The full title of "Over 2,400 Voice Service Providers Face Removal for Failing to Comply with the Robocall Mitigation Database Filing Requirements" is a lot more clear.
> Removal from the database means other providers will
be prohibited from accepting call traffic from these providers.
> Can probably trade the 's' in "reqs" for the decimal point.
I was iffy about dropping the 's' from 'reqs' to get it to 79 (makes it sound like they've only violated one requirement, not multiple) but then I suppose the whole thing is that truncated/abbreviated by that point, it doesn't matter...
Lots of users of engineering notation do this.. 1M5 = 1,500,000, 22k1 = 22,100, etc. The unit takes the place of the decimal point. A missing dot doesn't change the meaning.
Exactly, putting (meaningful) characters instead of dots got really going when copy machines made some dots disappear after more than one "copy of a copy" was made.
Then when fax machines came along sometimes dots would disappear or be unclear on a single transmission.
Either way, occasionally sometimes the page would also be scattered with random dots too because of degraded photosensitive operation, or audio-frequency noise on the telephone line at the time.
And it got even more uncertain when text that is not fixed-width got within mainstream reach :\",
> As an English speaker, I'd interpret 2k4 as 2004, not 2400.
Whereas as an English speaker, I'd interpret 2k4 as 2400 because, well, that's just how it's always been in my orbits (cf resistor labelling, for example.)
Occurs to me that I could have done ">2k VSPs" and avoided the "2k4" controversy but I expect it'd just cause more arguments about whether ">2k" is valid for ">2400"...
If it is that the ROI is just real unattractive for spam calls now... I wonder if the waves are just new people trying to spam for the first time. And taking a little bit of time to figure out that it's not profitable.
If so that's not great. Because there's probably an infinite supply of people ready to waste their money trying get-rich-quick crap.
Whether it's profitable is relative. For relatively little effort anyone with a bit of tech know-how can setup a spam/scam operation. If they also happen to live in a low-income region and target high-income regions, they only need to scam a handful of people a month to get a decent ROI. The amount of vulnerable people is unfortunately high, especially among the elderly.
Jim Browning on YouTube does great work exposing this scum. There are huge call center operations in India and Pakistan, and the local authorities are useless if not complicit.
This will only get more popular and profitable once AI tools get more accessible. There's no need to have a physical location and hire humans if they can just launch a army of bots that have perfect accents and can follow a conversation without deviating from the script. The next generation of robocalls is just starting.
I tend to agree about the lists. I get a couple of spam calls and texts a week, which seems to be much, much less than what most of my friends get.
My father gets multiple spam calls every day. He lets them all go to voice mail, so nothing about his behavior encourages them to keep calling. Yet they keep coming.
I've had my cell number for about 15 years, and for another 10 years prior it was a land line, so 25 years in total. My father's cell number is only about 10 years old. So despite having a much older phone number, I get way less spam calls and texts than he does.
Part of that may be what lists we're on. Another reason may be that for the past 20 years, when ordering things online, 99% of the time I give a fake phone number. Companies claim they want it in case there is a problem delivering your order, but even before I started doing this, I never had a company call about an order they couldn't deliver. Once or twice they emailed me about an order they couldn't fulfill (out of stock, etc.), but I do give them a legit email. The 1% of the time I give a real phone number is when I'm dealing with a serious transaction, e.g. a bank or insurance or medical company.
That is really good, also because your tracking cookies get bound to your phone number and then market segmentation companies then use your phone number to direct ads to your tracking IDs. To them, your phone number is like your SSN.
> He lets them all go to voice mail, so nothing about his behavior encourages them to keep calling. Yet they keep coming.
I mean, he lets them go to voice mail. Pick up and set the phone down might use more time on their calls and get the line marked as worse target. But I still get several calls a week, so it's not perfect.
I still get regular spam calls and spam texts. Maybe half the texts are obvious scams (make $1000s a day from home reshipping stolen goods) and the other texts are conversation starters that shady telcos can explain away as plausibly harmless (but are likely to be the first step in deliberate pig butchering scams).
My favorite time waster story was an old guy who took a scrap junk car from me (his retirement career).
Said some slick guy in a suit showed up on his farm property unannounced and made him an offer on it.
Owner was so annoyed that he smiled and told the guy to come back tomorrow and they'd talk it over.
Guy shows up the next (sunny) day with a colleague... both in suits... in summer... in the southeast US.
Owner proceeds to walk them 6km+ around the perimeter of the property while dangling the possibility he'd be willing to sell.
Then finally ends things with "But you know what it comes down to? My dog was born on this property, and she's pretty old now. I don't think it'd be kind to move her. So I appreciate your time, but don't think I'm interested in selling."
Was impressed at how much time and ingenuity retired folks have to fuck with people, just because they can.
I may be atypical because I started a company and unfortunately used my personal cell is several places which got into sales databases. And made a political donation.
For me, it got so bad (multiple calls per day) I've stopped answering anything that isn't in my contacts already.
I think it's mainly a millennial and gen z thing-- older generations still answer all calls, at least those that aren't into tech. I think it's just easier to realize that anyone not in your contacts will either leave a voicemail or text you if it's that important.
We ignore it too. But I can tell the ones who do answer. They get extremely irate if you do not pick up when they call. As if it is their personal line to you and you should drop everything for them. I dump them into voicemail too.
I'm mid Gen X, and I can't imagine wasting my time answering all calls. I have my phone set to silence any unknown numbers. I'm not going to answer any call that isn't in my contact list. Voicemail a coherent message and I'll call you back and add you to my contacts.
I think it must vary a lot between numbers. My girlfriend gets a huge amount of spam calls. I get almost none, and we're on the same network. I do get a ton of spam texts though.
The robocalls are more rare for sure. But there’s been a huge uptick in shitty recruiters calling me with lowball offers for shitty jobs. I’ve had to remove my phone number from my resumes and delist it from indeed and stuff but it doesn’t seem to be helping. I don’t know how they’re finding me and they refuse to tell me.
I apologize for the commercial plug, but when I switched off of CenturyLink and onto Ooma last year my robo / spam calls went way down. Part of that is that they have some filtering options, part of that is that I believe they provide telemetry to something akin to NoMoRobo.
About 7 weeks ago I picked up a new AT&T SIM to use for data backup while my fiber connection was out. Never placed _any_ calls and only 1 text to my current mobile number to capture the new number. I get 4-6 calls per day, most labelled "Spam Risk". This period included the last couple of weeks of the US election and the volume then was much higher from what I am guessing was robo-war-dialing election campaigns.
Even though I'm in an older generation and prefer voice over text I have adopted the habit of only picking up callers that I know I want to speak to.
I get very little phone or SMS spam. All SMS spam gets replied to with "STOP", which, for most of the SMS services, is a strike against the spammer. I've been on the Do Not Call list since it started.
Email spam is repetitive enough that the usual Thunderbird filters work.
If a spam email has an unsubscribe link, I click on that and add the sender to the block list. If it doesn't have an unsubscribe link, I try to find out which service sent it and send them a notice of a CAN-SPAM law violation. The usual suspects (Mailchump, SpamGrid, etc.) do terminate accounts for that, to prevent being blocked themselves.
In Twilio[1] a "STOP" reply is an automatic add to blocklist. Their user doesn't have control over how that is handled. I wouldn't be surprised if other providers have the same controls in place behind the scenes.
