Spam calls and texts have basically ruined the “phone” aspect of my iPhone. I now have my phone set to auto ignore anyone who is not in my contacts list. For SMS I enabled the filtered view so I only see messages from contacts.
The end result is that the spam is mostly hidden away, but it’s still there. Full of garbage.
I honestly wish I could deny-all by default. Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now.
My provider has 'Call Control'. If you call, it has a short prompt that says "This user has call control enabled, please enter <<some random digit>> to be connected." It ensures that only humans get through. However I have noticed some calls get through so I wonder if bots have already developed tech to listen to the message and enter the number. Wouldn't be hard I suspect.
It got so bad on my main emails, I just made a new one, started out with a custom domain and going to start doing per-website emails from now on to track where the hell its coming from
I’ve been doing this for a few years and find that the per website emails aren’t so bad and it’s whenever I use my old “legacy” emails that I’ve had with gmail for ages that gets the spam directed to it.
you can just add +myalias to most email services and get it delivered automatically. E.g. first.second+github@gmail.com delivers to firstsecond@gmail.com
Not just "can," they do strip the + part. Especially the sketchy ones. Or they barf. I tried this for a while and had a 30% success rate. It was dismal.
Migadu mail is very cheap, been using them for almost a year now with zero interruption or issues. Unlimited custom domains, unlimited aliases, etc for $20/yr
Currently using the middle tier and have been very happy with it.
Note that codified aliases are limited, but you can create a catch-all account. I have not needed to codify aliases to send "as" one of those accounts.
PretzelBox.cc (my project) does this along with a blog, a file storage area, and hosting.
Final pricing is still TBD but if you join the beta list, we are handing out huge discounts which’ll bring your effective cost between $5-15/month for everything.
The first time I busted a company doing this was very satisfying writing to their privacy officer requesting they remove every trace of my data from their systems with an attachment of the spam email with their domain on it so it there could no doubt where it leaked from. Hopefully it was worth the few cents they got selling my address.
You were satisfied with with empty calories? That's what I would consider this with the information you provided. Did the company you sent this removal request a) respond, b) honor your request? If no, then what you did was essentially waste your time. If they did, why not add that information to your post?
A) if more people make a fuss about their email getting sold the way OP did, we can still salvage something out of the situation
B) results/outcomes are not the only reason people why should do things. After all, we lionize those Russians protesting the Ukraine invasion knowing nothing will come out of it at a personal level.
I can see where you're coming from, but I disagree with shortsighted. Pessimistic maybe. I see this kind of messaging to a company doing shady things similar to clicking the unsubscribe link in emails. It's just confirming the message was read by a human, and validates the email address as a good target. Even if you send the cease email from a different address, you've just given them a new address to harvest.
This is bad IMO, why should individuals have to rectify something a company did? All it does is encourage bad behavior because I'm sure that the still comes out ahead if even 10% (being generous) did the above.
Society would be way better if we made a collective action to lobby our Congress to change the laws and make it illegal. Tech has been unregulated for far too long and there's too many bad actors taking advantage of this.
"Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $46,517, so non-compliance can be costly." I'm not sure how much of that can be collected by the recipient.
yeah they did that as well with my <name>_comcast@<mydomain>.com and say the same. Every email I have is registered like that (rule in postfif for a non + separator because spammers remove them) and I see leaks all the time. Last one was robinhood address for which I now receive some crypto scam on it.
> going to start doing per-website emails from now on to track where the hell its coming from
Beware that some websites use this "legitimately":
I ordered some stuff from Ikea and asked that it get delivered. Ikea forwarded the request to a third party, TaskRabbit. I now get TaskRabbit email spam to my ikea.com@ per-website email. And no matter how many times I unsubscribe from TaskRabbit the spam still comes.
Spam detection successful! I just put @taskrabbit.com into the blackhole and call it a day. If I get more spam to ikea.com@ then it will also get blackholed. I already won't buy anything else from Ikea for something as dumb as this.
Same for me. I’ve missed some important calls from random numbers and it’s frustrating.
There’s even a group of spammers that call twice back to back, I think to get around the setting that allows double calls to come through.
My iPhone helps a bit in that it will ring if I’ve ever called that number before.
It’s funny because I think having a setting where only apple accounts are allowed would be welcome, but I think that only works on iMessages since calls can be easily falsified. I’m looking forward to the day that Apple will know if a device is actually originating the call and pass that info to me.
I trust Apple more than any other org to actually care about eliminating spam calls. Sad state of affairs.
> It’s funny because I think having a setting where only apple accounts are allowed would be welcome, but I think that only works on iMessages
Most of my iMessage spam seems to be from fly-by-night Apple accounts (often setup with @gmail.com and @outlook.com email addresses). It surprises me that Apple seems to make it really difficult to report these as spam accounts (it's like five taps in iMessages to even find the right profile page to do so) and at this point because I get so many of them I've gotten to just deleting the threads rather than reporting them as spam because it is too many steps to report and the spammers are just cycling through random email addresses anyway so you never see more than one message from the same "Apple account".
Be careful using the silence unknown callers setting in iOS. I had an interview set up and the call silently went to voicemail. They had called through some Google service so calling back didn’t work.
I wish there was a setting to turn the silence unknown callers feature off for x hours. As it stands, I'll manually toggle it during periods where I know I might get an unknown call I actually want to answer. Leaving it on 99% of the time has dropped my spam calls significantly.
The only way I've found to get around this is to either temporarily disable the setting if I am expecting a particular call or make sure that I have contact info for every single person I interact with during these exchanges.
Even if I know where the call is coming from, your experience shows it is still possible to mess up because you can't possibly account for all the kinds of weird phone systems people might be using.
I nearly missed a "next steps" call from a recruiter recently because of this.
The solution to me seems clear: use video/voip apps for everything and ditch the phone number. I don't know how to reach that critical mass. It feels like we should already be there with zoom and teams, but apparently not.
I always keep my phone on if I'm interviewing (or dealing with mortgage or govt bullshit) because you have to answer unknown calls regularly. I also turn it on if I'm expecting to sync up with someone specific.
But otherwise, I leave my phone on silent and have it set not to notify me about voicemails. My friends and family know how to reach me.
A lot of people are not in situations where they can be cavalier about basically not being reachable by phone from someone not in their contacts. To be sure, the idea that we're always reachable is quite a modern phenomenon. Nonetheless, it's something of an expectation in many circumstances and behavior patterns take it into account.
The good news I guess is that, while I'm sure people vary, spam phone calls and texts seem to have gone down quite a bit for me to the point where they're a very occasional annoyance.
This is the main problem with spam: it is reducing the effectiveness of our communications systems. It doesn't matter whether we disregard a legitimate call/text since we do not know its source or whether legitimate calls/texts are blocked so we never see them (or even if we miss a call/text since it is buried in illegitimate ones).
Entire call centers are setup in certain countries to prey on the elderly in the West (particularly the US). This should absolutely be treated more seriously than it is. Probably not terrorism, but whatever is between that and elder abuse.
A couple years ago, I got people returning calls I never made for about a month. They were all elderly, and my phone number was being spoofed by people claiming to be Aetna (a health insurance company).
None of them knew it was possible to spoof your phone number. Some thought I was lying and that I had been leaving voicemails as a prank. I'm sure most of them would have fallen for whatever scams these people were peddling.
It's fun to imagine old cranks replying to Viagra spam and forwarding chain emails, but the reality is far darker.
Yeah this became apparent to me in the past month after a family emergency. I have gotten tons of spam calls and texts for a long time, which I usually just ignore. Now, I’ve started getting important, legitimate calls from unfamiliar numbers at any time of day and the weight of all the spam has become more apparent. The American telephone system is totally broken by this issue.
May I recommend you consider something like MetroPCS or similar MVNO-type service, which offers a pay-as-you-go no-contract plan for what I consider reasonable rates (cheap if only call/text).
There is no reason voice mail should be limited to 3 messages.
Why? I assume if someone I know calls and doesn't leave a message, I figure they just wanted to chat if I was available but don't have anything urgent. Leaving a voicemail just wastes both of our time. And Caller ID tells me they called.
Anyone who would probably call me out of the blue that I might actually care about talking to is almost certainly in my contacts list. And I assume the converse is true. There are very few people who I'll just ring up to chat with. It's not really a big deal in that I can get the sense of a voice mail from the phone transcription pretty easily. But if I didn't catch someone and actually want to communicate something I'll probably follow up with a text.
I've made the same assumption and been wrong. It might be a bigger assumption than you realize. Maybe they just got a new phone, and their contact list wasn't synced correctly.
I notice this whenever I've been job hunting. All of the sudden I need to pick up for every "Unknown Caller" in the hopes that it's to set up an interview!
TMobile has been blocking 2FA texts/calls so everytime I sign in to Twilio is a supreme hassle. But only a problem with Twilio - so maybe the issue is on their side
It isn't just Twilio. When I had T-Mobile, I was able to get 2FA SMS from about 1/3 of the companies that I use it with. Even financial companies like Vanguard and many others, never were let through with T-Mobile. I called T-Mobile and asked them to open it up completely. No improvement.
