I remember setting up Lenny and forwarding calls I used to get to him while commuting on the bus early in my career. It was a lot of fun to listen to scammers start to freak out when they realized what was happening.
Our record at the office was 47 minutes. FORTY SEVEN MINUTES keeping a scammer on the phone till they hung up. We never laughed so much at work in all of twenty years. :D
I always ask the robocalls to say something specific.
It finally worked the other day! A robot repeated "chrysanthemum" back to me when asked. Sadly it seemed to be limited to this one single trick; as I continued my attempts to exploit it, it abruptly apologized and ended the call.
Cute, but one day I am going to get lucky and a scammer is going to get absolutely wrecked.
Chrysanthemum is also my go to. That or “You’re in a desert. You’re walking along in the sand when all of a sudden.. you look down and see a tortoise..”
It would seem to me that it's a lot easier to build an AI that acts as a non-tech-savvy granny to keep scammers busy, than one that actually successfully executes a complete scam from start to finish on a real life person.
> surprised there aren't any comments whining about this
This is called a totem.
You’ve invented or learned a caricature to rail at which may have once been based in truth, and from time to time again approximates it, though never with the fidelity you ascribe to the original. It’s commonly done by sides in partisan polarisation, the most common being a two-mode system that pillories its picture of the other.
If you picture the person writing the totem comment, you probably have a clear idea of what they do for a living, how they dress, et cetera. Totems are why both deification and demonisation work; they’re a hack of the human ability to visualise and project.
This is doubling down on “may have once been based in truth, and from time to time again approximates it.”
Analogy: phantom pain is pain in a limb that was once there but now isn’t. The limb was real. It probably felt pain. But when a patient imagines pain after the limb is gone, that’s the diagnosis.
Those comments are real. The people, probably, too. Responding to them when they aren’t in the room is a separate matter.
You have this notion of a visualization gimmick and have visualized me using it (ironic). In fact my game is far simpler; blithly preempt and thereby insult anybody who subscribes to a belief I consider to be misguided. For all I know they look just like me, it makes no difference.
> preempt and thereby insult anybody who subscribes to a belief I consider to be misguided
This is the totem. You react to a misguided belief even when it’s a phantom.
If you look at two-mode polarised discussions, you’ll find both sides talking about a totem of the other, reacting to imagined preëmptions and rarely interacting with each other. The graphs separate. As a result, the preëmptions are more imagined than real. (Both in characterisation and frequency of emergence.
Note that this is perfectly normal. Kids do it. And it’s fun. It’s also easy, since instead of reacting to anything empirical or well argued you’re constructing straw men for the purpose of taking them down.
You have reiterated your position after I disputed it, a behavior which may be described as "doubling down". This term carries a negative connotation, and therefore proves the other person (myself) correct.
This is cool when some independent hacker / artist does it as "Lemmy".
When a big telecom does it, the second thing they do with it is to fuck up the spam detection so bad that every third phone call I make gets answered by "Daisy".
And just think about it - why would a telecom need this tech? They can already drop the spam calls and stop routing calls from the bad actor telecoms who enable the spammers. They don't do that because they prefer to collect a few cents a call from them rather than serve their customers better. It's everyone else who needs this.
Ah! So step 2 is wait for the spammers to automate blacklisting of Daisy phone numbers, and only then start rolling out a (paid) Daisy option to customers.
Not connecting calls doesn't waste spammer money, but maybe Daisy does.
If the big telco can find 10 righteous callers from a a bad actor telecom, they should keep routing the calls.
My friend works for a big telco and is the guy fixing this problem for them. They have amazing powers of deception when they need it. New numbers can be conjured up at any time.
The new fad among wireless carriers here in the US is to route what they think are spam calls to a fake voicemail box.
Voicemail that is left in this generic voice mail box never makes it to their customer and the customer is completely unaware that some of their calls have been diverted.
Then suddenly, calls from consenting callers to consenting receivers are labeled as spam and blocked. What can you do about it? Nothing. Switch to email, I guess. Oh wait, same problem.
Bulk scams by mail are at least less common because mail fraud is investigated pretty seriously and results in federal felony charges. Not to mention the cost of initiation is much higher. Unfortunately individuals are still sometimes targeted.
> Not to mention the cost of initiation is much higher
This is the thing we screwed up for email and phone (after per call fees dropped to zero).
It's not rocket science to create systems that net to zero for common usage (balanced in-bound vs out-bound), but charge an arm and a leg for bulk senders.
Until you're running a file server or the equivalent. There has to be some way for a willing recipient to zero-rate or reverse-charge the responses to their requests. The Internet gets this wrong.
