Foreign countries aren't subject to US phone laws. Anyone making any call in or to the US can just lie about their caller ID, and the phone company forwards that lie to you.
Most of them are referred to as willful violators. To them, less than 1% of people will chase them down, so the risk is worth it.
What do most of us do? Block the numbers, install apps to block them, yell at them, curse their name, not pick up.
Consequently, if you can find out who they are as AnimalMuppet rightly indicated, you can make them pay YOU. Personally, I've collected nearly $4,000 generated from carefully drafted letters to the violators. I am sending off a demand for another settlement payment soon, I just haven't had the time to schlep on down to the post office.
The money represents an out of court settlement. It works. They would rather pay you and have you shut up, than you drag them into court. USUALLY, you have them dead to rights and the process of discovery should you go to court would reveal they did in fact call you.
It's an investment of your time, you have to take the call and convince the salesperson they are about to make a sale. Usually you can get the info if they think they are going to make a sale. I feign interest in what they are selling. Some of them are really good and won't give up any information because they understand the risk of doing so. I've had both experienced and non-experienced reps on my phone.
Funny thing is, I get less calls now. They've practically stopped at least for one vertical - auto warranties. I suspect I may be blacklisted or they somehow share information with each other, because there is a very high probability that if you call me, your company will be writing me a check.
I am happy to divulge more information, my friend has written an Ebook on the subject in detail complete with template letters and is a complete "how to" guide on collecting money from the robocallers. It's extremely satisfying. Only cost $47.
All of the robo calls are I get are clearly from spoofed numbers; they spoof my area code from a previous location, but are clearly targeting people in SF, e.g. tax scams on foreign workers, stuff I can't understand in Chinese. Everyone I know gets spam with similar spoofing.
If you'll only tell me for $47, color me skeptical. :)
It's simple, you ask them who they are. The ones that are not based out of the US you cannot collect from.
I got a call from Florida. Picked it up. Pretended to be interested. They coughed it up 45 minutes into the call after pretending to want to check their BBB page. I hate to give away all the info from the Ebook. Everyone is skeptical. Myself included. I paid him the money because he put forth the effort to put the information together, and he's my friend, I trust him. It's paid off, clearly.
You'll have to forgive his use of a cheesy domain extension but he put up a quick site to sell his Ebook. Full disclosure this is an affiliate link but at a $7 commission I assure you you're not making me rich.
If you want, you can look up all the various laws and have a lawyer draw up a template letter for you, or you can pay the $47. He includes a photo gallery of the checks people have collected with info redacted for obvious reasons. That's what sold me.
Not sure why I am being downvoted. How else do you expect to extract information out of someone who doesn't want to tell you who they are necessarily? Think about it logically. I really don't know why I bother trying to explain it actually. I'll just keep continuing to cash checks in my spare time, and you skeptics can continue to get calls.
I once was able to confirm (with reasonable certainty) that the caller was using Twilio, because the message they left was a verbatim text from a Twilio example[1] for detecting whether a human answered:
"You did not reveal yourself to be human. Goodbye!"
Since then I've filed Twilio alongside Cogent in the "doesn't ask too many questions about who uses its services and for what" category.
You have to get them to cough it up. Obviously you can't start the call with "Who are you?!?" They'll just hang up on you - and call again some other time. There are different strategies to accomplish this. My personal strategy is to act interested. The Ebook goes into further detail and most importantly includes the template letter that was drafted with the help of a lawyer I assume. It's a small investment.
I'm probably too busy/lazy to do this myself, but it warms my heart knowing that somebody is screwing with the robocallers. I will now send each robocall to VM with the thought of them bitterly writing another check to @instaheat sometime in the near future.
Haha I appreciate that! I told a few of my co-workers and even after "showing them the money" they had the same response as you. Just too damn busy to invest the time into the calls.
Surprisingly I've had the number of robocalls go down since I started politely answering them. I'm never rude but ask for ridiculous things like negative interest rates on my credit card. I never hear from them again whereas before I'd keep getting the same call.
I have started telling people that I need to whitelist them in order for me to take a call from them. If I have to expect call from someone new (e.g. need to expect callback from some vendor, etc.) usually by asking "what number should I expect a call from?" -- usually they are fine answering that question, but if they won't or can't, I demand call back number that I can actually call, in response to voice mail.
I understand not everyone can do this (especially for business expecting inbound calls) but at least for personal numbers, I really want to see the social norm shifting to "have the caller on a whitelist or they are ignored."
An alternative approach: I NEVER answer calls that don't have a user-ID that I know (or a number I recognize). IMO, any legit business, charity, whatever will use that advantage.
Picking up, just saying hello, that's a 'real number'. They'll be back.
In some cases, the same (no-ID) number will call several times over a period of days. I add the number to my blacklist and the phone might ring once.