I switched my same phone with same phone number to another provider and I get all texts that I am hoping to get now and get literally no spam texts.
The Authy app is not exactly TOTP - it's a bastardized version that requires you to supply a phone number to use it because that is what they use as a seed. Since twilio is a spam company, I would advise against this.
I'm surprised this doesn't get mentioned higher. On the Pixel you can screen a call with text to speech and reject any spam calls. Most robo-dialers are smart enough to understand you're doing this and hang up automatically. It's win-win.
Yes and that's not even what I'm talking about. I'm referring to when a call comes in the phone has some logic that will make it show up "suspected spam call" - and spam texts it silences the notification and moves it into a spam folder.
That's exactly what google phones do. They are far ahead on this front.
I bought an iPhone this time around because I wanted to play with lidar and because google defaulted hard on the "free picture storage" promise. There's a lot to like about the iPhone, but anti-spam is a glaring exception. Holy shit, I assumed that Apple would at least have made an effort, even if wasn't their core expertise and the result wasn't quite as good as google's, but it's like they didn't even try. Meanwhile google put this into production years ago and they have iterated and tuned it to the point that the spam problem is almost completely buttoned down.
Unless I am missing something, iPhone doesn't have filtering quite like this. iPhone can filter "Unknown Senders." This is a fairly annoying feature almost as bad as the spam messages themselves.
Google is applying spam filtering. Essentially all the text messages I want come through. All the text messages I don't are a silent notification.
Pixel applies spam filtering on calls too. Few spam calls even make it through the spam filtering. When they do make it through, and you don't recognize the number, you can use Google Assistant to screen the call, which will provide a live transcription of what the caller is saying, all using a local on-device speech recognition system. If you want to pick up, you can do so. Otherwise, you just drop the call.
This filtering ability took call and text spam from aggravating to almost nonexistent. I think I will buy Pixels just because of it.
I especially like the feature to "screen" a call that looks like spam, the small number that get through to me. It almost always is spam and I've wasted some of their seconds. It's not much, but I now feel like a victor rather than helpless. :)
It does: I've used RoboKiller (who provided the data from the article) since I switched to iPhone in 2020 and missed the Google Assistant stuff from my Pixel. It has a free and a $40/year tier both of which are good compared to the alternatives like Truecaller, and it does both call and SMS filtering.
I think the main advantage of this is that spammers remove a number that has Google Screen replying. When I got a first phone with this feature the number of calls dropped from several a day to a couple a week.
The ability to filter per se is quite bad. The calls it decides to screen itself pass through 100% i.e. it listens to an extended warranty call or 5 star hotel call and then rings through as if it's a legitimate call. It's worth noting that only a small fraction of calls go to screen automatically, most just ring and I have to press screen button myself.
Just your phone? Practically every means of contact I have is flooded with useless crap messages. My phone, email, and physical mail are all nearly useless. I barely bother to check them anymore, because for every 1 legitimate message I get, there are dozens of spam ones.
> I honestly wish I could deny-all by default. Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now.
I would love an information-lock based system. Basically those "What's your mother's maiden name?" security questions, but repurpose them so other people have to answer them before they contact me.
I'm pretty sure even a basic "What is my name?" security question would eliminate most spam. For those more infuriated by spam, you could set it to something random and effectively have a password to contact you.
Aside from using Gmail, which has quite good spam filtering, my solution to email spam is siloing: using a separate email account for different categories of account sign-ups, etc. I just checked my 'good' email's spam folder, and there's nothing there - I get maybe one spam email every few months. (In order to reduce friction, I have autoforwarding from other emails, which doesn't resend spam with gmail - but there are other solutions which would presumably work for any email provider).
The only downside is, with paid email accounts, this could be monetarily problematic - which I don't really see a solution for, unfortunately. But, it's definitely way easier to filter email spam than physical/phone spam.
It doesnt stop the possibility that a legitimate other person with your contact details does the "share address book" with some shitty app. Its not you who has to fail - its ANYBODY in your contact network.
I used to use separate emails for orders, newsletters, etc. But what I found was that the separate email effectively became a dev/null. Gmail does a good enough job of filtering and tagging that I get a mostly clean primary inbox without effectively trashing everything else that I might want to look at once in a while, e.g. reservation confirmations.
I don't think the physical mail problem gets talked about enough. Maybe it varies - because I actually don't have much of a problem with spam text messages myself - but one of the bigger chunks of my HOA bill lately is the cost of the daily emptying of a large trash receptacle by the mail boxes, because everyone opens their box and immediately dumps 90% of that crap into a shared trash can. What a waste.
I'm my HOA president right now and something that infuriated me is a Texas law stating we have to notify all residents of actions by mail. Nobody reads their mail and nobody should. We're a block of 6 townhouses and my farthest neighbor is 40 feet away. I see these people everyday and can just tell them, yet we're forced to send out a bunch of useless mail destined to be thrown away. We first noticed this when we saw a category of charge from the property manager related to mail. None of us want mail, but the state of Texas forces us to receive it anyway. They also sell contact info to marketers when you apply for a driver's license, so ever since they passed the law saying you can't vote with an out of state ID, that increased my spam levels, too.
So how in general should people be notified of official actions/activities? Just hope they find out somehow? It's not like most people read some local newspaper any longer.
But really, it shouldn't be on senders to care about how their messages are routed at all. USPS should be able to accept a message, digitally, addressed to a specific individual, and then route it either to an email address or a physical address, per the recipient's preferences.
I don't consider email a reliable/robust official notification mechanism. People have various emails, may or may not check a given email address, stuff gets filtered to spam, etc. It's almost certainly more trustworthy than it was a number of years back but if you want to send me an important notification, I want it to be first class mail.
The reliability of postal mail is circular. I only bother to check my physical mailbox because it's used for official notices, like ballots, jury summons, and tickets. If I could direct those to email, I'd lose the key and not regret it for a moment.
HOA actions seem like exactly the sort of thing I should be receiving by mail. I think this thread is referring to not wanting things like "To {YOUR_NAME} or Current Resident" or spam offers via mail, which are a waste.
Right. I'm sure most of would agree that we don't want to normalize robocall phone calls for anything that isn't really immediate and urgent. And failing that, email isn't necessarily reliable (spam filters/changes/getting lost in all the clutter), which pretty much leaves physical mail. So, yes, even if most people will just throw it in the trash I do want to receive notification of town meetings and other official actions that affect me by mail. I certainly also wouldn't want to normalize posting something on Next Door or Facebook to be a sufficient alternative.
I vividly remember the time my apartment complex scheduled a fire inspection and chose to forego the written notification required by California law, instead replacing it with an email. Too bad their property management dashboard was incapable of sending me email. I got a notification during a meeting with video showing people breaking into my unit. The police (just around the corner!) showed up before I could get home. It was a mess.
I opted out of "pre-screened" offers years ago, and I think that has helped a lot. I did the "permanent" version, but there is a 10-year one IIRC (at least when I did it).
Yeah. Companies can purchase information from the credit bureaus and use it to target direct mail. Providing your SSN helps them match you, because it would be SO SO BAD if they accidentally opted out someone against their will.
When I lived in Canada I remember they had a nifty solution. Put a green round sticker in your mailbox and the mailman will skip your inbox when placing crap mail.
At one point I got my physical junk mail load down to a trickle by writing "refused - return to sender" on it and dropping it back in the nearest mail box. The sender has to pay for return postage, so that will get you dropped off their lists right quick.
Unfortunately, it's high maintenance, and it doesn't take too much of a lapse to get back up to the usual junk load. But I occasionally like to daydream that, if we could get enough people in the USA to do this, the junk mail industry itself might become financially untenable.
>The sender has to pay for return postage, so that will get you dropped off their lists right quick.
Actually, returning an unopened USPS-shipped letter or package doesn't cost postage at all. They probably removed you since you essentially took the time to communicate that they're not going to succeed with any future mail.
Oohhh. This could be done without postal service cooperation. Just stamp all the junk mail, and put it in a curbside bin.
Once a month, a service pickes it up, then leaves a dumpster of spam next to the local USPS mail drop. (Or shovels it over the counter at the post office.)
Also, provide a list of houses subscribed to the service to the USPS. The ball's in their court now!
I have a PMB (I've tried https://virtualpostmail.com/ and https://earthclassmail.com/) and never receive any junk mail. They either scan your mail to PDF, or bundle it and forward it to another address like your home. For some reason which I don't understand, marketers don't send junk mail to PMBs.
I've tried this before, writing "return to sender" on spam, except was putting them back in the mailbox with the flag up. The mailman threw a minor fit after the 3rd or 4th time I did it, left a note in the mailbox complaining about it, and started circling with a pen "or Current Resident" on every piece of junk mail. I quit after that because pissing off the mailman is not worth it and I wasn't about to take the fight anywhere past that.
I like those little business-reply-mail envelopes. I tear up everything and put it in those envelopes and send it back. They DO have to pay for those to be returned.