The physical mail spammers know to only use deceptive tricks, like "FINAL NOTICE" or pretending to be affiliated with you using some publicly available information. I have not yet seen one dare to full-on lie, because there would be real consequences.
If a scammer puts "FINAL NOTICE" on a solicitation they mailed with no prior relationship, I do still report it as fraud. But that's probably wishful thinking.
You sound like an advocate for telemarketers. Am I correct?
I doubt very seriously that the pool of people who have knowingly and intentionally and explicitly opted in/consented to telemarketing - that is, without any dark pattern involvement and with a clear and unmbiguous consent experience, is very large. In fact I think it is infinitesimal because I can’t recall seeing such a consent UX- they ALL involve dark patterns. And if you pair that with “marketer who diligently implements all state & FTC requirements and does timely and accurate processing of removal requests, I think that the 3 relationships left are web app UX testers.
I think the world would be a better place without telemarketing or email marketing. Maybe a “one email per year” limit per merchant who you have actually paid money to and not opted out of.
I’m not OP, but my worry is about the false positives. I have real inbound calls and emails getting detected as spam all the time. Luckily my VoIP provider has a spam box I can look in, but at this point I just have to go through them every so often to make sure I’m not missing anything important.
If the telecoms can perfectly predict the telemarketers, then I’d love it. But in practice how often is this going to block people I know from calling me? Probably not never, and then we just have to give up on phones as a reliable method of communication.
Exactly. Many people want to be able to receive phone calls from their doctors, airlines and schools. These types of B2C calls are presumably most likely to be marked as spam in the event of false positives.
I’ll take my chances. 99%of the people I want to talk to either email/text me first or are already in my contacts list (which I’m not really all that picky about). I’ll accept that failure rate.
Isn't "emailing you first" just kicking the can down the road? What stops spam emails getting through to you? (Besides the exact kind of heuristic filtering you seem to be objecting to, that is.)
Disneyland will have a handful of IPs and phone numbers, and I'd bet my hat will have a team aggressively calling any ISP or provider that flags them as spam.
Better yet, route all calls for all disconnected/unassigned numbers in their part of the numbering plan to it. It would probably kill robocalling overnight.
I hate to say this.. but I find this very difficult to believe..
I don't think any telco puts effort into stopping spammers.. I'd like them to but I don't think it's something they either can care or legally capable of fixing.
I work for a telco, though not in that department. We put a lot of effort into trying to block spam calls, and adapting systems to the newest tricks. The reason why the results aren't better is (I'm being told) a combination between IP telephony making reliable source tracing all but impossible, and common carrier laws which mean that you can't block a call unless you're 100% certain it's a scam, otherwise you open yourself up to being sued.
Then, once the spammers have blacklisted the Daisy numbers, cycle those spam-free numbers to their customers and start a new batch of Daisy numbers. This way, there is a constant flow of spammer free numbers being cycled into the pool. Of course, everyone and their dog wants your phone number, so you will have to be careful who you give it to if you want it to stay spam-free.
As long as the scammer's paying to route the call, I'm ok with this. And the telcos' fitness function for their pool of robogrannies should be time-spent-on-call. Making it uneconomic is the way to kill it.
If every third call you make goes to Daisy you are using shit data and are likely part of the problem. Are you absolutely sure they are fucking up the spam detection, or are you just doing all of your cold calling with blinders on?
My mistake, but I completely stand over my words: it's cool if someone sends scammers to talk to the disembodied voice of Lemmy Kilmister, not cool if Vodafone or O2 license his likeness to do the same thing.
Instating an AI model as "Head of Scammer Relations" is hilarious. I think the point here is to collect the phone numbers of scam call centers and have Daisy call them so that scammers waste time talking to it rather than a victim.
I was a little surprise to read that they're using speech-to-text and text-to-speech rather than an end-to-end speech model. Won't that horrible latency? (I guess the old-person persona disguises it a little...)
I'm imagining this is just a publicity stunt, and I'll say it's a very good one. However I can't see it being very practical. There are lots of scam calls to keep up with and LLMs and text-to-speech models are expensive to run. If they do run this in production, the costs of running hundreds of 'Daisies' will inevitably be passed onto the consumer, and worse still, if the scammers are calling in through PSTN lines or cellular this will use up our already scarce bandwidth. I've frequently had difficulty connecting through trunk lines from Belgium and Germany to numbers in Britain, and that's without a legion of AI grannies sitting on the phone!
real-time full duplex like OpenAI GPT-4o is pretty expensive. cascaded approaches (usually about 800ms - 1 second delay) are slower and worse, but very very cheap. when I built this a year ago, I estimated the LLM + TTS + other serving costs to be less than the Twilio costs.
which is why we need to adopt nuclear power so we run thousands of these so the odds of them picking up a bot instead of a person is overwhelmingly likely
Every type of defensive tech is nothing more than driving up the cost of attack.