I've started to get spam via iMessage lately which I assume avoids most automated scrutiny that may apply to bulk SMS. Usually in the form of "your UPS/USPS package address needs to be verified" or something.
My iMessage is configured to send read receipts, so I quickly bounce the setting before opening the message to click the "Report Junk" link (maybe it's pointless). It would be nice to mark things as spam/junk without having to open them, perhaps I will just delete them since iMessage has been a malware vector in the past.
perhaps I will just delete them since iMessage has been a malware vector in the past.
And that’s when you will discover that you’ve been wasting your time because when you delete them, you’ll get a dialog saying “…is not in your contacts” with the option to “delete and report junk”. You never needed to open the messages to begin with.
Maybe the FCC should explain this to some of the political spam culprits using hefty fines, because while those folks claim they honor "STOP" they send every campaign with a different number and the "STOP" message doesn't matter because they're clearly all meant to be "one-and-done" spam campaigns.
Political ads/calls are exempt?! Seriously?! Shit! I didn't know that. And that explains why I get two-dozen calls per day prior to a major election. So annoying.
Could you share some advice on finding the service if they're missing an unsubscribe link? I have been reporting these kinds of emails to their domain registrars, but if I can do more I would like to.
I've not been asked about my car's extended warranty for months now.
I think the FCC finally shutting down just one or two blatant bad actors made a massive difference in robocalls. It just took them months (years?) to do it.
I had a huuuuuuuuuuge increase the past couple months (10-20 a day). Almost all medicare fraud scams. They seem to be tapering down a bit (2-5 a day). It's interesting, because they have all my info (where I live, my full name, etc.), but somehow not my age? Because if they knew my real age, they shouldn't be calling me for medicare fraud scams... I wonder if maybe what's happening is that the people selling leads lists for scammers are willfully omitting age information, so they can charge more for a larger list which is not obviously 50%+ garbage scam leads for medicare fraud.
I also had an uptick in text spam (used to be very rare until maybe 9 months ago, then it became about 1-2 a day, now it's back down to just a few a week).
I still get multiple a day. Have had multiple a day for months (maybe years? My call log doesn’t go back far enough to know for sure).
I can’t block them because they are different numbers every time, so I have all unknown incoming calls set to go straight to voicemail.
I don’t even know what they are calling for. If I ever try to answer there is only silence on the line. But I haven’t even done that in months- hoping the calls would eventually stop. (They haven’t)
One infuriating thing is that there is some sort of “verified” checkmark in my call log for some numbers? Or maybe not verified, but “valid number?” Why are they even allowing non-verified calls through? It wouldn’t stop the problem, as 1/4 of my spam calls have the icon anyway. But it would help, surely.
I guess, it's a remote spam farm. The machine calls you, and when you answer, it calls a remote spammer who works from home, so it can take them a while to answer. I guess, it's a clean comfy job: they work from home even without profession or education, maybe even subscribed to several spam farms.
I thought my girlfriend had abandoned me. My most frequent phone call by far was from a nice sounding recorded lady informing me that the extended warranty I never bought on a car that I never owned was in danger of expiring and this was my last chance to renew it. Ever. She would sometimes call me three times per day with that message but I haven't heard from her in months. I was afraid that my last chance had come and gone, or that she is no longer that into me. But it's just the FCC coming between us.
That's OK, life goes on. Love finds a way. I met another nice lady on X. She cares deeply about the diversification of my crypto portfolio. I don't know why I keep attracting women who want to take care of me, I just do. It may be my gravitas. But the three letter agencies are watching so this time I'll have to move fast.
Those "SECOND NOTICE" scam letters that aren't from my bank but have my bank's name on them make me mad. I report them to the USPS as mail fraud, an act which I find therapeutic.
I haven't had a junk call since 2023 (aside from political polling) but I receive a fake usps text from international numbers pretty much daily.
google's messages app is pretty good at corralling them into a spam folder but I do peep in there every now and then. I hope that whatever provider is allowing these gets disconnected.
I've been getting a ton of those USPS and Amazon shipping and return related phishing texts. The first couple of times I genuinely looked at them but they always have bitly URLs and sometimes they have little thoughts at the end like "May the day ahead bring you peace and clarity, from USPS!" Which is so funny to me because it reveals a complete cultural unawareness of how American companies communicate.
I haven't had to handle any scam calls or texts since I switched to Android. I had no idea the feature was so effective. They should advertise it more.
Yes, because the calls and texts get classified into a "Spam & blocked" folder that I can go glance at if I feel bored. Some feature of either Android or the Google Pixel phone is doing this.
I get no calls anymore, but I attribute it to pruning where my contact info is distributed and using the spam filters available on call/text.
My father got (no hyperbole) 90 calls a day, consistently, until I realized why he wasn’t answering his phone. He had used zero of the tools that the cell service provider and smartphone OS made available to him. Additionally, he likes talking to people, so he wouldn’t be “mean” to tell callers/testers to take him off their list.
Exponential increase over the past decade. Currently I get 5-10 calls per day. I'll get the same robocall from the same LA phone number (I've never lived anywhere near LA) three times a day for a month advertising roof repair or some shit like that (I don't own a home).
I almost never get spam calls yet I started to receive them almost daily preceding and after the election. Fortunately iOS is great at filtering them. I'd just like a feature to not see them at all, they don't deserve a single missed call notification or unread flag on my device.
That's definitely true. I answer each one that I can to get a Guage on their business model and then make fun of them for how much they spent on my lead.
I think they are all different and resell to eachother because they keep calling no matter how horribly I've trolled them day after day.
Most other scams never call back after my trolling.
I'm wondering if the Medicare calls are the "setup your own turnkey business" flavor of the day.
PSA - use a free carrier lookup website to see where your spam calls and texts come from. Mine mostly come from Bandwidth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_Inc.), Sinch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinch_AB), and other such platforms with APIs. It appears these companies have very poor anti abuse practices. When I contacted them for help they basically refused to reveal how my number was obtained, what their practices were in establishing consent, and did no more than block one specific number each time from contacting me. Sometimes they claimed they’re just a wholesale reseller and have no obligations to take more action. They didn’t even respond to my repeated request to preserve data and communications relating to these repeated abuse cases. These companies should be shut down and their executives should be personally fined.
By looking up the carrier you can then find the right company to complain to via their reporting process, if they have one. And additionally you can file a report to the FTC and FCC that mentions them.
EDIT: The idea is that you complain to the company whose platform is sending you spam, the regulatory agencies at https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/ and https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/, your own cell phone carrier by forwarding text spam to 7726, and that will result in actions that hopefully will address that one situation but also collectively reduce spam for everyone. Without identifying which platform sent you the spam, you cannot know which company to go complain to (they usually have a reporting tool on their website). And you can name them in your complaints to the FCC and FTC.
I’m assuming that you search for the originating phone number of spam callers? It was unclear to me from context how this would help in the manner you suggested, for blocking or reducing spam calls.
It does exist but you have to take the 5 minutes to fill out a form. You can find it at https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov and click “Phone issues”. I also suggest simultaneously reporting to the FTC via https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ and click “Report now”.
You can also forward spam text messages to 7726 in the US (goes to your cell phone carrier), which is very effective because the carriers have low tolerance for these issues and also train their own anti spam off this data.
I do submit a complaint for each instance. I’ve sent over a thousand now. Hopefully it’s useful data to someone.