The waste is a problem, and another big issue is that it undermines the purpose of the USPS. A major reason why the USPS was created and continues to exist is because the government needs to be able to contact people. Taxes, censuses, legal proceedings, etc, there are a lot of times the government needs to be able to contact people.
Allowing bulk spam mail to use that channel of contact is contrary to its purpose. It's not a place where I get high priority messages with delivery confirmation to make sure I get them anymore. It's a place where random flyers get stuffed, and the government insists on mixing their messages into that stream of crap.
USPS should stop bulk delivery entirely and have FedEx and UPS do it. They're not allowed to put stuff in my mailbox (and literally can't, because they don't have keys). At least then we restore the line. Things in the mailbox are important. Things that get left on my doorstep might be, but probably aren't.
But USPS is underfunded and according to the source below they made $13.9B from marketing mail in 2020. As long as USPS is underfunded it is a necessary evil.
I never cease to be amazed how much I pay in taxes and then whenever there is a government service that is necessary or desirable for me, I have to pay to use it or endure shit like this to subsidize it.
Well for one thing you're also subsidising ('subsidising') all the people who earn less and pay less tax than you; not to mention all the people who are net paid by taxes.
I've never lived in the US and I do hear that perhaps it isn't particularly efficient with tax money, but still, if you looked at the average tax paid instead of your own it might not be nearly so amazing?
I'm not sure what other things to take into account. For example it says tax collected in Luxemberg is $44k per capita. Vs USA at $16k per capita. I'm sure another issue is 20% of USA taxes going to military?
Of othe places I've actually spent significant time, Singapore and Japan seemed to have pretty great government services and their taxes collected per person are lower than the USA. But I also know their cultures are different and that there are less people that need government support
I'd happily pay zero more taxes, and have the USPS properly funded using money that used to pay for overpriced cruise missiles or Navy ships that don't even function.
Just one hour a year at median individual hourly income lost to junkmail and you're, what, at least halfway to that cost? One important missed letter every few years can easily cause more harm than several years of that fee. Seems like a good deal to me, even if I'd rather (as another poster wrote) just spend slightly less on the military and give it to the USPS to make this stop.
Go the other way. Charge the spammers more for delivering their trash.
No, this won't eliminate it. It will give you less of it, though, and give the USPS more money. Win/win, even if we don't win as much as we would like.
Bulk mail currently gets a discount compared to individual letters. Eliminate that, and we'd see less bulk mail.
This discount is what got brought up when I complain about this on NextDoor and Facebook. Local business owners who are contributing to the spam, whose circulars are among those I just immediately throw in the trash, don't want to pay more. I'm very curious if they actually track the ROI on that advertising. I've asked - one local business found they got nothing from mailings anyway. But that's just a sample size of 1.
You are in the minority. As evidenced by the proliferation of overlay ads in their smart TVs, people are extraordinarily price-sensitive when it comes to something they can put a hard monetary value on. "This costs you $50" is something people are significantly more hostile toward than "This costs you some of your time, attention, and peace of mind" because in general we're really bad at assessing the value of our own mental well-being.
>As evidenced by the proliferation of overlay ads in their smart TVs
Genuine question, is it even an option to pay $X more and get an otherwise identical TV with no overlay ads? It's admittedly been 7 or 8 years since I last purchased a TV, but I don't remember such an option being available at the time, and the only time I can ever remember seeing that sort of choice being available was with the kindle, where it's very explicit that the ad-free (but otherwise identical) version is like $20 more (or, was when I bought my kindle, which again was many years ago).
That being said, I'd be extremely curious to see sales numbers for ad-free vs ad-laden kindles, although I sort of doubt I'll ever have the chance to.
Economies of scale and some sort of insufficient-competition market failure seem to sometimes make relatively-niche choices far more expensive than they "should" be, and TVs seem to be one of those cases—so you end up with manufacturers making $100 extra dollars (numbers made up, but bear with me) per panel on ads, but it'd cost you $1,000 to get the same panel without ads, which distorts apparent consumer preferences (pushing that niche even farther out of the mainstream, and so making the gap even worse).
It's not that they care a ton about price (they do, but), but that price is verifiable, certain, and stable,, while future benefits are not, or might be rugpulled.
I have lots of problems w/crypto, but one thing they've gotten right is the credibility of self-binding. Without that, it's just hard to trust any actor on their future behavior---from Reagan's immigration amnesty, to cable tv's ads, to funding government agencies that ("this time") will fix a problem.
(None of this is motivated by any dislike for USPS, which I generally like. I'm just talking about people's (imo justified) reluctance to trade the known for the unknown).
USPS is operationally profitable for a long time. They have this requirement to save large amounts for future pension obligations that keeps them in red.
Also, Congress retains the ability to use USPS profits at will for their own projects, versus a true corporate model where profits would be reinvested back into the "business".
This is why we don’t have such a receptacle by the mailboxes. It goes in everyone’s home recycling and is dealt with by the ordinary recycling pick-up.
This is one of my environmental bug-bears. How much non-recyclable, glossy paper is wasted on marketing bumf that gets distributed across a whole country only to land directly into the trash, possibly landfill? Even if it was recyclable, it's still serves no functional purpose except to be disposed of.
In the UK politicians also send out these kinds of flyers in bulk (never mind the inundation of flyers for takeaway food, Domino's Pizza, Papa John's, etc.)
For any single piece of legitimate mail (which is vanishingly small as most stuff is paperless now), there are perhaps 20 or 30 pieces of junk that come with it over the course of a few weeks.
I honestly wish it got legislated against. Junk mailers aren't entitled to offload their waste through my letterbox. I don't understand why they have the right to shove advertisements into my own home.
in my area, they [junkmailers] actually interfere with delivery of mail, as a postie is not allowed to put anything in a mailbox that cant be closed [for privacy/security] so when the junk carrier shoves it full, your real mail cant be delivered.
[adndm] no posties cant [as in not allowed] remove anything, even if they just put it in there and realized its the wrong address
In the US, no one except actual USPS mail carriers are allowed to deliver anything into a mailbox. Everyone except the tiniest operations take that pretty seriously, since the US postal inspectors (mail cops) are extremely serious.
Agreed. At a bare minimum, I'd love a way to bulk unsubscribe from mailers like this. It's a waste of my time, a waste of money, and bad for the environment.
The only non-work communication channel I use that has a better than 50% SNR is WhatsApp. And that's been getting worse lately—I think I've had about ten spam messages on that in years and years of use, and all but one's been in the last ~3 weeks.
Mail? Probably 90+% ads. Email? Hahaha, I only even bother to check it anymore when I know a messages is coming in, and that's usually from a machine. Phone? Ignore-if-not-in-contacts, probably 2x as many spam calls as real calls in a week. Text might be close to 50% but only because transactional texts (lazy 2FA implementations and prescription pick-up reminders, mostly) count as signal.
WhatsApp spam has been getting a lot worse in the past few months. I keep getting messages from foreign phone numbers using stock profile photos of attractive young women. I report them but they just come back with a different number.
OPSEC-wise I have a dedicated account for a certain kind of account. But what does the institution that uses that email address do? Send me 10X the email load with upsell nonsense, despite having opted out of all marketing emails.
No. Just, no. Stop. I am sick of this noise, and manually taking time to opt-out raises my switching cost. "Drowning" is a fantastic way to describe this.
Or "what is your name"? Seems like spam is always trying to hide the actual identity of the sender. "This is Jack from the warranty department"? Yeah, sure you are. Whose warranty department? They won't get specific because they know that if they do, I'll know that I don't know these people. They're trying to pretend that they're someone that I already have a relationship with, but in doing so they get vague.
And, "The vehicle warranty is about to expire"? Yeah, which vehicle? They won't get specific because they don't know.
I don't know how to implement it, but a "who are you specifically?" filter would eliminate a lot of my phone spam.
Or just raise the price on communications, or let recipients set a price on being contacted. Charge $1/text, which the sender gets back if the recipient replies. This would very quickly make most spam uneconomical, since the expected returns wouldn't exceed the cost to send the messages.
Spam works because most of these mass communication channels are free or extremely cheap. Raise the price and economics will dictate that most of these communications will drop off.
In France people put a sticker on the mailbox which says "Pas de publicité, merci" (No advertisement, thanks). It really decreased the number of ads I have received (although I still receive one from time to time). Maybe you could try something similar.
I'm in Brazil and right after I signed up for a new number, I was getting 15 spam calls per day, everyday. They recycle numbers here so some of those were "legit" but meant for previous owners. As an American with a US number too, the difference is night and day. My US number gets 1-2 spam calls per week or per two weeks.
But yeah, I do the same. All set to auto ignore, even though it means one or two necessary calls are missed (ex. my cc company wanted to inform me they were cancelling their partnership and thus closing all cards).
Hard to judge by region. My American number that I've had a while gets 4-5 spam calls a day and about five texts a week, and it's all trending up, despite whatever the phone companies say they're doing.
The newest one seems to be group FaceTime calls (to about 20 numbers) that hang up after a couple seconds. Not sure what the angle is there; makes me wonder if there's an associated iPhone 0-day. Or maybe just probing phone type.