Doubling the dwell time for a scammer will halve their profits. That could have interesting second-order effects. Perhaps it makes it not worth it for some subset?
Seems like the logical endpoint of a lot of this is people getting paid directly for their attention. Want to call me? I've set a price of $5/call that I answer, and an additional $10/minute of listen time after the first 10 seconds. Want to send me an email? $1/email and $5/100 words. Anyone I have emailed is automatically on my allow-list, which I can also adjust manually.
Yes. There are all kind or brokers selling the attention of their audiences: Google, TV Networks, podcasts, LinkedIn, etc. I'd like to see another attempt at disintermediation in the space.
And maybe like a temporary hold of the money, so you get it back if I’m convinced it’s not spam. Probably would resolve 99% of spam issues in the real world and create a chain of trust. Add some temporary disabling feature as well if you’re expecting a call from a random number too, so you’re set.
Sounds like a great solution to the minority of people like you and me who wouldn't mind the added steps of approving every real phone call as not spam after, having to remember how to set that you're expecting a call from a random number, etc. I can't see it being acceptable to enough people for any network to go down this road unless spam levels get way worse.
Spam is already at the level of changing people's default behavior from answering calls that come in to (as I saw described abt younger mobile users) "would rather pick up a live hand grenade than an unknown caller"
Personally, my default was to pick up and is now if recognized contact pickup, if not and I'm expecting an unknown call, scrutinize, then if pickup, only answer with a cough or two — never "hello" or "yes" due to threat of voice cloning escalate to banks.
Spam is universally detested
My assessment is that voice calls are on the verge of going obsolete if the telcos fail to get a handle on spam. Yet the telcos behave as if they have no clue whatsoever and DGAF.
Reporting spam should be the other way around, it defaults to assuming a normal interaction.
Consider: if you get harassed with a call or text you don't like, you send an SMS with that phone number to some known short code. You then receive $1 from the caller. If the caller cannot be found, the last verifiable link in the chain is responsible for paying the fine.
This would cause carriers to behave overnight, instead of allowing foreign call centers to spoof other people's real private numbers with your area code.
Not approving all the time, just setting every call by default to $1. Everyone who knows you will call knowing they’ll get their money back. And you can do an easy “add everyone in your contacts to a whitelist”, boom done.
It'd work well for both ends of the spectrum (spam callers & friends) but think would kinda fall down in the middle though — kids' school, doctor's office, plumber coming to service your boiler.
Where you are expecting a call and it's definitely not spam, but they're not going to be ringing from a pre-approved whitelist. Don't think they'd want to be putting $1 per call on the line and hoping for people to remember to click the right button afterwards
That's similar to the idea I had for combating texting spam:
- If your number is in my address book then texts are free for you
- If this is the first time you are contacting me then you pay me $1
There are probably downsides and ways this will screw up real relationships but it will certainly increase the cost of spam.
- Every contractor (plumber etc) you hire will ask you to please add them to your contact list first so that they can message you.
- After a while of half their clients not doing that and lots of fees on their end, contractors stop providing a phone number at all, asking you to please install ContractorApp to communicate with them.
I love every part of this. Not having things in writing is one of the most common tactics with bad contractors. And I miss their call backs because I have unknowns goto spam, so I have to remember to disable that feature...
Ha! Okay, I like this, I think it changes my mind on the whole thing being viable. There's probably some reason it wouldn't work in reality but the satisfaction from pressing the charge $1 option on spam would be huge.
I disagree about the we-adda-baby-itsa-boy issue. I don't see how that'd apply given that you can charge them $1 from the very first message.
If you have already sorted the world between people you want to take calls from and people you don't, why wouldn't you just block the people you don't want instead of charging them money?
My doctor, bank, eh well everyone, will text or email me if they cannot reach me. I haven't answered a number I don't recognize for the past 10 years; life is excellent.
No way to vet the quality of your offering makes a both-ways attention economy fundamentally unworkable in a Western society. If you were really prepared to be an 'attention worker', then you could go work at a click farm or content moderation firm or the like, one of the fastest growing markets in the developing world.
Best I can offer you is an in-game bonus for watching an ad.
Is it though? Like it might be valuable to you, but i doubt its valuable to anyone else in a phone call situation and both parties need to find value to make a sale.
Like if you are interested in the convo then you should be paying the other person as you are getting value from the convo.