As time goes by, the volume of this type of call drops away to one or two a day.
1. Last I heard, the office responsible for DNC enforcement had literally 4 staff members. The chances of getting caught and punished by the government are minuscule.
2. The rise of IP telephony has made it cost effective to run call centers and bot farms overseas to target the US, making it hard to get jurisdiction over violators.
3. IP telephony also makes it easy to cloak the source of calls, making them hard to trace.
4. Phone companies have been dragging their heels on implementing a validation method for caller ID, which makes number-based blacklists useless.
Because of how Telecom works, robocallers can put whatever originating number they want in the SIP header. This will eventually come to your phone, usually as a number in the same NPA-NXX (area code, first 3) to trick you to pick it up.
Carriers that originate a call can know if their customer doing so owns the number, but all the other carriers along the many hops it may take，have no way of verifying that one of the previous carriers owns that number.
The solution is a combination of the Stir/Shaken implementation and the proof of ownership for telephone numbers that the FCC is starting to ask carriers to implement.
Anyways, because people can fake the orig number, and SS7 is massive, it's nearly impossible to track down violators like this, given a number.
26 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 59.0 ms ] threadPeople do get fined... but you have to find them first.
Then the crowd hunt will ensue.
What do most of us do? Block the numbers, install apps to block them, yell at them, curse their name, not pick up.
Consequently, if you can find out who they are as AnimalMuppet rightly indicated, you can make them pay YOU. Personally, I've collected nearly $4,000 generated from carefully drafted letters to the violators. I am sending off a demand for another settlement payment soon, I just haven't had the time to schlep on down to the post office.
The money represents an out of court settlement. It works. They would rather pay you and have you shut up, than you drag them into court. USUALLY, you have them dead to rights and the process of discovery should you go to court would reveal they did in fact call you.
It's an investment of your time, you have to take the call and convince the salesperson they are about to make a sale. Usually you can get the info if they think they are going to make a sale. I feign interest in what they are selling. Some of them are really good and won't give up any information because they understand the risk of doing so. I've had both experienced and non-experienced reps on my phone.
Funny thing is, I get less calls now. They've practically stopped at least for one vertical - auto warranties. I suspect I may be blacklisted or they somehow share information with each other, because there is a very high probability that if you call me, your company will be writing me a check.
I am happy to divulge more information, my friend has written an Ebook on the subject in detail complete with template letters and is a complete "how to" guide on collecting money from the robocallers. It's extremely satisfying. Only cost $47.
All of the robo calls are I get are clearly from spoofed numbers; they spoof my area code from a previous location, but are clearly targeting people in SF, e.g. tax scams on foreign workers, stuff I can't understand in Chinese. Everyone I know gets spam with similar spoofing.
If you'll only tell me for $47, color me skeptical. :)
I got a call from Florida. Picked it up. Pretended to be interested. They coughed it up 45 minutes into the call after pretending to want to check their BBB page. I hate to give away all the info from the Ebook. Everyone is skeptical. Myself included. I paid him the money because he put forth the effort to put the information together, and he's my friend, I trust him. It's paid off, clearly.
If you want, you can look up all the various laws and have a lawyer draw up a template letter for you, or you can pay the $47. He includes a photo gallery of the checks people have collected with info redacted for obvious reasons. That's what sold me.
https://robocalls.cash/ref/keven/
"You did not reveal yourself to be human. Goodbye!"
Since then I've filed Twilio alongside Cogent in the "doesn't ask too many questions about who uses its services and for what" category.
[1] https://www.twilio.com/blog/2016/02/tracking-call-status-how...
doc@doccompton.com
Buy cheapest thing from them with non-anonymous payment method - and then you have some trail.
I understand not everyone can do this (especially for business expecting inbound calls) but at least for personal numbers, I really want to see the social norm shifting to "have the caller on a whitelist or they are ignored."
Picking up, just saying hello, that's a 'real number'. They'll be back.
In some cases, the same (no-ID) number will call several times over a period of days. I add the number to my blacklist and the phone might ring once.
As time goes by, the volume of this type of call drops away to one or two a day.
2. The rise of IP telephony has made it cost effective to run call centers and bot farms overseas to target the US, making it hard to get jurisdiction over violators.
3. IP telephony also makes it easy to cloak the source of calls, making them hard to trace.
4. Phone companies have been dragging their heels on implementing a validation method for caller ID, which makes number-based blacklists useless.
Carriers that originate a call can know if their customer doing so owns the number, but all the other carriers along the many hops it may take，have no way of verifying that one of the previous carriers owns that number.
The solution is a combination of the Stir/Shaken implementation and the proof of ownership for telephone numbers that the FCC is starting to ask carriers to implement.
Anyways, because people can fake the orig number, and SS7 is massive, it's nearly impossible to track down violators like this, given a number.