My intent isn’t to reverse-spam the FCC though; the complaint form just only accepts one phone number at a time. Amusingly I’ve discovered that it’s possible to receive a higher volume of spam than the FCC’s rate limits allow reporting.
Don't most spam calls/texts these days use fake caller/sender IDs anyway?
> It appears these companies have very poor anti abuse practices. When I contacted them for help they basically refused to reveal how my number was obtained
How would a service provider know how your customer obtained your number?
But you reporting that you're receiving unwanted calls/texts from one of their customers should of course still trigger some action on their side – if indeed that's the number that contacted you, per the above.
Search as I may, I can’t for the life of me find the reason why. Does the robocalling industry have particular pull in Nebraska for some reason, or as far as we can tell are they just wanting to go their own way?
The explanation someone gave me years ago was that midwesterners can speak to northerners and southerners without needing a translator, and the cost of labor in rural Nebraska and Kansas (which also had a ton of call centers at the time) is low.
Sorry, I feel dumb for asking, but what does “voice service providers” mean here? Like, Verizon and TMobile etc etc? Can’t be because there aren’t 2,411 cell companies.
I assume any company offering VoIP services that interact with phone numbers (Direct inward/outward dialing, DID etc) is potentially included. E.g., virtual PBX, Twilio and so on.
My googling kind of indicates these are VoIP providers. But it still seems weird there are this many.
My vague guess is that these many providers have existed primarily to facilitate robocalling - to force the FCC to play wack-a-mole to get rid of them and FCC is now acting on them en masse, which might be more effective. But people who know this stuff might pipe up on the question.
Verizon and T-Mobile primarily provide their voice services using cell towers.
But voice services existed before cell phones!
They were delivered over copper cables between phone exchanges and people's homes. Some people and especially businesses still have these 'landlines'.
I would imagine that most customers of the companies on this list use neither landlines nor cell phones to access their voice services. Instead they likely use some sort of IP-based voice protocol like SIP or IAX.
A voice/wireless provider can abuse a lot of things and get away with it now. Even if it is an obvious problem, the FCC doesn't do anything about specific complaints unless you hire an attorney to file a formal complaint. All of the wireless providers that sell cheap wireless can terminate your account and say they don't know you and there's nothing you can do. Actual telecoms that have skin in the game (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc) can't do that due to there is usually a state/local regulator that can intervene.
> there is usually a state/local regulator that can intervene.
I was pretty shocked that when I complained to my state regulator about Verizon completely ignoring an issue with my business lines, I quickly got a call from a VP at Verizon grovelling and asking me what he could do for me. I said I needed my issue fixed, and then made what I thought was a crazy unrelated request- I wanted FIOS run all the way down the street to my business, and I'd been told previously that Verizon had no plans to expand FIOS in my area. Well, they fixed my issue within an hour, and within two weeks, they rolled trucks, ran the fiber down the street, and we had FIOS service up and running. They were obviously good and afraid of the state regulator.
If this leader is the good guy, why did it take them 4 years to do anything? That's a poor measure of progress.
The best thing they could do is make it impossible to spoof numbers or at least be able to reject them. Even then, you should be able to block anyone calling from a number that you cannot call back.
Not only that, but the companies being disconnected have been ignoring the FCC since February. They were given a new deadline in April that they also ignored. Why did it take an additional seven months to start the process of cutting them off?!
Probably because the incoming administration actually has credible possibility of firing public servants who just steal and waste tax dollars.
For once in the modern(?) history of the Republican party, the incoming administration is hellbent on pursuing one of the party's core values: Small government. You bet public servants who want to keep enjoying the nectar will frantically try to make themselves look useful.
Listen - without fail, the folks who want to make huge budget cuts because of the face value of certain programs, do not understand what those programs actually do and how the budgets add up. Government waste exists, but not in the quantities that detractors claim it does.
Bookmark this comment, and check on how you feel about everything in 4 years.
"Small government" is dumb for any highly developed country, and the people that want that are about to find out this harsh reality. The very wealthy and big corporations probably benefit - for a while - until things start happening like CEO's being assassinated in the street. Good thing stuff like that is not happening.
You don't need to tear down the government to put an end to deficit spending.
Thank you for demonstrating:
> Listen - without fail, the folks who want to make huge budget cuts because of the face value of certain programs, do not understand what those programs actually do and how the budgets add up.
The federal government budget is not a household budget. There's no such thing as having money or not having money. It's a mixed economy and they're the command economy part of it.
(This isn't true of state/local governments, those have limited budgets.)
More to the point, if you shut down 100% of everything that looks like spending it wouldn't save anything important. The federal government is an insurance agency and all the money goes to Medicare/Social Security payments and military wages. You could shut down the miltary I guess.
>The federal government budget is not a household budget. There's no such thing as having money or not having money.
Entire countries default fairly often, the USA is no exception if such a fate befalls us. We've already had our security ratings dropped once before.
>More to the point, if you shut down 100% of everything that looks like spending it wouldn't save anything important.
So you're saying reducing expenditures won't reduce expenditures. Also, war is peace and freedom is slavery; I implore you to consider WTF you're actually saying.
>The federal government is an insurance agency and all the money goes to Medicare/Social Security payments and military wages. You could shut down the miltary I guess.
As cited[1] by another commenter, Social Security + Medicare account for 36% of the budget with the military accounting for 14%. Together they're 50% of the budget.
Meanwhile, we are $35.46 trillion dollars in debt.[2]
These crazy numbers must be balanced sooner or later, and the costs to do so will be cheaper the sooner we do it. Every single part of the government needs to be cut and likely in most cases eliminated outright, that includes Social Security and Medicare and the military.
Spending even more money (that we don't have) in the hopes that we get more money and more efficient government as we've been repeatedly doing for fucking decades is a fool's errand.
The bottom line if we are borrowing money to make ends meet is: We. Do. Not. Have. Money.
Tear the government down until that red ink is no more. It's stupid that even this basic piece of financial logic is considered crazy and controversial.
There is a reason I didn't link your comment, though I'm not sure if you realize we are in agreement: Slashing Social Security and Medicare (along with Health) would go a long way towards balancing the sheets.
But of course, even those three combined are still 49% (less than half) of government expenditures. Even adding the military still only accounts for 63%.
Just FY2024 alone we were $1.83 trillion dollars short.[1] Cuts must happen from everywhere in government in order to bring sense back into the balance sheets. Also importantly, cuts must happen in order to make tax increases actually palatable to the electorate.
Cuts alone won't balance the cash flow, the revenue (taxes, et al.) must also increase and for that to happen taxes must be hiked and for that to be palatable the government must first lead by example in fiscal discipline by cutting expenditures wholesale.
DOGE is an unprecedented first step because their job is to bring the presumed-frivolous-by-some nature of government expenditures to light and prove them frivolous period. Actual cuts must come from the House who are tasked with the power of the purse and the Executive who are tasked with executing the budget, DOGE doesn't have any authority itself.
For once Republicans are declaring they really will pursue Small Government, I want to see that happen because we've never so much as tried. I'm sick and tired of Big Government and want to see another world, even if cuts will be fucking painful.
> Entire countries default fairly often, the USA is no exception if such a fate befalls us. We've already had our security ratings dropped once before.
The funny thing about this is how little happens to them when they do. Like Argentina's supposed to be the worst case scenario? The country best known for eating a lot of beef? You don't see them being sold to Brazil or anything.