What's the situation where you don't care about the convo but for the right price you could care, and the other party also thinks that price is reasonable? Like maybe if someone is trying to recruit you i guess, but the situations where that is true seem very few and far between (and we already have a system for that, where traditionally someone offers to buy you a meal in exchange for listening)
> What's the situation where you don't care about the convo but for the right price you could care, and the other party also thinks that price is reasonable?
Why would the other party think the price would be reasonable? Like the entire point of minimally targeted ads is to spray and prey.
Like if you assume a CPM of $2, that means $0.002 per phone call. Would you really find that acceptable?
If the answer is no, then you aren't really accepting payment,you are just blocking people with extra steps. No different than if you said you will accept a phone call for a billion dollars. You aren't really accepting something for payment if you set a price that nobody will pay.
No one's buying your attention on your terms. They're only exchanging it for the online services you want to use. No attention, no services, better up your subscriptions budget or make do without.
(Sorry if I'm being blunt, attention economy participants can't be so they'd sugar coat it to such a degree that you might miss the point).
I'm certain Satoshi was thinking of Hashcash! But I did mean what I said, though it wasn't until Martti Malmi released his emails with Satoshi that I knew this, and so might not be well known:
> "[this next bit turned out to be very controversial. there is extreme
prejudice against spam solutions, especially proof-of-work.]
> It can already be used for pay-to-send e-mail. The send dialog is
resizeable and you can enter as long of a message as you like.
It's sent directly when it connects. The recipient doubleclicks
on the transaction to see the full message. If someone famous is
getting more e-mail than they can read, but would still like to
have a way for fans to contact them, they could set up Bitcoin and
give out the IP address on their website. "Send X bitcoins to my
priority hotline at this IP and I'll read the message personally."
That's EVE Online's approach to fighting ingame "email" spam [0].
Every player can configure an amount of ingame money that is levied from a sender's account to deliver a message to them. It's a currency sink, so it's themed as a "tax" levied by the NPCs and its value is destroyed rather than paid to the recipient of the message.
I thought it used to default to 5 ISK (a pittance, something you can make back by shooting a single NPC pirate ship). I see some references to the default being ~2000 ISK at the time that it was changed to 0, where it is now.
Worked pretty well, imo. Players that need to be publicly contactable (people who organize public events, for instance) can turn it off easily. People who are "space famous" can crank it up to reduce targeted spam. Even at the default setting, it's effective at keeping ingame scammers from blasting the whole player list with messages (at least, the poor ones :). Doesn't apply to people you've already exchanged messages with. I think there's also some allowlisting you can do, etc.
> it's themed as a "tax" levied by the NPCs and its value is destroyed rather than paid to the recipient of the message.
It’s a cool idea and would work good for real world fines, too: fines that destroy the money paid instead of transfer it (to the city, the court, the police and so on). The fines would disincentivize bad behavior, while also not incentivizing the police to “go generate some crime” because it pays them.
Totally agree, but only if those taxes go to the entity that creates the money. From the federal government's point of view, who prints money, there is zero difference between collecting money and throwing it in a furnace. Both do the same thing. Money is just a piece of paper that says "the government owes you a debt of one buck". So if it is returned to them, they no longer owe it to you, and if it gets destroyed, the same thing is true.
But if those taxes go to the State of California, it's different. They don't print money, so it becomes a real debt to them. Destroying it in that case would cancel that debt and free the debtor (the Treasury) from that obligation.
Right but it costs money to send SMSs. At least it used to. I dunno if they've given up charging for that now since nobody uses them. Tbf I haven't seen a phone contract without unlimited texts for at least a decade I guess.
If you use a VoIP service like Twilio and voip.ms, you can set up a very simple IVR menu that just asks unknown callers to press 1 to be connected to you. No AI involved.
For me, this has been surprisingly effective against robocalls. Obviously this isn’t going to work against scammers who call directly, but most of the spam calls I receive start with some pre-recorded message which isn’t going to pass the menu.
If they ever get clever enough to automate the menu selection, it would be funny to have an infinitely deep IVR sort of like the tar pits people build on websites to trap web crawlers.
My Pixel 8 (not sure what other Android phones do this) can screen calls using their AI assistant. It asks what the call is about. If they answer, it displays the text to you as it rings through.
It sounds surprisingly human-like, even saying "Hello?" in a slightly annoyed tone when the other person doesn't respond in time.
I have pixel 7, and I think this feature is or very unstable, or cell-provider dependent. It was on my phone, then was not, then re-appeared briefly again, now it is not even in settings.
Another good one is for the phone to stay on hold for you. That one has been extremely valuable to me as Qantas would regularly keep me on hold for over 5 hours when I tried to get my money back for a cancelled flight.
The operator would sometimes be a bit confused when I pick up, but it usually worked well and certainly beats listening to hold music for hours.
