Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers (reportphonespam.org)

The 10DLC cartel wants to fine instances of unsolicited text messaging up to $20,000 per instance, hence why there is a big pushback against registering with this unsanctioned, not FCC mandated organization called The Carrier Registry (TCR).

TCR has been a nightmare to work with for those that do participate in their bureaucracy. You fill out pages of forms with everything from EINs/SSNs to the owners and co-owners of the firm and exact examples of what they plan to text, then 6 months or so later the TCR says "Oh, sucks to be you, we're invalidating all current registered companies, pay $50 to register again and fill out entirely different forms!

Also, T-Mobile is tacking on a new inactivity fee of $xx a month per business if your client doesn't message a T-Mobile number every few days :D"

So, you should still report it to the sending carrier.

Background: Most larger, reputable US-based wholesale carriers have policies that are similar to the CTIA's guidelines for political campaigns: https://www.ctia.org/news/political-text-messaging-engaging-... . CTIA sets a much higher threshold, including opt-in permission.

This is a bit like the FCC's definition of email spam (a very low bar - what's legal) vs. a mainstream email service provider's terms of use (a much higher bar - what they permit you to send through them).

This is really expensive to do (the RND and Do Not Call lists are very expensive to query, the FCC needs to make these cheaply available) and automation for doing these queries is not offered by most phone providers.

I used to be able to SMS enable my T-Mobile numbers offnet, but every 30 days TMobile would take this back.

10DLC is being strongly pushed by some carriers, while others are still permitting conversational traffic (for every one message that goes in, one should come back, with a 10% margin in either direction) to go over P2P rails.

With The Carrier Registry invalidating all registered organizations and campaigns every few months, triggering everyone to fill out a ton of paperwork, pay $50 or more to re-validate every business, and also the recent sudden devalidation of every sole proprietor 10DLC registration, I don't blame those who don't want to participate in this unsanctioned cartel formed by the big three wireless carriers.

You don't even have any submissions, yet.

OTOH it seems if you ever answer these even once you're no longer a random number to try you're immediately marked as a real person who can be tricked into answering at least some calls and will never hear the end of the endless ringing.

> Instead, report the phone number that the call instructs you to contact.

Under the above scenario most callers aren't dumb enough to leave a message, and I'd be concerned that actually engaging with anybody would increase the number of calls, at least in the short term.

If you're a staffer running the honeypot lines at the FCC, it would be fine because you can go home at the end of the day, but for a personal number I would need convincing. Would love to hear testimonials from anyone who tried this technique and their interpretation of the results.

I’d say at this point let the system fail if they don’t have email or whatsapp or something else they can use to reach you.

I'd suggest it will depend on goals / scale - if not many are using, probably would be ignored even if bad actors were aware of it. If it started to have real effects, there'd undoubtedly be very intentional efforts to attack it. Beyond just the sporadic script kiddiez / for the lulz set ...

Edit: sorry, "app" - to potentially use the app in some malicious way ... Not sure my comment is so useful, but, I'll leave it since it's unfortunately all too easy to end up with unintended consequences. Though, I favor fighting this garbage wholesale and support any efforts to interfere with the deluge of BS / noise with modern communications tech.

I'd propose that absent specific legal processes contact occurs at the consent and discretion of the contacted. That's one of a number of principles I've been kicking around under the notion of "Communications Autonomy"[1]. There is no fundamental right to attention. As such, any communications system which doesn't provide the ability to manage contact attempts and communications is in violation of those principles, and more concretely, as the annoyance and/or risk factors outweigh advantages and benefits, people and organisations will defect from those systems in droves.

The telecoms industry has been openly expressing concern that trust in the phone network will be lost. And by "phone network" I'm speaking broadly: POTS (plain old telephone service) and PSTN (public switched telephone networks), or any universal direct-access communications system.[2] I think we're seeing that breakdown. A key problem is that there isn't any single successor system that appears ready to step in, and most of the more likely proposed systems entail substantial concerns themselves over monopoly power and abuse, surveillance (state, capitalist, or other-actor varieties), etc.

I've got a few specific suggestions which I'm planning to make in a top-level comment to this thread.

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Notes:

1. See: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/108579251632091173>, <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/107742445268072257>, and <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/622677903778013902fd00...>

2. Phone, email, SMS, social networking, postal mail, etc.

Unfortunately the school's systems were down and so they weren't able to call me from the school's regular phone system. They called from random personal cell phones, so that went straight to voicemail. It wasn't until someone was literally sent to my house to bang on my door that I got notification of my child's medical emergency. They were about to administer medication that would NOT have been okay to give him, and I was lucky to be able to contact them and tell them to hold off before they did it.

Never mind reporting them to a phone provider. If something had happened to my son I swear to God I would have gone full Liam Neeson "what I do have are a very particular set of skills" on the jackass who's running that specific phone spam operation.

Once you add a “free call” entity on the other side (like Google Voice) then no one is charged to make the call.

Additionally, plenty of people “sell” their real number and there are android apps routing internet call through the victim’s real number. In this case, even if the person is charged, it’s not necessarily the spammer.

