no choice but to answer.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EzedMdx6QG4
More details here: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj8wg4/we-talked-...
That’s when the flooding works.
A lot of the scammers are just call-centres that outsource the lead generation. By flooding the call-back number, their campaign that they paid for goes down the drain.
I don't quite know what the purpose of the spammers using neighbor spoofing is, because generally if you actually respond to those calls, they hang up on the other end. Maybe it's fishing for potential victims that they'll target with another method?
The nature of the scam spam though probably relies on the ability of the victim to call back, so those numbers are not spoofed.
Meanwhile, I'm still dealing with large organizations (BestBuy, Fido/Rogers, TD, etc.) still sending promotional offers through all possible media, despite Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation being in full effect since 2017 and me having never explicitly consented to that garbage in the first place.
Maybe we ought to bring the hammer down on all spammers, "legitimate" or not...
They seemingly call numbers at random (at least, there's zero reason to call me in Chinese). The Chinese language scammers once hit my employer and made it hard to call them for a few hours because the scammers were dialing sequential numbers, and un-assigned numbers were sent to switchboard...
Though sometimes the calls seem to be targetted. Some immigrants have gotten calls from "Immigration Canada", while non-immigrants I've spoken to have not. So maybe there was a leak/theft that hasn't been detected.
I find the CRA generic English names funny. Typical scammers go by “James Morrison” or “Derek Johnson”. The real feds have names more like Jean-François Pelletier.
So far, I've never received an actual spam call on the Winnipeg number, only a very rare legitimate wrong number.
Hmmm... next time a store wants my phone number, I should give them that 204-xxx-xxxx number. I don't actually live in Canada. :)
Robocalls never leave messages.
Real person leaves message and I call back.
The Telco knows exactly who is originating the call, at least for the last leg of it, and could trivially issue marks against them, till they get booted off the network.
But alas, why would you boot the entity giving you 100x the revenue than the target?
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/internet-tran...
If every robocall received gets you five cents off your phone bill, it'll be solved within a year.
Robocallers just threaten consumers. Corporations truly could not care less, it seems.
I hope instead though some software companies treat this as a technical problem and sell solutions.
Every time I needed to give somebody my phone number, I would select an unused extension, add it to a white-list, and tell the recipient they could reach me at that particular extension.
Any incoming call that failed to enter a white-listed extension would be routed to a voice response menu that a real human could easily navigate, but a robocaller could not.
So far I haven't seen anything like this.
At least for now. I anticipate a cat-and-mouse game, and maybe the multiple-digit idea (or a more sophisticated CAPTCHA) might become necessary.
CAPTCHA idea: have the caller key in the answer to a simple mathematical question.
Of course, you need to define groups and add contacts to those groups, but it's all built-in.
this probably says more about the Android marketplace and user base than anything else, but there are easily 100+ apps designed to reduce spam phone calls one way or another. and we (myself included) still feel like the solutions are not really great. maybe i'm just not looking hard enough or expect too much.
but i keep thinking: it's a phone with a computer builtin -- it should be able to do "the phone call thing" super efficiently out of the box without any extra work from the user. i don't know...
[0] https://play.google.com/store/search?q=spam%20call%20blocker...
F*ck your PBX. Phone companies a) won't insure that companies only send Caller ID data that actually belongs to them, and b) won't cut off providers that don't do likewise.
Caller ID that isn't trivially spoofed wouldn't hurt, either.
Curiously, I had two "microsoft tech support" robo-voice robocalls just tonight. The bastards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_YjvC4ndzM
Lyrics I done suffer no be small / Upon say I get sense / Poverty no good at all, no / Na im make I join this business / 419 no be thief, it's just a game / Everybody dey play em / if anybody fall mugu, / ha! my brother I go chop em / National Airport na me get em / National Stadium na me build em / President na my sister brother / You be the mugu, I be the master / Oyinbo man I go chop your dollar, / I go take your money and disappear / 419 is just a game, you are the loser I am the winner / The refinery na me get em, / The contract, na you I go give em / But you go pay me small money make I bring em / you be the mugu, I be the master… / na me be the master ooo!!!! / When Oyinbo play wayo, / dey go say na new style / When country man do him own, / them go dey shout: bring em, kill em, die! / That Oyinbo people greedy, I say them greedy / I don't see them tire / That's why when they fall into my trap o! / I dey show them fire"
Translated by Azuka Nzegwu and Adeolu Ademoyo.