Its kind of funny to think we've already had many of these services that were apparently really ahead of their time.
I remember being an outside sales rep for a local mom and pop wireless company in the late 90's, early aughts. We sold an automated "assistant" called Wildfire that would screen calls and stood as an intermediary between you can callers. She would answer, you would record your name and then it would call you on any number of devices you had entered. At one point, I had it calling three of my numbers (office and two mobile numbers) and at any time, you could just send people to voicemail. It was very similar to how many of the AI assistants work today. If I remember it was like $30/month, but as reps we got to use it for free which was really fun tinkering with it.
AT&T also had something like this where you could have a program they offered which would screen your calls and either connect you or you could send people directly to voicemail. It didn't have nearly the features that Wildfire had, but it was effective.
Obviously in the late 90's and early aughts, something like this wasn't really needed and after a few quarters, AT&T quietly stopped offering their service. Wildfire lived on until the mid aughts after being bought and then killed due to lack of adoption and use.
Kind of crazy these kinds of programs were pretty common before the AI assistant craze now.
I seem to vaguely recall this Wildfire brand name....Because when i first got google voice, it was really half of an acquired company...which if remember correctly was a competitor to wildfire, no? Like grandcentral or something? Anyway, yeah, when i first got google voicemail, this feature was really impressive! But, of course eventually learned that this tyoe of thing already existed in some corners :-)
It's a great idea, and in Canada using the Koodo/Telus network you can turn on "call control" for free which does basically this, except it makes the caller enter a random number between 1-9. And you can also whitelist certain numbers like friends and family.
Very nice to see, my grandmother was recently scammed out of a large amount of money. Luckily the bank reimbursed her.
Scammers are a stain on the reputation of India. You could argue it's unfair to tar an entire country with the same brush, but quite clearly rule of law isn't properly functioning over there and there's complicity in letting them do this. Same goes for Nigeria.
I'd imagine India will gradually crack down on it more over time. The tech industry there is growing massive and they surely aren't happy about being associated with scammers.
They won't. The companies that operate these scam centers are diversified criminal enterprises run by ultra-wealthy and politically connected individuals. These people own the police, they own the politicians, and until fairly recently, they owned the voters through massive vote-buying schemes.
You can get away with murder in India if you're wealthy enough (e.g. the case of Jessica Lal, murdered by a politician's son in front of at least a dozen witnesses). The egregious corruption of the INC or "Congress party" (which is ideologically progressive) over many decades has created a massive voter exodus to the conservative BJP party, the majority party in India since 2014. However, the corruption and inefficiency at all levels of civil society has remained endemic.
He was indeed sentenced to life, but was inexplicably allowed to go in and out of prison during his sentence - on one occasion he was paroled for thirty days under dubious circumstances. He was eventually released on parole 4 years ago for "good behavior", and is now trying to rehabilitate his public image (along with his extremely corrupt father).
Oh, believe me, Indians fucking hate the scammers, probably more than you do.
Jim Browning (the scambaiter who worked with O2 in this article) has successfully compromised several scam operations, gotten their physical address and other dox, and referred them to the police. The offices get raided, Jim gets some nice CCTV footage of the raid, the operators of the criminal enterprise get a nice perp walk... and then a month later the case is mysteriously dismissed with a bullshit reason about AI deepfakes and "IO" (influence operations, I presume).
The thing to keep in mind is that India's government is run by Modi, a Hindu ultranationalist who wants to deport all the country's Muslims to Pakistan[0]. There's a pretty straightforward pipeline from organized crime to fascism and I wouldn't be surprised if the scammers in question here are part of Modi's power base (or part of other organizations which are part of his power base).
The only thing I could think of to fix this would be to strategically suck people out of India through generous visas for migrants who want to live in a country with functioning[1] institutions. The thing about organized crime is that it relies on having a pool of suckers to continue joining the criminal enterprise - in other words, even the scammers are themselves being scammed. This is one of the less selfish reasons why I'm an open borders fanatic, but I also have to admit that such a policy in today's era has negative political capital.
[0] Which itself has money problems because it's budget gets siphoned off by their own military and they have to beg the IMF for scraps
[1] To be clear, India's institutions still exist, they're just mildly broken.
So, scammers start using these things too (obviously), and so AI will be trying to scam AI, then they'll be like "we need to detect when our bots are talking to a bot, so they can exit the call sooner." GANWAR
My father setup his own solution for robocalls. If the phone rings more than three times it kicks the call to the fax machine. Apparently fax lines are supposed to be kept clear because of legal reasons? All I know is half the time I call I get a dialup sound as my call gets routed to the fax machine.