I really hate this attitude that every little danger has to be regulated.

You could probably get sued for negligence if you process card details over an unencrypted connection, but that's nothing compared to the damage your business will take if the card companies decide that you're on the naughty list.

Also, the more spammers reported the less to bill for the calls. As less spam calls.

Yeah what everyone else does is creepy af, and _should be illegal_, but that's not the facts on the ground today.

Is it conceivable that they don't have control of who is using their network, and how they're using it?

It's not like they've just landed on the planet with this big telecoms network to manage. They created them, they set the rules, they own the gates.

It's purely profit driven, no question.

In the exact same way that Google and Meta claim to not be able to police advertising on their own fucking networks.

I'm not so sure about this. No one (except for, obviously, spammers) benefits from email spam, every mailhost and network admin is most certainly interested in stopping it (to some extent), and yet my mailbox can prove that spam is still very much alive.

Solving spam problems in a highly distributed large federation of networks is not simple.

However, I think there are less telecoms than LIRs and mail systems out there, and they typically have better control over who their clients are (less hacking, though I could be wrong), and there's not enough pressure on them (spammy mailhost's gonna get banned by every RDNSBL real quick, telcos - I don't know, but I guess not so much?), so I can certainly agree that telecoms have issues with their incentives. I could be wrong about this, though - I don't really know much about the telephone industry.

- How do you feel about the telcoms reading/filtering your texts?

- Where do you feel these controls would be most appropriately applied? Sender or recipient or both?

- How would you define SMS spam for filtering? Should the messages be manually reviewed or automatically filtered based on volume/content?

- Should recipient telcoms filter potentially malicious or spammy voice calls?

Some of the companies are quite spammy. It’s frustrating as blocking the number risks blocking real ‘you have an appointment at xxx’ type messages.

They care, but in the way most people care about not being fat. They still can’t make the necessary lifestyle changes to do anything about it even if it is their most ardent wish.

Because it's a political problem, not an engineering or business problem.

In order to prevent monopolies, we have very strict requirements about carrying all calls that enter the network. Otherwise, phone companies would randomly block each other as part of anti-competitive tactics to push each other out of business.

The telephone spammers take advantage of these laws, because it is very difficult to legally block a spam call. Your phone provider must carry all phone calls without any prejudice!

(So I'm about to get very close to the line about hacker news's "no politics" guideline. Please consider that spammers "hack the law" and "hack politics" before you flag me. Instead, I would appreciate it if you take a minute or two to fact check my opinion disguised as fact.)

The primary way out of this is by a legal change, not by an engineering change or culture change: We must update our laws so that it is very difficult to make and carry spam calls on the telephone network.

I personally believe that one way to do this is to require that all phone calls provide rich metadata to the phone that is ringing. I really should know who is calling me, and the phone company that originates that call should be responsible for verifying it. I would even consider a requirement that makes it trivial, or automatic, to "lift the corporate veil" on who owns the company that is calling me. Otherwise there should be strict penalties for a phone network that allows originating calls with phony or spoofed metadata.

(I also don't think anyone has a right to make a 100% anonymous phone call. I think we can figure out how to allow people who need to make anonymous phone calls to make them, without exposing the entire phone network to SPAM.)

Ultimately, every phone call that enters the phone network needs to have a strict and auditable chain of liability.

In reality, if our laws included a requirement for strict metadata, and then a requirement to make an "abusive phone call" button really obvious, we could figure this out pretty quickly: at this point it becomes a simple reputation system.

Finally, we need laws that prohibit co-opting the phone network for marketing. We may want to start with prohibiting unsolicited commercial and political calls. We need to make sure that there are no loopholes, where the company you bought something from 2 years ago is still free to call you as if you have an ongoing relationship. We need to recognize that pulling out one's phone and looking at who is calling is really a significant burden to us, and that our government should protect us from companies and politicians who think that they have the right to interrupt our day at any moment to listen to a sales pitch.

If you really care and want to put time into this, advocate politically. (And remember that hacker news is not supposed to be political.) Don't waste your time reading instructions about how to report spam.

They care, but not enough to spend what is required to address it.

I’ve never really had any issues at all with SMS spam in the UK and Europe - but I’m currently in Thailand where it’s awful! When you buy a new SIM card at the airport, the spamming starts within an hour or so. I count 18 sent yesterday alone, once every hour or so during the day.

I believe it is actually the carrier (true.th) sending them as they all follow a similar format and seem to arrive with a somewhat predictable regularity.

They even have an automated number (*137) you can call and supposedly turn off spam, but it doesn’t work: “System will cancel spam SMS within 24 hour. Thank you for using!”. Yeah right.

Only solution on iOS seems to be to disable notifications for SMS from unknown senders in System Settings. Then, at least, they only annoy you when you actually look at the messages app.

I read the rest of the FAQ, signed up for Twilio, and their API worked to identify the number.

As far as oversimplifying political hypotheses go, this is a stupid one. Multinational corporations have fragmented power structures. They're broadly owned, publicly audited and subject to coups through market-based means.

If you want a secret cabal, America's emerging aristocracy is at least concentrated, opaque and difficult to dislodge.