> These crazy numbers must be balanced sooner or later, and the costs to do so will be cheaper the sooner we do it. Every single part of the government needs to be cut and likely in most cases eliminated outright, that includes Social Security and Medicare and the military.
Even if you want to be a heartless economic optimizer, your goal should be aiming to make the economy bigger. Making old people starve isn't going to do that. Neither is letting Russia conquer Alaska.
Austerity like this is European thinking - and its result is those are poor countries, whereas we're #1 because we don't do that.
> Meanwhile, we are $35.46 trillion dollars in debt.[2]
It's basically the current cost to us to borrow money. It's up a little, which does need to be dealt with, but it isn't historically high.
The way we should deal with it is a VAT or DBCFT. (And that's a Republican proposal from 2016.)
> The bottom line if we are borrowing money to make ends meet is: We. Do. Not. Have. Money.
We aren't borrowing money because we have to - we do it because it lets us sell bonds to other countries, which makes them subjects of the US financial empire; they have to use our banks. It's that global reserve currency thing.
(Technically, inflation is caused by the Fed, if you believe Milton Friedman. But printing money requires the Fed to raise interest rates to match. So either they raise interest rates and cause unemployment, or they don't raise them and cause inflation.)
The joke is, the federal government isn't big due to employee headcount, it's big due to all the shit it spends money on. The headcount is only 2.87 million. Cutting that headcount isn't going to do a thing for "small government".
Meanwhile, between NY State and NY City, there are a total of almost 1 million government employees. I can tell where the inefficiency lies and it's not the fed headcount lol.
But who knows, maybe they'll finally cut social security and medicare that makes up 55% of the federal budget. We'll have rampant homelessness on every street from old people, just like the pre-1800s, but that's the vibe they are going for.
No, they want to pass $3 trillion in tax breaks by extending TCJA.
DOGE is 100% fake. If it was real Musk would be appointed at the real thing, OMB, which is an actual agency. He's just going to put up reports saying they should fire individual people for being too woke (or trying to prosecute him for his habit of harassing young women at SpaceX) and nobody is going to read it.
But that one isn't real either because government spending is controlled by Congress. The executive branch has little power to reduce it.
Probably not. Combatting unsolicited calls has always had broad bipartisan support. The law that this action is based on was passed in 2019 during Trump's first term, and the regulations in 2020 by a Republican controlled FCC.
ah yes, because nothing screams ‘free speech’ like interrupting dinner with a pitch for extended car warranties. truly the hill to die on for entrepreneurial rights. i say this jokingly but also with some truth
The normal complaint about the EU's approach to regulation is that it's too vague and companies won't do business there in case they're found in breach of the vague laws.
In practice, at least on this subject, this just isn't a problem. I can't link to the directive that outlaws spam phone calls (it predates GDPR) but the telecoms clearly get told to stop facilitating them and yet I've never heard of a company that claims they were erroneously barred from the market.
Holy moly, chill. There was no criticism, nitpicking, or “telling others what to do”. What an absurd extrapolation. It was a polite and harmless observation—one that I would have appreciated getting myself, by the way—on a funny comment that requires prior knowledge to understand the joke.
And yeah, you are overanalysing. Despite having read and enjoyed Mitnick’s Ghost in the Wires¹ I had absolutely forgotten 2600 was the specific frequency and had to hop around a few links to recall what this was about. Who would self-congratulate on something so small?
Hacker News is ostensibly about curiosity, so explaining references is absolutely on topic. And being lazy is a hacker trait, I personally dislike when I don’t pursue something interesting because there was no easy link to follow.
The irony in your comment is something else. Don’t assume bad faith.
I'm in Northern Europe and lately spam calls, and especially spoofing from random peoples numbers have become so bad i know multiple who stopped taking any calls, or even changed their phone numbers because they got too many calls, or angry people called them because their number was spoofed.
To me the whole system is archaic - i know gen z would never ever take a call from someone they don't know, or even call each other - it's simply not something you do - it would be like reading your spam mails.
And i'm coming to the same conclusion, answering random people is naive.
A girl got lost. She wanted to call her mom, but the girl had left her phone at home. So she went to the library to phone her mom. The librarian refused to let the girl make a call. [N.B. Yes, the librarian got in hot water for that move]
The girl eventually convinced a stranger to let the girl call her mom using the stranger's phone.
The mom, who was frantically trying to locate her daughter, took the call even though it was from an unknown number.
How many people would make an exception in that case of an unknown number calling?
>> The mom, who was frantically trying to locate her daughter, took the call even though it was from an unknown number.
>> How many people would make an exception in that case of an unknown number calling?
Duh! What a stupid question. Almost everyone in extreme distress due to losing their child would take anything, call, stranger knocking at the door, medium talking to the ether. Anything! :)
I get this is an Idiocracy-level type of question: "If you have one bucket that contains 2 gallons and another bucket that contains 7 gallons, how many buckets do you have?"
That's the point - all the people who said, "Not in contact list, do not pickup" (including me), did they think about an exception list?
I know I didn't. Short-sighted reaction after getting inundated with mandarin-speaking spammers.
I don't know what the globally correct answer is. But "never pickup" seems too extreme (even if the person, calling on the unknown number, leaves a voicemail, if you can't reach them with a return call, what then?)
Well at least where I live, the obvious exception to "don't pickup unknown numbers" rule is shipping services. Some of my online orders will arrive by courier and their drivers will call me when they arrive near my flat so I go out and pick my package. Completely unknown random numbers although companies do have the option to associate phone numbers with caller ID so I can see it's a delivery service. But by some reason (cost, convenience, no idea), they don't.
I can usually infer from the fact that I made an online order, sometimes they'll send me an SMS prior to sending but not always. Anyhow I did have my share of picking spam calls because of the necessity to ignore the "no unknowns" rule while expecting a package.
Overall I don't get that many calls yet that I'd have to configure the phone to reject ALL numbers not in the phone book. But call spam is definitely increasing, along with plain scam. I almost got my card stolen by a post office spoofing scam. And recently my bank cancelled my card and had to get a new one after someone from US tried to buy jewelry with it (I live in Romania) - probably leaked from one of the many online services I pay for. Now I switched to single-one-time-use cards from Revolut for all non-recurring payments, unfortunately it's too much of a hassle to do so for recurring ones. And with increasing security vulnerabilities my only protection is separate bank accounts and keeping only small amounts of money on the account linked to the debit card. No credit, only debit.
A personalized Viking Raider takes your package on a saga to your chosen destination, looting and pillaging on the way while yelling battlecries and occasionally throwing an axe.
Admittedly, I have to let some things through because I'm a freelance musician and if I don't take a call, the client will move on to the next person on their list. But at least leaving a voice mail means the caller doesn't know if they've reached a live line or not.
I get at least 10 calls a day lol. They are all from India. Insurance scams, life insurance scams, you name it. I had to switch to only accept calls from known numbers. The rest are just sent to voicemail. I will probably miss on something important, but I have had it.
I recently did the same thing, as 95% of my incoming call volume in a week was spam calls. It's been great. The friction I feel is when interacting with ephemeral contacts like contractors, etc. I've had to try to be diligent about adding them as contacts if I expect a call back, or hoping they leave a voicemail.
It's sad there really isn't much you can do about it. I tried do-not-call lists, answering and telling them to stop calling me, reporting them - all was apparently a waste of time.