Right. These scam calls are not a god-given problem. Some countries do not have them in any significant amount. I suspect there is greed involved (political or corporate) that prevents this problem from getting solved.
So it's just an AI re-implementation of the Telecrapper 2000 [1]? The original site is down but there are plenty of YouTube videos [2] of it still available.
That's pretty hilarious. Amazing what you can do with just a well-crafted pre-recorded script.
There are some other Youtube videos where a guy writes these ChatGPT personalities, but those aren't as entertaining because the AI is basically just blurting out random thoughts rather than engaging in an actual conversation.
276 comments
[ 2349 ms ] story [ 1147 ms ] threadIt's like corporate avatars for hiring or cold call bots for sales.
I'd say stick to white listed numbers, but pro phones can't do that, and they are the most prone to spam.
It finally worked the other day! A robot repeated "chrysanthemum" back to me when asked. Sadly it seemed to be limited to this one single trick; as I continued my attempts to exploit it, it abruptly apologized and ended the call.
Cute, but one day I am going to get lucky and a scammer is going to get absolutely wrecked.
This is called a totem.
You’ve invented or learned a caricature to rail at which may have once been based in truth, and from time to time again approximates it, though never with the fidelity you ascribe to the original. It’s commonly done by sides in partisan polarisation, the most common being a two-mode system that pillories its picture of the other.
If you picture the person writing the totem comment, you probably have a clear idea of what they do for a living, how they dress, et cetera. Totems are why both deification and demonisation work; they’re a hack of the human ability to visualise and project.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40043630
Analogy: phantom pain is pain in a limb that was once there but now isn’t. The limb was real. It probably felt pain. But when a patient imagines pain after the limb is gone, that’s the diagnosis.
Those comments are real. The people, probably, too. Responding to them when they aren’t in the room is a separate matter.
This is the totem. You react to a misguided belief even when it’s a phantom.
If you look at two-mode polarised discussions, you’ll find both sides talking about a totem of the other, reacting to imagined preëmptions and rarely interacting with each other. The graphs separate. As a result, the preëmptions are more imagined than real. (Both in characterisation and frequency of emergence.
Note that this is perfectly normal. Kids do it. And it’s fun. It’s also easy, since instead of reacting to anything empirical or well argued you’re constructing straw men for the purpose of taking them down.
I clarified my position. The visualisation isn't the totem per se. The representation is.
> term carries a negative connotation, and therefore proves the other person (myself) correct
Nobody said you were wrong. Correct, necessary and even germane are distinct.
The above comments seem to me much like a simulacrum of how that might go. The comment exchange should have stopped much sooner.
When a big telecom does it, the second thing they do with it is to fuck up the spam detection so bad that every third phone call I make gets answered by "Daisy".
And just think about it - why would a telecom need this tech? They can already drop the spam calls and stop routing calls from the bad actor telecoms who enable the spammers. They don't do that because they prefer to collect a few cents a call from them rather than serve their customers better. It's everyone else who needs this.
Not connecting calls doesn't waste spammer money, but maybe Daisy does.
If the big telco can find 10 righteous callers from a a bad actor telecom, they should keep routing the calls.
Voicemail that is left in this generic voice mail box never makes it to their customer and the customer is completely unaware that some of their calls have been diverted.
This is the thing we screwed up for email and phone (after per call fees dropped to zero).
It's not rocket science to create systems that net to zero for common usage (balanced in-bound vs out-bound), but charge an arm and a leg for bulk senders.
If a scammer puts "FINAL NOTICE" on a solicitation they mailed with no prior relationship, I do still report it as fraud. But that's probably wishful thinking.
I doubt very seriously that the pool of people who have knowingly and intentionally and explicitly opted in/consented to telemarketing - that is, without any dark pattern involvement and with a clear and unmbiguous consent experience, is very large. In fact I think it is infinitesimal because I can’t recall seeing such a consent UX- they ALL involve dark patterns. And if you pair that with “marketer who diligently implements all state & FTC requirements and does timely and accurate processing of removal requests, I think that the 3 relationships left are web app UX testers.
I think the world would be a better place without telemarketing or email marketing. Maybe a “one email per year” limit per merchant who you have actually paid money to and not opted out of.
If the telecoms can perfectly predict the telemarketers, then I’d love it. But in practice how often is this going to block people I know from calling me? Probably not never, and then we just have to give up on phones as a reliable method of communication.
The disadvantage of email is that it doesn't work for urgent use cases, like Disneyland calling the parent of a lost child.
(Hopefully leaving voicemail keeps out of reach of spammers, I guess it's just too expensive for them ?)
I don't think any telco puts effort into stopping spammers.. I'd like them to but I don't think it's something they either can care or legally capable of fixing.