I am suffering greatly / and I get this idea (or wise) / poverty is not good at all / and I decide to join this business (scam) /
419 is not a criminal act but a game / Everybody will play / but if you are fool / I will chop your money /
Chorus:
I own the National Airport / I built the National Stadium / The president is my sister's brother / You are the fool and I am the master /
White man, I will eat your dollar / I will take your money and disappear / 419 is just a game, you are the loser and I am the winner /
I own the refinery / I will give you the contract / But you will have to pay me a small fee before I bring them / You are the fool, I am the master / I am the master!!!! /
When whites scam / it is said that it is a new style / But when the country man does the same / White people shout: bring them, kill them, die! /
White people are greedy, I say they are greedy / I have seen through them deeply (or very well) / So, when they fall into my trap / I will show them fire (or showing someone who is the real boss by treating them harshly)
"We all know robo-callers are annoying, but could they also be deadly? More at 5."
That and contact your govt representatives.
On the other hand, legit companies often call as a private/unknown number, and I never pick up. Don't Apple, insurance companies, etc., realize that no one's picking up their phones anymore?
Forget land lines, I'm considering just not having a POTS phone number at all anymore. Just sell me data and I'll take it from there, thanks.
All of the European ones. The number they call out from isn't their helpdesk so they block it to stop people calling back.
> On the other hand, legit companies...
I suppose they're technically legit, but I refuse to recognize as legit the third-party call centres subcontracted by service providers I use. A legit company itself almost never calls. Which makes not picking up a phone a correct strategy.
> Don't Apple, insurance companies, etc., realize that no one's picking up their phones anymore?
People might be picking up simply because any given day you may be expecting some call from an unknown number. I often end up picking up in the days I expect a package, because delivery drivers here get confused by the layout of the neighbourhood I live in.
1. The US has long had very geographic numbering. Most cities have a single area code for everything in that city, in bigger metropolitan areas it may be a few codes instead.
2. Americans took longer than almost everybody else to get used to giving their "full" number, after all everybody you know in Springfield is in the same area code so why not skip that part when reading numbers?
3. But most of the code space is sparsely consumed this way. Most area codes have free space, but there are few whole area codes, let alone groups of codes, free.
4. So, in most countries cellular telephones were assigned separate area codes, but in the US they'd just be assigned numbers in a local area code where they were purchased.
5. But, in other countries the different area code provided a clear signal to consumers when cellular calls were expensive. This is the same pattern as knowing the 1-800 prefix is free to call. Re-using geographic area codes meant Americans didn't have this signal...
6. It wouldn't be right to charge extra with no way to know in advance, and cellular phones were for rich folk anyway, so why not charge the phone's user for the extra cost?
The ban follows form article 13 of the directive on privacy and electronic communications: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32...
The ban is not 100 percent effective - I receive a robocall maybe once every year - but it's pretty efficient. From the numbers I read here, it's some 99.9 percent effective. I have lived in 3 different EU countries and it wasn't a big issue in any of them.
Different countries in the EU have implemented the ban differently. But generally, businesses that use robocalls are fined on a per call basis. So it is an issue that can be dealt with by regulation. Companies breaking the rules are fined and the risk of being reported is high so it's not a viable business model.
I still receive spam emails, which is the same and is also illegal, but - and I don't mean anything else than to state the fact - almost all spam I receive is from outside the EU, such as America, Russia, Africa or Asia.
I figure that Every. Single. Phone. Call. is fraud.
Every. Single. One.
https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/
https://instaud.io/2IHF
If anyone knows how to do this, please, please, please let me know. I'm dying to fight back, as are some people on my team.
This would probably cost something like 2 cents per minute [1] plus whatever your phone service charges (if you're just calling your existing phone) and hosting costs for your server. I was originally tempted to say you could save on this cost by hanging up on verified callers and calling them back directly, except I realized that's about the same as rejecting all calls and calling back the ones who leave meaningful voicemails / texts.
I think you could get it down to 1.2 cents per minute (+server costs) if you also write a mobile app to handle all your calls via VoIP. Then you also need to factor in your cost for data if not using wi-fi.
And also possibly of interest - a few days ago, Google also announced a call screening service for the Pixel [2] which transcribes call audio in real-time for you to read and possibly pick up and join the call. This one has the advantage of being able to screen out actual humans working in call centers to spam you with calls (which is less common than the robocalls in my experience).
[1] https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223132367-How-M...
[2] https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/10/09/call-screen-will-le...
(This happened in 2000 so my memory isn't 100% on it)
One of my managers asked me to call him at home (either in the US or Canada) and when I dialled, I was hit with a message along the lines of "I do not accept unsolicited calls" before I got through to him.
Now, this is the hazy bit, I am sure it asked me to press a key to continue.
Assuming I'm not talking nonsense here, how hard would it be to have a service like that where the message asks you to type in a number it reads out in order to continue: It would wipe out the current generation of robocalls immediately.
Like popups and tracking blockers, it would obviously start an arms race but it would at least be a start.