In our modern world, every last vestige of trust is being abused. Government bureaucracy is an increasingly-visible problem, and a lot of it is insulation to protect lobbied interests, but some of it is a good-faith reaction to the way various actors abuse trust in a market. Eventually, there will be no trust left in society, whether due to law or personal technology. Apple would do well to take the lead on better ways to handle this on the personal side.
I pick them up on purpose, bate them, waste their time, call them back, waste more time. It can be fun sometimes, had one hanging on me the other day, I was laughing so hard. "Stop calling us!", "Stop calling you?! Bro stop calling and scamming people!" lol... Im also always looking out for AI phone systems as well. It's real fun messing with those, specially when you can get them off the rails.
yup, anyone who knows me knows to email if they want a reply, and that I only take calls by appointment. Leave a message and I might call back, otherwise my phone's not on me, doesn't ring if the caller isn't in my contacts and doesn't even have cell reception most of the time.
I've wondered more than once if our contact information should be more like Apple's hidden emails - generated for the specific person or business we want to be able to contact us, and revocable - with a public fallback which is expected to go to a voicemail of some sort.
My personal data has been part of 2 major leaks so I'd definitely pay for this feature. I already use a service which generates random emails and forwards it to my primary email address so having such a service for phone numbers would be a great idea.
It is an immutable law of commerce that any effort (be it legal, technical or otherwise) to protect people from obnoxious and/or harmful behavior by businesses will be fought tooth and nail by obnoxious and/or harmful businesses.
Exactly. They want to only have direct personal emails so that if someone is a spammer they can easily be blocked/banned. And so that there are consequences for spamming. This is sort of the same principle as KYC.
GenX here and I'm the same - I always hang up on an unknown caller, and consider calling someone without texting first to be rude.
I don't think it's a generation thing, I think it's that what we generally consider normal has changed, but that some people got left behind in the old normal.
It’s definitely not rude to call someone without asking first. If you don’t want to answer the call then don’t and if it’s important I’ll text or leave a voicemail.
I’m saying that if two people have each other in their contacts lists and are on friendly terms, it’s not rude to call them if you need to talk to them.
Maybe I misunderstood, though. Sounds like you were talking about cold calling someone you don’t know. I agree that’s rude if the person is not expecting random inbound calls or isn’t in a professional context were there’s an expectation of receiving a call, and has been for generations.
Yeah, it's subtle. There are friends I can call out of the blue no problem, and others that I definitely need to text first. Generally determined by how well I know them, or in what context I met them. If it's someone I haven't called before, I'd consider it rude to just call them without texting first.
And, obviously, in a work/professional/commercial setting it's always OK to call if they've given you their number. It feels weird, but it's OK.
Delivery drivers/taxis just text me when calling fails. The upsides far outweigh the downsides of blocking all calls not in my contacts. Humans and institutions adapt to new normals. Some just slower than others.
> I don't think it's a generation thing, I think it's that what we generally consider normal has changed, but that some people got left behind in the old normal.
Isn't that the definition of a "generational thing"?
Now I have to think every time, is this someone I have to text first? Or do they consider texting then calling redundant?
Anyhow, I think both are important communication techniques, adults should be able to do remote direct verbal and async written.
I take "generational" to mean different behavior patterns in different current generations. Of course, behaviors and norms can also change for most people over time.
I (in Germany) still wonder why I’m lucky. I’m not complaining, I’d like to keep it this way. But my phone number is relatively ancient, as it’s still the same I got with my first phone around 22 years ago (maybe almost exactly? I think I got it for Christmas when I was 16 :D), and it even was included in the Facebook leak a while ago.
After the FB leak, I got a maybe 6-8 spam calls over the next month, and that was it again. It’s maybe 1-2 per year, and they are easy to recognize because they call from different countries.
I thought it was maybe Germany having stricter regulations, but people on Reddits /r/de do complain about spam calls, so no idea.
Experiences seem to differ a lot. In the US, I only have a cell phone so I have to give out the number and I only get junk calls once a month or so. It's certainly not in the disable incoming calls category. (Although I also suspect that different people have different tolerances and different perspectives on people being able to reach them from possibly unknown numbers.)
Easy, call via some voip implementation or another i often have internet access when i dont have phone service, not rarely have service without internet and therefore voip is already more relible. Moreover, its also quite clear who is calling me, so spoofing isn't viable. cellular based calls are dead and belong buried.
Not all would, but most worthwhile clients support end to end encryption, or some form of authentication which is time consuming to circumvent, meaning it becomes quite difficult to efficiently spoof random identities.
Phone calls now produce JSON Web Tokens that identify users with cryptographic signatures. This was codified around 2018 by the IETF, SIP Forum, and ATIS.
So the public phone system now supports it, but the problem is that not all providers support it yet, which fundamentally weakens the system. Of course, you can’t just add a new “protocol version” to an over-100 year old phone system with zero time to do a migration.*
But now that it’s been a few years, we are reaching a point where, at least for the US, the FCC wants to ban any provider who hasn’t added support.
Are the signatures available to the end user? I would love to set up a call screener that only accepts verified calls, as most spam uses spoofed numbers. I'm assuming that the major players implement the protocol at least .. I'm ok if the filter rejects things that aren't real land lines or cell phones.
In general "hosted" services will hide the actual token from the end user, though they may offer either filtering features or the ability to tag calls in the Caller ID based on their signature.
Trunking services designed to feed in to a customer-controlled PBX will usually offer either the same sorts of filtering/tagging or complete passthrough of the token.
This is only possible if the call transits through all IP networks. If the call at any point goes over TDM, and out of band shaken is not implemented, then the signature is lost.
End to end authenticated calls is the ideal state, but I don't think we're fully there yet.
Which country? I am in Finland and have had the same number for over 20 years. It is publicly listed. I receive maybe 1-2 marketing calls a month and less than one SMS scam per year. I am somewhat restrcitive filling in my contact details when I don't expect any real business. I only use deposable email addresses, but that should be completely unrelated.
Sweden here, and I get less than one spamm call per year I would say, likely from abroad since in Sweden you can easily opt-out of marketing calls, except from companies where you are already a customer, which can be annoying enough.
My work mobile number is listed on the company website. I need to answer unknown calls from anywhere in the world, although I only get them every two months or so.
I can easily look through my whole call history. This year I seem to have had about six spam calls, and for the first time I bothered to work out how to block a number on Android — three of the calls were from the same number within a few days of each other.
I'm curious how this works in the USA for people that need to answer work calls — does the receptionist at a large company find 9 out of 10 calls coming in are spam? In some countries there are specific ranges for different types of numbers (all UK mobile phone numbers begin with 7, all numbers beginning with 3 are businesses/etc) which allows the spammer some basic filtering, but that's not the case in the USA.
That's your answer right there. Finland is a small country with a very niche language of just about 5M people - it's too expensive to teach people Finnish good enough to convincingly scam off the elderly, not enough marks to return that investment, and you need a sizable population of poor and desperate/dumb people to act unknowingly as money mules.
In contrast, for English language scams, you got 340 million Americans, 68 million Brits and dozens if not hundreds of millions of people speaking primarily English in former colonies (India, Australia) that are potential marks. And to make it better for Indian scammers, people there are already used to Indian call center accents so their alarm bells don't go off immediately.