Thank you for the insight.
This is actually genius. The spammers will have blacklisted all of their targets eventually.
presumably someone is still getting charged for calls and AI -- and therefore someone is making money -- in this situation though, non?
Why?
> Influencer and reality TV star, Amy Hart, has worked with Daisy to produce a shocking video to show how she’s taking on phoney fraudsters
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy
Doubling the dwell time for a scammer will halve their profits. That could have interesting second-order effects. Perhaps it makes it not worth it for some subset?
Personally, my default was to pick up and is now if recognized contact pickup, if not and I'm expecting an unknown call, scrutinize, then if pickup, only answer with a cough or two — never "hello" or "yes" due to threat of voice cloning escalate to banks.
Spam is universally detested
My assessment is that voice calls are on the verge of going obsolete if the telcos fail to get a handle on spam. Yet the telcos behave as if they have no clue whatsoever and DGAF.
Consider: if you get harassed with a call or text you don't like, you send an SMS with that phone number to some known short code. You then receive $1 from the caller. If the caller cannot be found, the last verifiable link in the chain is responsible for paying the fine.
This would cause carriers to behave overnight, instead of allowing foreign call centers to spoof other people's real private numbers with your area code.
plus a lot of spam comes out of compromised phones, or compromised systems. what good is this if i have your phone, or just your SIM?
Where you are expecting a call and it's definitely not spam, but they're not going to be ringing from a pre-approved whitelist. Don't think they'd want to be putting $1 per call on the line and hoping for people to remember to click the right button afterwards
There are probably downsides and ways this will screw up real relationships but it will certainly increase the cost of spam.
- Every contractor (plumber etc) you hire will ask you to please add them to your contact list first so that they can message you.
- After a while of half their clients not doing that and lots of fees on their end, contractors stop providing a phone number at all, asking you to please install ContractorApp to communicate with them.
This message is from an unknown number. (Accept / Block / Charge sender $1)
It’s a boy!
That said - perhaps harder to change the name that shows up as quickly as you could leave a recorded name? :)
Still one of the best ads ever made.
I disagree about the we-adda-baby-itsa-boy issue. I don't see how that'd apply given that you can charge them $1 from the very first message.
contractors can add this to their invoices if they care.
>Every contractor (plumber etc) you hire will ask you to please add them to your contact list first so that they can message you.
This is reasonable. If they want to reach me, they should whitelist in advance instead of hoping they can randomly get through.
Best I can offer you is an in-game bonus for watching an ad.
Like if you are interested in the convo then you should be paying the other person as you are getting value from the convo.
What's the situation where you don't care about the convo but for the right price you could care, and the other party also thinks that price is reasonable? Like maybe if someone is trying to recruit you i guess, but the situations where that is true seem very few and far between (and we already have a system for that, where traditionally someone offers to buy you a meal in exchange for listening)
Marketers seem to think so, or they wouldn't waste their time calling.
Minimally targeted advertising.
Like if you assume a CPM of $2, that means $0.002 per phone call. Would you really find that acceptable?
If the answer is no, then you aren't really accepting payment,you are just blocking people with extra steps. No different than if you said you will accept a phone call for a billion dollars. You aren't really accepting something for payment if you set a price that nobody will pay.
(Sorry if I'm being blunt, attention economy participants can't be so they'd sugar coat it to such a degree that you might miss the point).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/
> "[this next bit turned out to be very controversial. there is extreme prejudice against spam solutions, especially proof-of-work.]
> It can already be used for pay-to-send e-mail. The send dialog is resizeable and you can enter as long of a message as you like. It's sent directly when it connects. The recipient doubleclicks on the transaction to see the full message. If someone famous is getting more e-mail than they can read, but would still like to have a way for fans to contact them, they could set up Bitcoin and give out the IP address on their website. "Send X bitcoins to my priority hotline at this IP and I'll read the message personally."
Every player can configure an amount of ingame money that is levied from a sender's account to deliver a message to them. It's a currency sink, so it's themed as a "tax" levied by the NPCs and its value is destroyed rather than paid to the recipient of the message.
I thought it used to default to 5 ISK (a pittance, something you can make back by shooting a single NPC pirate ship). I see some references to the default being ~2000 ISK at the time that it was changed to 0, where it is now.
Worked pretty well, imo. Players that need to be publicly contactable (people who organize public events, for instance) can turn it off easily. People who are "space famous" can crank it up to reduce targeted spam. Even at the default setting, it's effective at keeping ingame scammers from blasting the whole player list with messages (at least, the poor ones :). Doesn't apply to people you've already exchanged messages with. I think there's also some allowlisting you can do, etc.