I feel like there's an analogy with fake news and deliberate disinformation campaigns. Universally blocking access to information is difficult or impossible, but it's relatively easy to generate lies and nonsense in such quantities that people don't know who to believe.
Email had similarly wide-open protocols to phone systems so it can be interesting to ask how spam was tackled. One thing with email is that big webmail providers got to be gatekeepers so could e.g.
- require signatures/other things to prove which hostname the email came from
- do wide-scale analysis of senders/email contents to filter out spam
There are still issues (eg people typically will be more mad if they see spam emails than if unexpected legitimate emails get marked as spam because they won’t know if the latter is happening unless they frequently check their spam folder), and the popularity of some webmail systems means that it can be hard to tick all the boxes to not have your own legitimate emails binned. Similarly the ‘marked as spam’ signal is very strong so if you send out a newsletter that people mostly read and want and can easily unsubscribe to, you can still end up being sent to spam for all users because some people use ‘mark as spam’ to mean ‘please unsubscribe me from this newsletter’.
It seems the phone system is still at the stage where they don’t know who phone calls are actually coming from (except somehow they manage to bill these people).
>if you send out a newsletter that people mostly read and want and can easily unsubscribe to, you can still end up being sent to spam for all users because some people use ‘mark as spam’ to mean ‘please unsubscribe me from this newsletter’.
My Gmail SPAM folder is filled with a ton of stuff that isn't really spam. There are newsletters I probably signed up for at some point or at least downloaded a document/watched a webinar where getting periodic emails was part of the deal. Because, yes, rather than clicking the unsubscribe button which legitimate marketers will honor, a lot of people just hit report spam which at some point puts it into the spam bucket for everyone.
One of those people is me. I don’t take the time to determine whether it’s ‘legitimate marketing.’ I would never ever sign up for a marketing email, even if I am a customer of the company that sends them. Until companies stop dumping every single email address the get their hands on into their marketing list I will continue to mark every one of them as spam. I even use rules to flag emails including the word ‘unsubscribe’ so I can do it more easily.
The reason why some people use the spam signal to unsubscribe is because most of these email lists were not _explicitly_ requested by the people. Not only that but unsubscribe confirms the existence of an email address. I'm hoping that the machine learning approach to spam completely collapses so that we're forced to do something more effective.
I've paid $40/year for RoboKiller (the source of the data in this article) since 2020, and consider it worth every penny. For reference, I was a long-time Pixel user before then who enjoyed the Google Assistant call filter. It's not quite as good as Google Assistant (it's based on call forwarding) but by far the best solution on iPhone, and it filters SMS spam as well as calls.
Even setting your phone to auto-ignore anyone not in your contacts is infuriating... apparently my iPhone considers any number marked as Spam Risk a "known" number and allows it to ring right through. So if you're a spam caller then you're actually more likely to get me to answer the phone by spam calling enough people to get Apple(?)/AT&T(?) to mark you as a spam caller. It's craziness.
Email did solve the spam problem, but only for strict spam. I still am drowning in the pseudo-spam of constant promotions and inane notifications that are from companies who I do business with and legitimately do need to contact me from time to time. It's at the point where maybe 5% of my inbox is anything I would ever be interested in reading. And I have noticed an uptick in this kind of think in my text messages. I hope it doesn't become the next email.
I never had this problem on my Android phone because it had a Google Voice related service where I could block known spammers. Almost no one got through. Since switching to iPhone I've noticed a significant uptick. This might be coincidental, maybe Android would have been letting more through also.
It's not any better in Thailand. In fact, it's been worse. I wish there was a “no call” list. I wish the carriers couldn't spam you. While I still had a LINE account, if you spoke to tech support through the platform you were enrolled in their spam and could only mute it.
I understand how email spam is hard to trace to its source, but phones should be possible.
I’d like the FCC to impose a fine for spam messages that are paid for the company advertising with spam. I think the issue now is that the spam calls are lead generators that then collect info and forward to “legitimate” companies to sell warranties, insurance, whatever.
The “legitimate” company should be fined and then let them sort out the scammy firms that are spamming to generate leads.
If we had the email and text and app equivalent of a Do Not Call list, we would have everything we need: after perhaps a first time slap on the wrist, companies that continue not to run their lead lists against that registry deserve everything that happens to them.
No, the problem is that a string of spam calls could be a false flag attack. If you wanted to drive your competition out of business, you’d just pay some spam callers to dial everyone on the do not call list and lie about who hired them
That would be nice...if carriers had actually implemented STIR/SHAKEN with no exceptional conditions that political organizations could use. As currently done, the National DNC list is basically useless.
Potentially, but then there would be the paper trail to show conspiracy, etc if a company made false leads to their competitors.
This may also be a choice of whether I want to get 35 calls a day from spammers or assassinate all shady car warranty companies. The companies are already shitty as they allow these spam-generated leads, so I don’t have much sympathy for their continued existence.
A law that says "you are responsible for the business practices of the people you contract to generate leads for you" would be great. But how does the lead-generation ecosystem work? I'm imagining some sort of open lead-generation system, where the legitimate company doesn't have an ongoing relationship with the spammers, but is willing to pay out if they show up with bunch of leads.
So, I could see a law where we say, "well, if you accept the bundle of leads, you, legitimate company, are responsible for the business practices of the lead-generator."
But would it be possible to launder these things?
Shady company uses illegitimate means to gather leads.
"Sells" only the successful leads to third party that's just popped up for this transaction and, as a result, hasn't really engaged in any practices at all...
I dunno. Seems like a big headache for regulators, although I guess they sort out this kind of stuff all the time (or at least try to).
Since companies must pay out to lead generators, I assume this means they have to know them with taxids and whatnot if they are paying out large sums.
By fining the companies using the leads it takes the headache away from the regulator and puts it on the company. Set up some sort of statutory damages process where I record the call and get to the point where I get transferred to someone who says “I work for FooCorp and sell warranties, please give me your credit card.” I send that recording to a regulator, fines the company $300, keeps $50 to fund itself and pays me $250 as the victim.
This seems like it will quickly make companies strictly vet their lead generations.
It seems pretty bad that any company exists based on cold calling genera consumers. All those companies should go bankrupt for sucking.
I’ve been very fortunate. My phone number is for an area code 2000 miles away, so I only answer the phone if a local number is calling. Everything else I just ignore.
This has been working well for me but I notice the spam calls are starting to come from random area codes instead of always being from "my" area code. Eventually they'll hit on the correct one I suppose.
This used to work for me, but lately I have been getting spam from my current area and other areas that I previously lived. not sure what list they are using now, but it's a good one.
It's worth remembering that being despicable spammers doesn't make people bad developers.
Someone, somewhere, is having a scrum right now on how they can tie physical location to phone numbers to spoof caller numbers more effectively. It's completely plausible to use eg social network leaks to spoof phone numbers you are likely to recognize.
If they aren't doing it now, it's probably more that they don't need the extra spam-power at the moment rather than that they're too bumbling to think of arbitrarily clever ideas for ways to combine all of the public and leaked information about us.
We are drowning in spam because the spammers use automatic systems while we don't or can't.
When I receive a call from a number outside my contacts that has never called me before I want a dialog to pop up after I close the call that asks me if I want to block the caller or whitelist him. This way if I receive a spam call I can immediately hang up and block it without navigating through some baroque UI and manually blacklist it. I still have found no landline phone that offers a similar functionality and I'm stuck with manually blocking numbers from a horrible webUI
Blocking spam calls is not very helpful because the numbers are inevitably spoofed and can be spoofed differently for the next call with near zero effort on behalf of the spammer. The problem is the phone system has inherent poor design that causes all sorts of issues and the major players aren't really interested in fixing it but at best are willing to apply mediocre patches.
We had a lady calling our company (the hallway phone specifically) for a week demanding answers/threatening lawsuits about why we keep trying to sell her pills. We make commercial and government electronics. She refused to understand that the phone number on her screen is not the number calling her.
You're telling me that a connection-oriented system with a volume a billionth of the internet can't keep logs of who initiates a connection for 5 minutes? Oh, yeah.
It does keep a log… of caller IDs. The problem isn’t the volume of data, it is that the system isn’t setup to authenticate callers so you can’t tie a spam call to any persistent identity to block
>It does keep a log… of caller IDs. The problem isn’t the volume of data, it is that the system isn’t setup to authenticate callers so you can’t tie a spam call to any persistent identity to block
Except the system is set up to authenticate callers[0] and that's been in place (at least in the US) for almost a year.
That it hasn't been as effective as it should be is another issue, but the technology exists and is (or should be) in place as specified by the law.
SMTP isn't authenticated either, and is by many measures way looser than the telephone system (which was built around managing physical wires for almost a century), and yet spam filtering has gotten pretty good?
The CNAM field in phone systems is a lot like the “from” field in an SMTP message, and the “source ip” in a IP packet. The sender can just set it to whatever they want.