For German language scams, it's 84M in Germany, 9M in Austria and 4.4 million German speakers in Switzerland. For us, it's mostly scams based in Turkey, because there are a lot of Turks who learn German because they have relatives here or their parents had a stint in the 60s-90s.
We've also had a couple generations of folks trained to treat 'foreign' sounding speakers as authoritative, due to most call center and support work being shuffled to non-US-based places. Calling a 'local' cable company and getting someone in Phillipines or India giving support is the norm, and many folks are now accustomed to giving details and account authorization for things to people who sometimes can't form coherent or natural-flowing sentences.
Just read [1] that our local telecom authorities (NKOM) report good progress when it comes to preventing people from abusing Norwegian telephone numbers to spam/scam Norwegians.
In France since the first of October you can't spoof a French phone number anymore. (Edit: at least with the existing ways of spoofing. I'm sure it's a matter of time before someone hacks an operator and signs their calls through them.)
Anecdotally, I haven't had any spam call.
>To me the whole system is archaic - i know gen z would never ever take a call from someone they don't know, or even call each other
I suspect folks in Gen Z are also less concerned with calls from medical/emergency/etc. services. That said, habits have certainly shifted. With very few exceptions, I'm not going to make a personal call out of the blue at this point.
I get up to ten a day or something like that. It used to be a smaller number of actual people. I’d answer it to listen to them, counsel/encourage them, and tell them about Jesus Christ. Even the scammers might in rare cases change their lives.
They’re almost all AI calls now. The AI’s force a specific progression, are rude, and will argue with you. Some are programmed to claim to be human. It’s usually the same AI’s selling the same products connecting me to the same telemarketers. Some know my voice.
I can’t stand robocalls because nothing good comes from it either way. I don’t get to encourage new people. Their sales hurt by contacting the same people for stuff they’ve already been disqualified for. If I heard new offerings, I might buy or donate. For example, one was St. Jude’s reminder which I responded to on their web site.
Others are taking action. There’s regulatory penalties for repeated calls, calls outside a certain time, etc. You need to be on the do not call list to be sure. You can send the companies a cease and desist or a lawsuit in small claims under the TCPA. There’s law firms semi-automating that, too. If in the U.S., use that if they keep harassing you.
One day years ago back when our desks still had phones on them someone called back and they had spoofed my desk number as their call back. Took a bit to get down to that because I had no idea if it was someone in the company or not trying to reach me. (We checked into to desks at the time I think so the number could have been forwarded or listed as mine for the day at the time I think)
The problem is not that the phone system is old or "archaic", or that it uses old technologies - rather, the system is as bad as it is, because it's been ravaged by a cancer - a cancer on modern society known as advertising[0].
All of this has happened before, and it will happen again.
Any new media, any form of communications we invent, develops this cancer as it grows into mainstream awareness. The more people a new tool can reach, the more rewarding it becomes to marketers and salesmen, who all flock to it - and as they do, they accelerate the growth of the medium while also displacing and degrading the intended/legitimate usages of it. Soon enough, the medium turns into barren wasteland full of threats to users' sanity and wallets. Only once it goes so bad that people stop using the medium, and/or find a better alternative, do things get better - the cancer dies off as its nourishment supply, i.e. the audience, goes elsewhere. But the disease follows them there. And, if didn't inflict terminal damage to the old medium, chances are that old medium will experience a second spring[1], albeit in a much more diminished shape, becoming a niche hobby or internal technical tool[1].
Advertising is what destroyed AM/FM radio (remains a niche). It's what destroyed outdoor information displays (now existing only to show ads). It's what denies us beautiful vistas (all obstructed by billboards). It's what killed OTA TV, then cable TV[2]. It's what killed e-mail[3]. It's what killed the phone system, and it's what will kill any new thing we move to.
This problem will not go away until we start treating the actual disease - advertising. And by treating I mean the equivalent of radiation therapy[4]; anything else, anything narrowly targeted, leaves space for the disease to come back with extra force - the line between "outright scam" and "legitimate communication" is fuzzy, and salesmen and marketers are very creative at blurring it further.
And no, adding crypto (the legitimate kind) to the mix - authentication protocols, encrypted handshakes, whatnot - will not help, for the same reason your immune system isn't of much help against real cancer either. Sure, it'll get harder for a random Joe the Scammer to do their fly-by-night salesmanship, but advertisers in general can afford to implement all the schemes marking them as AAA tier 1 legitimate communication.
After all, if you look at the web, who's actually pushing most of the security stuff? Unsurprisingly, biggest players in adtech. Improving the medium's immune system is in their interest - they're still invisible to it, and getting rid of the most obnoxious scams secures their own ability to feed on all of us.
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[0] - Well, kinda. It also includes bits of activities classified under "sales" and "marketing". I think the closest term encompassing them all might be "marketing communications", but "advertising" as understood by regular people covers most of it.
[1] - In rare cases, it may turn into a kind of "zombie mode", a blob of glowing radioactive mutated cancer, able to live out of background cosmic radiation, or such. I mean, how else can you describe the Fax system? You plug it in, wait a moment or three, and suddenly it starts spitting out ads!
[2] - The prime example why paying doesn't protect you from the disease. Once medium contracts advertising, the option to "pay instead of seeing ads" quickly turns into "pay and see ads anyway", and then "fuck you, pay more and see even more ads".
[3] - No, spam filter only catches the worst of it. "Legitimate" advertising still fills most of everyone's inboxes, which is a big reason why people flock to closed, gate-kept alternatives.
[4] - Or nuking it from orbit. Pick your own favorite exaggerated metaphor; it's the only way to be sure.
I've decided to only receive calls/msgs from my contacts. On iPhone, you can do it by "Silence Unknown Callers". Instead of pretending I can ignore the spam calls, I'd rather take the risk when something super important are coming from an unknown number...
Not really an option for me - my child's care providers may call me from an unexpected phone number, plus the occasional doctor phone call from a number that's not the same one I call to schedule appointments, etc.
That only works if you have no family. Because you risk an emergency provider being unable to reach you if something happens, or even something as simple as your kid/spouse losing their phone and trying to call you from a borrowed phone.
It can't happen too soon. When/if it does happen I will need to unblock the 1000 numbers that called me repeatedly. At one point, I wanted to block the entire 202 area code. A feature I would have appreciated would have been to have the ability to figure out which block of numbers were allocated to that provider, and then block all the numbers allocated to that provider
Most of us in this group failed to update our Robocall Mitigation information five months ago and are doing it now.
Honestly, the bad actors are not in this list. Everybody in this list has implemented rate limits per the previous filing and are in compliance with other aspects of the FCC.
I saw a lot of companies that either recently ceased operations or probably should have never registered in the first place. Real bad actors aren't going to be silly enough to fail to file their paperwork.
WCB notified each Company on March 29, 2024, that its certification was noncompliant with section 64.6305 because the Company had failed to submit an updated RMD certification and updated robocall mitigation plan by the February 26, 2024 deadline. WCB's notification informed each Company that it must submit an updated certification and updated robocall mitigation plan in the Robocall Mitigation Database by Monday, April 29, 2024. After this second deadline, the Companies still had not updated their RMD certifications and robocall mitigation plans with the required information; as a result, WCB referred each Company to the Bureau to initiate removal proceedings.
2,411 companies have been deficient since February. The FCC sent them a strongly worded letter in March, giving then a new deadline in April. Roughly seven months later, the FCC is finally starting enforcement procedures.