0. https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/EVE_Mail#CONCORD_Spam_Prevent...
The idea in general seems to have been around since 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
It’s a cool idea and would work good for real world fines, too: fines that destroy the money paid instead of transfer it (to the city, the court, the police and so on). The fines would disincentivize bad behavior, while also not incentivizing the police to “go generate some crime” because it pays them.
MMT (modern monetary theory) argues that taxation isn't about "funding", it's actually about controlling inflation.
MMT is somewhat controversial.
But if those taxes go to the State of California, it's different. They don't print money, so it becomes a real debt to them. Destroying it in that case would cancel that debt and free the debtor (the Treasury) from that obligation.
You can buy jigs that hold hundreds of SIMs connected to a handful of cellular modems connected to a c&c and drip them out.
For me, this has been surprisingly effective against robocalls. Obviously this isn’t going to work against scammers who call directly, but most of the spam calls I receive start with some pre-recorded message which isn’t going to pass the menu.
Edit: s/auto/pre
It sounds surprisingly human-like, even saying "Hello?" in a slightly annoyed tone when the other person doesn't respond in time.
Another good one is for the phone to stay on hold for you. That one has been extremely valuable to me as Qantas would regularly keep me on hold for over 5 hours when I tried to get my money back for a cancelled flight. The operator would sometimes be a bit confused when I pick up, but it usually worked well and certainly beats listening to hold music for hours.
I remember being an outside sales rep for a local mom and pop wireless company in the late 90's, early aughts. We sold an automated "assistant" called Wildfire that would screen calls and stood as an intermediary between you can callers. She would answer, you would record your name and then it would call you on any number of devices you had entered. At one point, I had it calling three of my numbers (office and two mobile numbers) and at any time, you could just send people to voicemail. It was very similar to how many of the AI assistants work today. If I remember it was like $30/month, but as reps we got to use it for free which was really fun tinkering with it.
AT&T also had something like this where you could have a program they offered which would screen your calls and either connect you or you could send people directly to voicemail. It didn't have nearly the features that Wildfire had, but it was effective.
Obviously in the late 90's and early aughts, something like this wasn't really needed and after a few quarters, AT&T quietly stopped offering their service. Wildfire lived on until the mid aughts after being bought and then killed due to lack of adoption and use.
Kind of crazy these kinds of programs were pretty common before the AI assistant craze now.
Details about Wildfire here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildfire_Communications
Scammers are a stain on the reputation of India. You could argue it's unfair to tar an entire country with the same brush, but quite clearly rule of law isn't properly functioning over there and there's complicity in letting them do this. Same goes for Nigeria.
You can get away with murder in India if you're wealthy enough (e.g. the case of Jessica Lal, murdered by a politician's son in front of at least a dozen witnesses). The egregious corruption of the INC or "Congress party" (which is ideologically progressive) over many decades has created a massive voter exodus to the conservative BJP party, the majority party in India since 2014. However, the corruption and inefficiency at all levels of civil society has remained endemic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jessica_Lal
Jim Browning (the scambaiter who worked with O2 in this article) has successfully compromised several scam operations, gotten their physical address and other dox, and referred them to the police. The offices get raided, Jim gets some nice CCTV footage of the raid, the operators of the criminal enterprise get a nice perp walk... and then a month later the case is mysteriously dismissed with a bullshit reason about AI deepfakes and "IO" (influence operations, I presume).
The thing to keep in mind is that India's government is run by Modi, a Hindu ultranationalist who wants to deport all the country's Muslims to Pakistan[0]. There's a pretty straightforward pipeline from organized crime to fascism and I wouldn't be surprised if the scammers in question here are part of Modi's power base (or part of other organizations which are part of his power base).
The only thing I could think of to fix this would be to strategically suck people out of India through generous visas for migrants who want to live in a country with functioning[1] institutions. The thing about organized crime is that it relies on having a pool of suckers to continue joining the criminal enterprise - in other words, even the scammers are themselves being scammed. This is one of the less selfish reasons why I'm an open borders fanatic, but I also have to admit that such a policy in today's era has negative political capital.
[0] Which itself has money problems because it's budget gets siphoned off by their own military and they have to beg the IMF for scraps
[1] To be clear, India's institutions still exist, they're just mildly broken.
Joke aside, is this going to be cost effective? What would it cost to keep a scammer on the phone for an hour? Who will pay this bill?
[1] https://hackaday.com/2005/09/08/telecrapper-2000/
[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QlK_zHisT_A
There are some other Youtube videos where a guy writes these ChatGPT personalities, but those aren't as entertaining because the AI is basically just blurting out random thoughts rather than engaging in an actual conversation.