Yeah, this is the most aggravating part of it. I've had people call me and ask why I called them (I didn't my number was spoofed). I tell them I didn't call, and invariably they don't believe me. Side note, I do not recommend trying to explain spoofing to random strangers. It doesn't help
> When I receive a call from a number outside my contacts that has never called me before I want a dialog to pop up after I close the call that asks me if I want to block the caller or whitelist him
Is this not standard on phones? Terminating a call on my Galaxy s10 shows me options to block number add to contacts, and redial. I know Samsung's UI has remained a couple years upstream of stock Android (and many yrs upstream of IOS) for the entirety of the smartphone era, but I thought this wouldve been a big standard feature.
In Brazil an interesting law was recently passed: calls from call centers must start with a 033 number. It is now much easier to block or know when you are being called, likely, by a robot.
We are still drowning in paper spam. This is yet another area that is ripe for *reducing emissions and impact on our environment* that can only help everyone involved _except_ for companies that spam(scam in many cases), yet it is allowed to just continue.
In my experience lots of unwanted mail comes from credit card offers, insurance, etc. Turns out that unless you have an account with them, all these financial service companies get their prospective mailing data through the credit bureaus. However there is a 2003 law that required the bureaus to create an opt out mechanism, which is available here: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/
Doing this has cut out 99% of my spam paper mail for the last year. Would highly recommend for sanity and as an easy way to cut down some on environmental impact. You can opt out for up to 5 years through the website or permanently by writing a paper letter. I did the latter through one of the "you write digitally, we'll send physical letter" services you can find on google and it's been great.
One of the problems I have with websites for official interaction with US government stuff is that, a lot of times, it's some random .com website or a 3rd party with no direct integration with the government entity they're interfacing with. This site has all the potential hallmarks of being a scam, so if I just found this on my own I would have a hard time believing it would work after giving it my personal info.
For sure. Except I don't think this site provides "official interaction with US government stuff". My expectation is that the government was involved only to create the regulation and the implementation was left to the credit bureaus. Which of course are incentivized to make the conversion rate of this site as low as possibly. So offputtingly sketchy is probably a good thing for them.
When this came up in the context of Bitcoin, my back-of-the-envelope calculations were that Bitcoin and US spam paper mail were roughly the same order of magnitude, close enough that I couldn't say which was actually bigger with the error bars on my envelope.
Ban enough things like that and soon you're talking real impact.
A frustrating thing is that it’s cheaper (per letter) to send bulk mail with eg franking or giving letters to the post service pre-sorted.
On the environmental side, if your paper is made from reasonably sustainably sourced wood, isn’t throwing it into landfill a form of carbon sequestration?
I simply took my mailbox down a few years ago, and have everything sent to my work address, since USPS doesn't deliver a lot of the paper spam to business addresses. It works pretty well at reducing the crap I get in the mail, as well as protects my privacy, but holy heck do you break the system without a residential mailbox. From having the USPS tell HUD that my house lot was abandoned, to people accusing me of being a Ted Kaczynski, to not being able to get the free Covid tests the feds sent out, it's crazy how much people just can't handle you not having a residential mailbox.
There are also various businesses that sell mailboxes (with a regular address, unlike P.O. boxes that are more limited) and these are business addresses. I hadn't thought of that advantage before. I also have a residential addresss where I live but having moved a number times without forwarding and not using it for anything but a few heavier packages I only get the large weekly circular and maybe one other ad from a local business per week.
Is anyone aware of any kind of spam campaign that involves creating a character with your phone number? I get calls and texts about florida real estate probably every day. I don't answer any calls from numbers I don't recognize, but the texts from "potential buyers" about "my listings" just keep coming. Every so often I will look up my number to see if it matches an agent, or look up the properties I'm asked about, but nothing ever makes sense. The listings are always off market, and I haven't found my number yet. I'm sure this is a big no-no, but I have responded to a couple of these messages, trying to tease out some more information, but I have never received a reply.
It's most likely that people are just mistaking my number for some real estate agent's number, but you never know. Has anyone else experienced something like this?
This happens to me as well. At first I thought maybe they are trying to contact my number’s previous owner. But I also regrettably replied to one message which ended the conversation. I think it’s spammers trying to see if a real, responsive person is behind the number. Recently I’ve been receiving phishing links based around another scenario
Yes, I get 10-20 calls/texts a day wanting to buy property I own in TN. I get the personalized texts too addressing me by name. I'm guessing they're just pulling property records and calling/texting whoever is listed as the owner, which is a public record. It's always for the property in TN, not the one I actually live in in a different state, so I'm assuming they're targeting certain cities. I'm assuming it's a company like Blackrock, trying to scoop up more residential houses. Most messages are identical and seem automated, even with a "text STOP to stop receiving messages." I get cash offers for as-is condition, sight unseen, or at least that's what they say. Wouldn't know, I never respond. Florida is a hot real estate market as well. Buy up the houses and all you're left with is sky high rentals.
I don't really get spam calls any more. Pixel 6 Pro on Google Fi, living in New York. Not sure which of these aspects has fixed it, or if it's something else. I get far more legitimate calls now than spam. At least in terms of what makes my phone ring.
+1, I have the same setup and Google is doing a great job saving me a bunch of annoyance. Oh and Google's call screening service is god sent. I usually make all unknown numbers go through screening before answering.
Completely anecdotal and tangential but: the feature of the google pixel 6 where it screens my calls for me and offers up its own robo-voice interactive answering service is absolutely amazing. The phone visually shows a transcript of what is being said, what their response is (if any), and allows me to click options to respond. The main advantage is of the majority spam calls I get in a day I've already been able to "rescue" a few legitimate calls that I needed to respond to.
I think there are plenty of legitimate callers who will just hang up if they get the robo screener. "Must have been a wrong number." "Weird, I got the operator." "I'm not dealing with this."
My post very deliberately meant to disagree with that. Hanging up is mutually exclusive with leaving a message. Important to you is unfortunately not the same as important to the caller. A car mechanic or doctor's office might make very little effort to contact you another way, and might wait hours or a day before even attempting to do so. And we have delivery drivers known for giving up on delivering your stuff even in ideal circumstances.
My experience has been entirely positive. Every dentist, day care, plumber, doctor, car mechanic, etc whose call I was expecting has said a terse reason for calling like "Doctor So-and-so" or "X car mechanic your car is ready" or "day care please call". Of course I have no data for calls I wasn't expecting, but given that any call I am not expecting is usually a call to action to do business with them "hey, your car has X thousand miles, come for an oil change" or "your cleaning is coming up next week" or something like that.
Basically, if I am expecting the call, I 100% get them. If I am not expecting the call, I got a lot of them or they use another method like text or email. I am not aware of any calls I am not expecting that I missed out on, but my fear of missing out unsolicited calls is pretty low. And I trust that for unsolicited calls, they are more about getting through than I care about getting through.
Are there plenty compared with to volume of spam? I have been using this service for a while, and check up on what its doing, and so far everything its filtered has been an unwanted call.
That's fair - I've found the opposite: all this does is effectively push up the voicemail service to a layer I can interact with (as opposed to google voice voicemail) and usually important calls will attempt to interract with the robo screener or leave a message whereas spam will just ignore the robo screener entirely. This is purely my personal experience though and depending on how you use your phone (like in a business setting) and with who (like people who are legitimately busy) you may experience the complete opposite experience.
That sounds like some pretty cool tech, but the problem is that spam still interrupts your day, whether you're holding the phone to your ear or looking at it in front of your face.
I agree. Waiting for the robot to interrogate the auto-recorded spam call is significantly more annoying than just picking up the phone, hearing a sales pitch in Spanish or the "your car warranty is about to expire" man, and immediately hanging up.
I like this feature too. Somewhat unrelated, I saw a similar "hold-for-me" frill released on my Pixel recently and used it a few times. Later read that ToS and saw that Google records the entirety of your conversation- not just the part that you have them hold- when you use this feature. Wouldn't be surprised if there were something like this on the screen-feature for the calls you end up picking up. For me it's been about 2/200.
right but I have no control over one aspect (spam calls existing) but I do have control over the other aspect (interruption to my personal workflow due to spam calls) - not everything has to be perfect in all aspects - always expecting so must be extremely exhausting ...
Demand legislation to end spam calls, along with everyone else, and it would end. At minimum tell your carrier about it. Their customer service takes notes. If everyone started calling about it, it would stop quickly.
Here in Germany commercial cold calling is illegal and carries a pretty heavy fine. (in the tens of thousands). In 20 years I've had one spam call. Literally just ban it and require explicit consent from customers, problem solved.
Yeah totally weird and for many Americans to get a call from a foreign country code is very unusual. I started getting spam with apparent chinese origin numbers within the past few months.
(Belgian here) After the facebook data leak in 2021 I got 2 or 3 spam calls a week from various numbers but mostly from the UK. I started reporting them as spam immediately and for the last couple of weeks it seems to have died down.
Out of curiosity, you got these scam calls in Finnish? I always thought that US was a specially good market for these scams because you have ~300m potential victims and a good supply of english-speaking people in poorer countries who are willing to participate on the scheme, so a Finnish-speaking ms support scam would be hard to understand from this point of view.