> The FCC sent them a strongly worded letter in March, giving then a new deadline in April. Roughly seven months later, the FCC is finally starting enforcement procedures.
To me, they’re trying to avoid any and all accusations that they’re moving unfairly quickly or terminating access without appropriate consideration if people missed the notice or needed more time to respond.
That's generally how regulations work. Which means they're always getting screamed at from two sides: one who thinks they're going too slowly, and the other who thinks they're abusive for doing anything at all.
Pretty sure most Americans would support the FCC taking swift retributive action the very first day it was legal. These companies didn't just accidentally miss the notice. They have been active in profiting off of fraud for years and know exactly what they are doing.
The main reason I use a Google Pixel is because of its automated call screening feature. I crank it up to maximum sensitivity (screen all unknown numbers) and answer every call that gets through because it's always a human, and it's never a spam call. I'm surprised more smartphone companies haven't already implemented similar features.
I don't get why other phones don't do this. Is it complicated? I think it just plays a recorded voice greeting. It's simpler than a answering machine. There is no fancy AI or anything like that.
I have one from Verizon since they are my carrier. For free it does an amazing job blocking spam calls. If I was willing to pay (I’m not) it would tell me what kind of spam call it is.
Not worth the price.
I still don’t answer calls unless they’re in my address book or I’m expecting one. But I get very very few calls anyway thanks to the app.
And they are allowed to leave voicemails, which they never do. Real callers do if I get an unexpected genuine call.
Add in the features iOS has had in the last few releases to be able to see transcriptions of voicemails, now live as they’re being left, and most of the hassle is gone.
The spammers trained everyone to stop answering. I shouldn’t have to do any of this. But it’s better than it was a few years ago.
It simply rejected calls that lacked caller ID, which is what I assume the GP meant by unknown callers. It wasn't only Nokia either, every single phone that I have ever owned has been able to do this. Its right there alongside novel features such as "sending a text" or "making a phone call."
If you meant the Pixel feature then there are probably lots of videos and posts covering it.
It doesn't play any kind of greeter. Seems to be an online database of spam numbers, I receive calls marked as Spam with a big red exclamation mark. it's not as simple as blocking any calls that aren't already contacts. I could never use that professionally.
Telcos already keep this information and Google having it as well doesn't really change much. Both are going to sell it plus give it up to law enforcement when asked.
The most important features of my Pixel phone are all the ways it prevents me from getting unwanted phone calls and text messages. It's pretty good at it.
We've allowed the entire telephone medium to get corrupted by scams. It has been ruined.
And mine is on the list .. and it's the only phone number I have for all my banks and other accounts. Looks like I'm frakd. And no, I'm not a robocaller, in fact I never used this phone to call or text anything, just to receive texts.
The US has number portability - you should be able to switch now and keep your number
However having said that, I'm not sure it will keep working if the original provider goes bust. If it's the same as in the UK, under the hood the implementation requires the original owner of the number range to do forwarding. So it's worth checking if the owner of the range of numbers containing your number - often a different company - is on the list
Robocalls. That said, they're likely "virtual" providers, which are in turn enabled by "Mobile Virtual Network Providers", companies that sell telco-provider-as-a-service, so that a virtual provider only needs to focus on sales, marketing, first call customer support, and legal liability but not the technical nitty gritty. I hope the FCC goes after these MVNOs enabling them next.
(source: wikipedia and I worked in a small segment of the mobile network operator market for a short while)
I have some questions 1) are these telcos effectively pass-thru operators for actual spammers ? in other words, just a paper entity working with 1-2 customers ?
2) Do these VOIP providers act as resellers for the big telcos ? If yes, how does the telco contracting/onboarding fail so hard at screening for bad actors as potential customers (is there a law like KYC for them at all ?)
3) Finally, once onboarded don't the big telcos have some incentive to boot bad actors from their busy networks ?
And it's been going on for years. Years ago, when I had a landline, I started to notice that a lot of spam calls came from the same area codes and prefixes. A quick trip over to telcodata.us showed that all of these prefixes/thousands blocks were assigned to the same company, which had a web storefront as a wireless provider but didn't really provide cellular service. Apparently, nothing has changed.
Many of these small voip providers the voip service is a small portion of their overall business. They may be a small ISP, reselling voip as an add on to internet services. Or they may be a small MSP marketing services to businesses in their area, and VOIP is just one small part of their overall package. If you are already marketing to the customer, providing customer service, billing, and even onsite support, why not add an additional service like VOIP, even if it alone isn't all that profitable? Even if you are only breaking even, having the service in house can save you time and money troubleshooting when a customer call you up and says they are having problems making phone calls and their third party VoIP service support is blaming the network...
You can become one yourself this week if you install Asterisk on an obsolete PC in your closet and plug one or more phone lines into a "telephony interface card". You don't have to stay in business.
For a long time the area was serviced by AT&T, who probably started with phone lines and then progressed over time to dial up and then more modern cable / broadband. They probably bundled in home phone service for many years.
When the local ISP built out all their gigabit fiber infrastructure they probably felt they had to offer some kind of phone service to compete, and went with VOIP since they weren't going to build out a whole telephone network infrastructure. I'd bet most people don't use it, but they need to offer it to be viable for certain older customers that don't want to give up their home phones.
I briefly set up a home phone on the provided VOIP, just for fun and nostalgia, but it was pretty annoying with sometimes getting disconnected and needing a manual power cycle to reconnect so I stopped using it.
By pushing new lines on you even if you don't need them, creating very low expectations for technical service, and automating away customer service at every turn.
I feel like there is a shadow cartel where all telcos agree to suck as much as possible so there's no real incentive to switch. Also aggregators love re-bills where you pay them for another provider's invoice but they can't do anything service-wise on it.
At my work (in charge of 140 Windows laptops/iPhones) the only way T-Mobile would give me a deal on 30 new iPhones was by selling me 50 new SIMs for lines I told them I absolutely didn't need. I'm turning those off now. Don't even get me started on Granite or Telepacific, each of which make Comcast and AT&T look like shining examples of greatness.
On another note, I want a phone that complete has no connection to the phone system, ie. no phone number, but has cell connectivity so that I can make data calls using whatsapp or similar. Can someone please make this?
WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram require a SIM enabled non-VoIP phone number available to receive SMS at all times in case they decide to reverify you. Doesn't necessarily have to be the same device, but still quite annoying.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] thread> Removal from the database means other providers will be prohibited from accepting call traffic from these providers.
(Submitted title was "FCC Could Block Over 2,400 Providers from Robocall Mitigation Database".)
As an English speaker, I'd interpret 2k4 as 2004, not 2400.
In Chinese that structure would mean 2400, though I don't know how widely understood the K would be.
Where are you from?
You also save on the comma in "2,400".
I was iffy about dropping the 's' from 'reqs' to get it to 79 (makes it sound like they've only violated one requirement, not multiple) but then I suppose the whole thing is that truncated/abbreviated by that point, it doesn't matter...
Then when fax machines came along sometimes dots would disappear or be unclear on a single transmission.
Either way, occasionally sometimes the page would also be scattered with random dots too because of degraded photosensitive operation, or audio-frequency noise on the telephone line at the time.
And it got even more uncertain when text that is not fixed-width got within mainstream reach :\",
Whereas as an English speaker, I'd interpret 2k4 as 2400 because, well, that's just how it's always been in my orbits (cf resistor labelling, for example.)