I, German, once saw a mail-crime being done as the co-owner of a UPS associated package handling business. Some scammer had sent mail to people and they were sending back - to a post box we managed (we had not know what it would be for when it was ordered) - actual money. We called the police - and they said it wasn't their responsibility. Everything was done voluntarily after all. I called a well-known organization - they do just shrugged and told us to just go ahead, nobody would and could do anything. Pretty much that if people were so stupid to fall for it and sent money vial mail to unknown people, quite voluntarily even if scammed, they could not do anything. The scammers used a Delaware company and a Canadian address and they were sending their scam mail (actual mail) to Germans. Probably bought some address list somewhere. No chance to find them, but even preventing the ongoing scam was nobody's priority.
Also, I once returned a wallet thick with various cards, all paper money already stolen but things like drivers license and other important documents still inside. I brought it to the police. I waited for almost an hour in line, and then it took more than another hour of the officer documenting every single item in the thick wallet. He had to, he could not just write "wallet", it had to be every single item.
I highly doubt the police will do anything. Scams don't seem to be anything the police will go after, maybe some very high level stuff when it's about millions. They are also very busy writing reports and doing other important paperwork... /s Googling I just found that there are 760 cases of bike theft per day in Germany. Less than a tenth of them are found. -- https://blog.alh.de/taeglich-werden-ueber-760-fahrraeder-ges... -- There is just too much "small stuff" for police. If anyone gets murdered I just have to wait a day or two for the newspapers to announce the murderer has been found. On the other hand, for small crimes I expect not much is going to happen apart from filing the report (which I'm sure alone takes up plenty of time).
Sadly, to 'report it to the police' is easier said than done. I know my local police department lacks jurisdiction and the best I can do is submit a report to the FCC. But what use is reporting the dozens of spam calls I receive every day to an agency that seems to lack the means to go after sophisticated spammers outside of the United States? It's not like these spammers use real contact information (they use dynamic fake phone numbers) and operate inside of the US.
I suspect virtually all such reports end up being used for metrics and no actual prosecutorial case is created out of them.
For real, I'm not sure why people haven't thrown the book at the "car's extended warranty" people yet. I mean, they should have an entity in the US no?
Not necessarily. They can call you from (almost?) any country and put whatever number they want in their caller ID, and your phone company will just blindly show you that number.
Yes, that's fair. But the reason that list exists is because it is legal to cold call. Having an opt-out is much weaker than an opt-in. It sounds like the German system is opt-in (per company).
I don't understand the technicalities behind how they do it, but SPAM calls in the US can spoof their phone numbers. I'm not sure if it's pre or post carrier connection.
Spam spoofs the caller ID field. The calls are routed by the ISP so the ISP sees everything (including that the source address and caller ID address are differ, ie spoofed) and allow it. It would be trivial to flip the switch on spam.
They already have the power to stop spam. Stopping spam lowers profits. They wouldn't pay someone for an ability they already have that they actively don't want to use.
No. It most certainly is not. It may be illegal in your locality, but it is certainly legal in most of the US. The federal Do Not Call list would be useless if it were illegal.
While not in Germany, I haven't had a single legitimate cold call since I disallowed all major calling companies a few years ago and since then it has become illegal to cold call so that was solved.
Now I get 1-2 a month from scammers abroad and with "private numbers" which is highly annoying since those aren't even legitimate. As a solution I asked my phone company to block all foreign numbers: won't do (they didn't say the couldn't they just won't). They also profit from you calling/accepting a foreign number so just get a fine from them and see how long it lasts would be my solution.
Same in Norway. But that's not the problem here. It's scam calls from abroad, using spoofed phone numbers. So basically how you in your emails can set an arbitrary from field.
However, I feel operators should start verifying these somehow. Or allow me to block all calls from a Norwegian number originating from India for instance if not in my contacts or something.
1. The successful communication platforms are ones that are opt-in, meaning you can't message or talk to someone unless you give their consent; and
2. This is why federated messaging systems have not worked and likely won't work in the future. Why? Just like with POTS, there is always going to be an incentive for bad actors to "launder" messages or calls.
What I find particularly irksome about the spam situation is the exceptions carved out for charities and, worse yet, political fundraising to the "do not spam" laws. I mean these laws don't stop a huge amount of spam because it's illegal anyway and probably originates overseas.
But I honestly don't want to be a part of the current phone system and just ignore any unknown numbers.
It's a big leap. The "successful" communications systems are post, phone, and email, none of which have the property you claim is essential to success. And none of the systems with that property are in fact successful.
And all three of them are no longer 'successful' at effectively delivering messages because users of those systems are drowning in spam. It completely blows my mind to return to the US and see how bad phone and SMS spam have become. The spammers have now become so effective at parasitising the transmission channels that they have caused them to go into decline. It is easy for spammers and scammers to exist and thrive as parasites in these systems for exactly the reasons stated.
> 1. The successful communication platforms are ones that are opt-in, meaning you can't message or talk to someone unless you give their consent; and
Not particularly true in the rest of the world, for instance in Europe as many have pointed out in other threads. The SMS text messages work well here, and good data protection laws/regulations ensure that there is virtually no spam or phishing. This is not a problem with the platform, but with the lack of regulation in the industry.
I am not an American, and I think I can count on one hand the number of spam messages and calls I have gotten over, say, the last 10 years. Oh, all right, call it two hands. I have no filtering service of any kind. For Americans to suffer this so, there really seems to be something wrong somewhere, or possibly very right where I am.
I'm not American as well, and I receive lots of spam calls (average of a couple per day I'd say).
I now have developed a "feeling" on whether or not I have to pick up the call, based on if I'm expecting a call, country code, similarities with previous spam phone numbers, etc... It's really annoying.
It's because the US/Canada is a very large homogenous (single-language) a d relatively wealthy target. Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, etc. not so much.
Why would no one regulate it? Right, because both political parties are spamming as well. At the height of the presidential campaign I got 52 emails from republicans and 47 from democrats and they are full of dark patterns and manipulative language on both sides. It’s insane.
That particular loophole drives me up a wall. I routinely get upwards of a dozen political emails a day simply because I sent $20 to my district's US Representative once and only once.
I understand why things like ActBlue exist to centralize this kind of stuff in terms of contributions, but the comms side of things is still completely backwards.
My Thai phone number got slammed this week and I've had many friends here complain about all the scammers. Apparently they will have 1 person pretend they are the police and one of my friend's friend (not the brightest person) started crying thinking it was real
From my observations, Thai people are very trusting and nice so unfortunately this is probably a very profitable operation
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] threadThe end result is that the spam is mostly hidden away, but it’s still there. Full of garbage.
I honestly wish I could deny-all by default. Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now.
$15/year (plus the cost of the domain)
Currently using the middle tier and have been very happy with it.
Note that codified aliases are limited, but you can create a catch-all account. I have not needed to codify aliases to send "as" one of those accounts.
Final pricing is still TBD but if you join the beta list, we are handing out huge discounts which’ll bring your effective cost between $5-15/month for everything.
(No affiliation beyond being a happy customer.)
Actually have to step up to $5/month (per user) to get custom domain names.
A) if more people make a fuss about their email getting sold the way OP did, we can still salvage something out of the situation
B) results/outcomes are not the only reason people why should do things. After all, we lionize those Russians protesting the Ukraine invasion knowing nothing will come out of it at a personal level.
Society would be way better if we made a collective action to lobby our Congress to change the laws and make it illegal. Tech has been unregulated for far too long and there's too many bad actors taking advantage of this.
Beware that some websites use this "legitimately":
I ordered some stuff from Ikea and asked that it get delivered. Ikea forwarded the request to a third party, TaskRabbit. I now get TaskRabbit email spam to my ikea.com@ per-website email. And no matter how many times I unsubscribe from TaskRabbit the spam still comes.
Spam detection successful! I just put @taskrabbit.com into the blackhole and call it a day. If I get more spam to ikea.com@ then it will also get blackholed. I already won't buy anything else from Ikea for something as dumb as this.
There’s even a group of spammers that call twice back to back, I think to get around the setting that allows double calls to come through.
My iPhone helps a bit in that it will ring if I’ve ever called that number before.
It’s funny because I think having a setting where only apple accounts are allowed would be welcome, but I think that only works on iMessages since calls can be easily falsified. I’m looking forward to the day that Apple will know if a device is actually originating the call and pass that info to me.
I trust Apple more than any other org to actually care about eliminating spam calls. Sad state of affairs.
Most of my iMessage spam seems to be from fly-by-night Apple accounts (often setup with @gmail.com and @outlook.com email addresses). It surprises me that Apple seems to make it really difficult to report these as spam accounts (it's like five taps in iMessages to even find the right profile page to do so) and at this point because I get so many of them I've gotten to just deleting the threads rather than reporting them as spam because it is too many steps to report and the spammers are just cycling through random email addresses anyway so you never see more than one message from the same "Apple account".
Even if I know where the call is coming from, your experience shows it is still possible to mess up because you can't possibly account for all the kinds of weird phone systems people might be using.
The solution to me seems clear: use video/voip apps for everything and ditch the phone number. I don't know how to reach that critical mass. It feels like we should already be there with zoom and teams, but apparently not.
But otherwise, I leave my phone on silent and have it set not to notify me about voicemails. My friends and family know how to reach me.
The good news I guess is that, while I'm sure people vary, spam phone calls and texts seem to have gone down quite a bit for me to the point where they're a very occasional annoyance.
None of them knew it was possible to spoof your phone number. Some thought I was lying and that I had been leaving voicemails as a prank. I'm sure most of them would have fallen for whatever scams these people were peddling.
It's fun to imagine old cranks replying to Viagra spam and forwarding chain emails, but the reality is far darker.
There is no reason voice mail should be limited to 3 messages.
Otherwise, your call looks exactly like spam, so either you will get ignored, or that person has to answer all calls from unknown numbers.
I've made the same assumption and been wrong. It might be a bigger assumption than you realize. Maybe they just got a new phone, and their contact list wasn't synced correctly.
I switched my same phone with same phone number to another provider and I get all texts that I am hoping to get now and get literally no spam texts.
I bought an iPhone this time around because I wanted to play with lidar and because google defaulted hard on the "free picture storage" promise. There's a lot to like about the iPhone, but anti-spam is a glaring exception. Holy shit, I assumed that Apple would at least have made an effort, even if wasn't their core expertise and the result wasn't quite as good as google's, but it's like they didn't even try. Meanwhile google put this into production years ago and they have iterated and tuned it to the point that the spam problem is almost completely buttoned down.
Google is applying spam filtering. Essentially all the text messages I want come through. All the text messages I don't are a silent notification.
Pixel applies spam filtering on calls too. Few spam calls even make it through the spam filtering. When they do make it through, and you don't recognize the number, you can use Google Assistant to screen the call, which will provide a live transcription of what the caller is saying, all using a local on-device speech recognition system. If you want to pick up, you can do so. Otherwise, you just drop the call.
I especially like the feature to "screen" a call that looks like spam, the small number that get through to me. It almost always is spam and I've wasted some of their seconds. It's not much, but I now feel like a victor rather than helpless. :)
The ability to filter per se is quite bad. The calls it decides to screen itself pass through 100% i.e. it listens to an extended warranty call or 5 star hotel call and then rings through as if it's a legitimate call. It's worth noting that only a small fraction of calls go to screen automatically, most just ring and I have to press screen button myself.
> I honestly wish I could deny-all by default. Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now.
I would love an information-lock based system. Basically those "What's your mother's maiden name?" security questions, but repurpose them so other people have to answer them before they contact me.
I'm pretty sure even a basic "What is my name?" security question would eliminate most spam. For those more infuriated by spam, you could set it to something random and effectively have a password to contact you.
Aside from using Gmail, which has quite good spam filtering, my solution to email spam is siloing: using a separate email account for different categories of account sign-ups, etc. I just checked my 'good' email's spam folder, and there's nothing there - I get maybe one spam email every few months. (In order to reduce friction, I have autoforwarding from other emails, which doesn't resend spam with gmail - but there are other solutions which would presumably work for any email provider).
The only downside is, with paid email accounts, this could be monetarily problematic - which I don't really see a solution for, unfortunately. But, it's definitely way easier to filter email spam than physical/phone spam.
It doesnt stop the possibility that a legitimate other person with your contact details does the "share address book" with some shitty app. Its not you who has to fail - its ANYBODY in your contact network.
I'm a happy customer.
But really, it shouldn't be on senders to care about how their messages are routed at all. USPS should be able to accept a message, digitally, addressed to a specific individual, and then route it either to an email address or a physical address, per the recipient's preferences.
I agree, that it's annoying in the meantime though.
Don't rely on email for important things.
https://www.optoutprescreen.com/
It seems like they could just get everything about you. Total and complete identity theft
EDIT - can't get the form to submit without an error anyways. We're sorry!
An error has occured while processing this page. Please try again.
Same thing happened to me. I just refreshed the page, confirmed form resubmission, and it worked.
Unfortunately, it's high maintenance, and it doesn't take too much of a lapse to get back up to the usual junk load. But I occasionally like to daydream that, if we could get enough people in the USA to do this, the junk mail industry itself might become financially untenable.
Actually, returning an unopened USPS-shipped letter or package doesn't cost postage at all. They probably removed you since you essentially took the time to communicate that they're not going to succeed with any future mail.
- slap “refused — return to sender” stickers on all the junk and drop it in bins for USPS
- bundle your actual mail and deliver it
Once a month, a service pickes it up, then leaves a dumpster of spam next to the local USPS mail drop. (Or shovels it over the counter at the post office.)
Also, provide a list of houses subscribed to the service to the USPS. The ball's in their court now!
- postal worker comes every day, with pre-sorted bins and leaves with outgoing bins; businesses already do this.
- first you re-sort the pre-sorted personal mail to remove spam, preserving the post office sort to keep it by customer
- then you sort all the removed junk by sender you’re returning to
— and when your next mail arrives, you give the USPS worker the pre-sorted outbound mail of returned junk
- keep a Instagram of your piles of returned junk mail, every day
This already happens with, eg, university or large office mailrooms. So you’re not asking anything new if USPS to make it work.
Allowing bulk spam mail to use that channel of contact is contrary to its purpose. It's not a place where I get high priority messages with delivery confirmation to make sure I get them anymore. It's a place where random flyers get stuffed, and the government insists on mixing their messages into that stream of crap.
USPS should stop bulk delivery entirely and have FedEx and UPS do it. They're not allowed to put stuff in my mailbox (and literally can't, because they don't have keys). At least then we restore the line. Things in the mailbox are important. Things that get left on my doorstep might be, but probably aren't.
https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/2062562/
I've never lived in the US and I do hear that perhaps it isn't particularly efficient with tax money, but still, if you looked at the average tax paid instead of your own it might not be nearly so amazing?
https://countryeconomy.com/taxes/tax-revenue
I'm not sure what other things to take into account. For example it says tax collected in Luxemberg is $44k per capita. Vs USA at $16k per capita. I'm sure another issue is 20% of USA taxes going to military?
Of othe places I've actually spent significant time, Singapore and Japan seemed to have pretty great government services and their taxes collected per person are lower than the USA. But I also know their cultures are different and that there are less people that need government support
I would happily pay (napkin maths) $40-50 more in taxes per person per year to make this fucking stop.
Shit, it'd save my city some money. Less trash.
No, this won't eliminate it. It will give you less of it, though, and give the USPS more money. Win/win, even if we don't win as much as we would like.
Bulk mail currently gets a discount compared to individual letters. Eliminate that, and we'd see less bulk mail.
Genuine question, is it even an option to pay $X more and get an otherwise identical TV with no overlay ads? It's admittedly been 7 or 8 years since I last purchased a TV, but I don't remember such an option being available at the time, and the only time I can ever remember seeing that sort of choice being available was with the kindle, where it's very explicit that the ad-free (but otherwise identical) version is like $20 more (or, was when I bought my kindle, which again was many years ago).
That being said, I'd be extremely curious to see sales numbers for ad-free vs ad-laden kindles, although I sort of doubt I'll ever have the chance to.
I have lots of problems w/crypto, but one thing they've gotten right is the credibility of self-binding. Without that, it's just hard to trust any actor on their future behavior---from Reagan's immigration amnesty, to cable tv's ads, to funding government agencies that ("this time") will fix a problem.
(None of this is motivated by any dislike for USPS, which I generally like. I'm just talking about people's (imo justified) reluctance to trade the known for the unknown).
In the UK politicians also send out these kinds of flyers in bulk (never mind the inundation of flyers for takeaway food, Domino's Pizza, Papa John's, etc.)
For any single piece of legitimate mail (which is vanishingly small as most stuff is paperless now), there are perhaps 20 or 30 pieces of junk that come with it over the course of a few weeks.
I honestly wish it got legislated against. Junk mailers aren't entitled to offload their waste through my letterbox. I don't understand why they have the right to shove advertisements into my own home.
[adndm] no posties cant [as in not allowed] remove anything, even if they just put it in there and realized its the wrong address
Mail? Probably 90+% ads. Email? Hahaha, I only even bother to check it anymore when I know a messages is coming in, and that's usually from a machine. Phone? Ignore-if-not-in-contacts, probably 2x as many spam calls as real calls in a week. Text might be close to 50% but only because transactional texts (lazy 2FA implementations and prescription pick-up reminders, mostly) count as signal.
OPSEC-wise I have a dedicated account for a certain kind of account. But what does the institution that uses that email address do? Send me 10X the email load with upsell nonsense, despite having opted out of all marketing emails.
No. Just, no. Stop. I am sick of this noise, and manually taking time to opt-out raises my switching cost. "Drowning" is a fantastic way to describe this.
And, "The vehicle warranty is about to expire"? Yeah, which vehicle? They won't get specific because they don't know.
I don't know how to implement it, but a "who are you specifically?" filter would eliminate a lot of my phone spam.
Spam works because most of these mass communication channels are free or extremely cheap. Raise the price and economics will dictate that most of these communications will drop off.
But yeah, I do the same. All set to auto ignore, even though it means one or two necessary calls are missed (ex. my cc company wanted to inform me they were cancelling their partnership and thus closing all cards).
The newest one seems to be group FaceTime calls (to about 20 numbers) that hang up after a couple seconds. Not sure what the angle is there; makes me wonder if there's an associated iPhone 0-day. Or maybe just probing phone type.
- require signatures/other things to prove which hostname the email came from
- do wide-scale analysis of senders/email contents to filter out spam
There are still issues (eg people typically will be more mad if they see spam emails than if unexpected legitimate emails get marked as spam because they won’t know if the latter is happening unless they frequently check their spam folder), and the popularity of some webmail systems means that it can be hard to tick all the boxes to not have your own legitimate emails binned. Similarly the ‘marked as spam’ signal is very strong so if you send out a newsletter that people mostly read and want and can easily unsubscribe to, you can still end up being sent to spam for all users because some people use ‘mark as spam’ to mean ‘please unsubscribe me from this newsletter’.
It seems the phone system is still at the stage where they don’t know who phone calls are actually coming from (except somehow they manage to bill these people).
My Gmail SPAM folder is filled with a ton of stuff that isn't really spam. There are newsletters I probably signed up for at some point or at least downloaded a document/watched a webinar where getting periodic emails was part of the deal. Because, yes, rather than clicking the unsubscribe button which legitimate marketers will honor, a lot of people just hit report spam which at some point puts it into the spam bucket for everyone.
I’ve been using Hey for two years now, and while it solved the spam problem, the UIUX makes it just so hard to use.
I’m keeping for one reason, it’s the shortest email I have.
I tested it for a while and liked it, but the price is too high for my low volume of personal email.
I’d like the FCC to impose a fine for spam messages that are paid for the company advertising with spam. I think the issue now is that the spam calls are lead generators that then collect info and forward to “legitimate” companies to sell warranties, insurance, whatever.
The “legitimate” company should be fined and then let them sort out the scammy firms that are spamming to generate leads.
Thanks, Ajit.
This may also be a choice of whether I want to get 35 calls a day from spammers or assassinate all shady car warranty companies. The companies are already shitty as they allow these spam-generated leads, so I don’t have much sympathy for their continued existence.
So, I could see a law where we say, "well, if you accept the bundle of leads, you, legitimate company, are responsible for the business practices of the lead-generator."
But would it be possible to launder these things?
Shady company uses illegitimate means to gather leads.
"Sells" only the successful leads to third party that's just popped up for this transaction and, as a result, hasn't really engaged in any practices at all...
I dunno. Seems like a big headache for regulators, although I guess they sort out this kind of stuff all the time (or at least try to).
Since companies must pay out to lead generators, I assume this means they have to know them with taxids and whatnot if they are paying out large sums.
By fining the companies using the leads it takes the headache away from the regulator and puts it on the company. Set up some sort of statutory damages process where I record the call and get to the point where I get transferred to someone who says “I work for FooCorp and sell warranties, please give me your credit card.” I send that recording to a regulator, fines the company $300, keeps $50 to fund itself and pays me $250 as the victim.
This seems like it will quickly make companies strictly vet their lead generations.
It seems pretty bad that any company exists based on cold calling genera consumers. All those companies should go bankrupt for sucking.
It's probably already been tried.
Someone, somewhere, is having a scrum right now on how they can tie physical location to phone numbers to spoof caller numbers more effectively. It's completely plausible to use eg social network leaks to spoof phone numbers you are likely to recognize.
If they aren't doing it now, it's probably more that they don't need the extra spam-power at the moment rather than that they're too bumbling to think of arbitrarily clever ideas for ways to combine all of the public and leaked information about us.
Except the system is set up to authenticate callers[0] and that's been in place (at least in the US) for almost a year.
That it hasn't been as effective as it should be is another issue, but the technology exists and is (or should be) in place as specified by the law.
[0] https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication
The telecoms know who's PAYING for these calls to be connected and SMSes to be delivered - they should be required to surface that information.
Is this not standard on phones? Terminating a call on my Galaxy s10 shows me options to block number add to contacts, and redial. I know Samsung's UI has remained a couple years upstream of stock Android (and many yrs upstream of IOS) for the entirety of the smartphone era, but I thought this wouldve been a big standard feature.
And the senders are much less likely to be able to get away with sending malware
Doing this has cut out 99% of my spam paper mail for the last year. Would highly recommend for sanity and as an easy way to cut down some on environmental impact. You can opt out for up to 5 years through the website or permanently by writing a paper letter. I did the latter through one of the "you write digitally, we'll send physical letter" services you can find on google and it's been great.
Ban enough things like that and soon you're talking real impact.
On the environmental side, if your paper is made from reasonably sustainably sourced wood, isn’t throwing it into landfill a form of carbon sequestration?
It's most likely that people are just mistaking my number for some real estate agent's number, but you never know. Has anyone else experienced something like this?
Basically, if I am expecting the call, I 100% get them. If I am not expecting the call, I got a lot of them or they use another method like text or email. I am not aware of any calls I am not expecting that I missed out on, but my fear of missing out unsolicited calls is pretty low. And I trust that for unsolicited calls, they are more about getting through than I care about getting through.
Robo callers talking to Robo callers is not the future we want to live in.
"I cannot vote or express myself in my country, so this what I do to cope"
Hopefully the authorities and carriers can figure it out before it grows to US levels. At least they are working on it (English article from Dec 2021: https://www.traficom.fi/en/news/traficom-looks-ways-block-in..., latest Finnish technical recommendation PDF on call blocking from Feb 2022: https://www.traficom.fi/sites/default/files/media/regulation...).
EDIT: I was just commenting on the physical geographic location of the callers, not anybody's race or nationality
Also, I once returned a wallet thick with various cards, all paper money already stolen but things like drivers license and other important documents still inside. I brought it to the police. I waited for almost an hour in line, and then it took more than another hour of the officer documenting every single item in the thick wallet. He had to, he could not just write "wallet", it had to be every single item.
I highly doubt the police will do anything. Scams don't seem to be anything the police will go after, maybe some very high level stuff when it's about millions. They are also very busy writing reports and doing other important paperwork... /s Googling I just found that there are 760 cases of bike theft per day in Germany. Less than a tenth of them are found. -- https://blog.alh.de/taeglich-werden-ueber-760-fahrraeder-ges... -- There is just too much "small stuff" for police. If anyone gets murdered I just have to wait a day or two for the newspapers to announce the murderer has been found. On the other hand, for small crimes I expect not much is going to happen apart from filing the report (which I'm sure alone takes up plenty of time).
I suspect virtually all such reports end up being used for metrics and no actual prosecutorial case is created out of them.
Regardless, there are a lot of fraudulent and misleading companies US-based companies that should probably be shut down.
Are you confusing cold calling with spamming? Here, for example, is the SEC page describing rules that cold callers need to follow: https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answerscoldhtm.html
I think the post you were replying to was saying cold calling in Germany is illegal full stop. I don't think that is the case in be US.
The problem is chasing companies not in US jurisdiction.
There is no technical limitation. It is allowed behavior and that must change.
No. It most certainly is not. It may be illegal in your locality, but it is certainly legal in most of the US. The federal Do Not Call list would be useless if it were illegal.
Now I get 1-2 a month from scammers abroad and with "private numbers" which is highly annoying since those aren't even legitimate. As a solution I asked my phone company to block all foreign numbers: won't do (they didn't say the couldn't they just won't). They also profit from you calling/accepting a foreign number so just get a fine from them and see how long it lasts would be my solution.
However, I feel operators should start verifying these somehow. Or allow me to block all calls from a Norwegian number originating from India for instance if not in my contacts or something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN
1. The successful communication platforms are ones that are opt-in, meaning you can't message or talk to someone unless you give their consent; and
2. This is why federated messaging systems have not worked and likely won't work in the future. Why? Just like with POTS, there is always going to be an incentive for bad actors to "launder" messages or calls.
What I find particularly irksome about the spam situation is the exceptions carved out for charities and, worse yet, political fundraising to the "do not spam" laws. I mean these laws don't stop a huge amount of spam because it's illegal anyway and probably originates overseas.
But I honestly don't want to be a part of the current phone system and just ignore any unknown numbers.
Not particularly true in the rest of the world, for instance in Europe as many have pointed out in other threads. The SMS text messages work well here, and good data protection laws/regulations ensure that there is virtually no spam or phishing. This is not a problem with the platform, but with the lack of regulation in the industry.
I now have developed a "feeling" on whether or not I have to pick up the call, based on if I'm expecting a call, country code, similarities with previous spam phone numbers, etc... It's really annoying.
I understand why things like ActBlue exist to centralize this kind of stuff in terms of contributions, but the comms side of things is still completely backwards.
My Thai phone number got slammed this week and I've had many friends here complain about all the scammers. Apparently they will have 1 person pretend they are the police and one of my friend's friend (not the brightest person) started crying thinking it was real
From my observations, Thai people are very trusting and nice so unfortunately this is probably a very profitable operation
I just checked my texts going back two years, and there is not a single unsolicited, spam or scam text. The same is true for phone calls.