> Unreal Tournament 2004, also known as UT2K4 and UT2004
or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_2K#Games
I'm not sure if being removed from the Robocall Mitigation Database is tantamount to being shut down, but it sounds like it to me.
Is that what everybody else is seeing? That maybe Stir/Shaken is actually starting to work?
I guess it could just be that generational social change... where more people just don't take phone calls. So the ROI for spam calls has reduced...
If so that's not great. Because there's probably an infinite supply of people ready to waste their money trying get-rich-quick crap.
Jim Browning on YouTube does great work exposing this scum. There are huge call center operations in India and Pakistan, and the local authorities are useless if not complicit.
This will only get more popular and profitable once AI tools get more accessible. There's no need to have a physical location and hire humans if they can just launch a army of bots that have perfect accents and can follow a conversation without deviating from the script. The next generation of robocalls is just starting.
My father gets multiple spam calls every day. He lets them all go to voice mail, so nothing about his behavior encourages them to keep calling. Yet they keep coming.
I've had my cell number for about 15 years, and for another 10 years prior it was a land line, so 25 years in total. My father's cell number is only about 10 years old. So despite having a much older phone number, I get way less spam calls and texts than he does.
Part of that may be what lists we're on. Another reason may be that for the past 20 years, when ordering things online, 99% of the time I give a fake phone number. Companies claim they want it in case there is a problem delivering your order, but even before I started doing this, I never had a company call about an order they couldn't deliver. Once or twice they emailed me about an order they couldn't fulfill (out of stock, etc.), but I do give them a legit email. The 1% of the time I give a real phone number is when I'm dealing with a serious transaction, e.g. a bank or insurance or medical company.
I mean, he lets them go to voice mail. Pick up and set the phone down might use more time on their calls and get the line marked as worse target. But I still get several calls a week, so it's not perfect.
My pet theory is that scammers are harvesting voice samples from voicemail greeting for the purpose of training a voice impersonation AI.
I now use the default greeting.
My favorite spam call was someone wanting to make a cash offer on the Ohio State University building that my office is in.
Said some slick guy in a suit showed up on his farm property unannounced and made him an offer on it.
Owner was so annoyed that he smiled and told the guy to come back tomorrow and they'd talk it over.
Guy shows up the next (sunny) day with a colleague... both in suits... in summer... in the southeast US.
Owner proceeds to walk them 6km+ around the perimeter of the property while dangling the possibility he'd be willing to sell.
Then finally ends things with "But you know what it comes down to? My dog was born on this property, and she's pretty old now. I don't think it'd be kind to move her. So I appreciate your time, but don't think I'm interested in selling."
Was impressed at how much time and ingenuity retired folks have to fuck with people, just because they can.
For me, it got so bad (multiple calls per day) I've stopped answering anything that isn't in my contacts already.
Isn’t that what everyone does? Or is it just a millennial thing…
Get married. Start a business. Get sick. Buy a house. Have children. Make interesting friends. Travel extensively.
Once life gets interesting, you start missing important calls with that strategy.
If it's important, they can leave an relevant voicemail.
How would you know?
Even though I'm in an older generation and prefer voice over text I have adopted the habit of only picking up callers that I know I want to speak to.
Email spam is repetitive enough that the usual Thunderbird filters work. If a spam email has an unsubscribe link, I click on that and add the sender to the block list. If it doesn't have an unsubscribe link, I try to find out which service sent it and send them a notice of a CAN-SPAM law violation. The usual suspects (Mailchump, SpamGrid, etc.) do terminate accounts for that, to prevent being blocked themselves.
Huh, didn’t know that. I assumed that it was nothing more than baiting a response, verifying that the phone number is a hit.
[1] https://help.twilio.com/articles/223134027-Twilio-support-fo...
So as far as telling whether it’s a legit number, the spammers still win.
My iMessage is configured to send read receipts, so I quickly bounce the setting before opening the message to click the "Report Junk" link (maybe it's pointless). It would be nice to mark things as spam/junk without having to open them, perhaps I will just delete them since iMessage has been a malware vector in the past.
And that’s when you will discover that you’ve been wasting your time because when you delete them, you’ll get a dialog saying “…is not in your contacts” with the option to “delete and report junk”. You never needed to open the messages to begin with.
Citation needed.
All the vendors we use have STOP functionality baked in as it’s the correct way to ensure we can unsubscribe folk.
Even the FCC[1] seems to agree.
[1] - https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-24-24A1.pdf?bcs-...
I think the FCC finally shutting down just one or two blatant bad actors made a massive difference in robocalls. It just took them months (years?) to do it.
I also had an uptick in text spam (used to be very rare until maybe 9 months ago, then it became about 1-2 a day, now it's back down to just a few a week).
These calls occur year round.
I can’t block them because they are different numbers every time, so I have all unknown incoming calls set to go straight to voicemail.
I don’t even know what they are calling for. If I ever try to answer there is only silence on the line. But I haven’t even done that in months- hoping the calls would eventually stop. (They haven’t)
One infuriating thing is that there is some sort of “verified” checkmark in my call log for some numbers? Or maybe not verified, but “valid number?” Why are they even allowing non-verified calls through? It wouldn’t stop the problem, as 1/4 of my spam calls have the icon anyway. But it would help, surely.
I guess, it's a remote spam farm. The machine calls you, and when you answer, it calls a remote spammer who works from home, so it can take them a while to answer. I guess, it's a clean comfy job: they work from home even without profession or education, maybe even subscribed to several spam farms.
google's messages app is pretty good at corralling them into a spam folder but I do peep in there every now and then. I hope that whatever provider is allowing these gets disconnected.
I get no calls anymore, but I attribute it to pruning where my contact info is distributed and using the spam filters available on call/text.
My father got (no hyperbole) 90 calls a day, consistently, until I realized why he wasn’t answering his phone. He had used zero of the tools that the cell service provider and smartphone OS made available to him. Additionally, he likes talking to people, so he wouldn’t be “mean” to tell callers/testers to take him off their list.
I have a business line, and pretty much every call to it is spam.
The spoofed calls have picked up again. It looks like STIR/SHAKEN means squat.
I think they are all different and resell to eachother because they keep calling no matter how horribly I've trolled them day after day.
Most other scams never call back after my trolling.
I'm wondering if the Medicare calls are the "setup your own turnkey business" flavor of the day.
https://freecarrierlookup.com/
https://www.carrierlookup.com/
https://www.ipqualityscore.com/free-carrier-lookup
By looking up the carrier you can then find the right company to complain to via their reporting process, if they have one. And additionally you can file a report to the FTC and FCC that mentions them.
EDIT: The idea is that you complain to the company whose platform is sending you spam, the regulatory agencies at https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/ and https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/, your own cell phone carrier by forwarding text spam to 7726, and that will result in actions that hopefully will address that one situation but also collectively reduce spam for everyone. Without identifying which platform sent you the spam, you cannot know which company to go complain to (they usually have a reporting tool on their website). And you can name them in your complaints to the FCC and FTC.
You can also forward spam text messages to 7726 in the US (goes to your cell phone carrier), which is very effective because the carriers have low tolerance for these issues and also train their own anti spam off this data.
My intent isn’t to reverse-spam the FCC though; the complaint form just only accepts one phone number at a time. Amusingly I’ve discovered that it’s possible to receive a higher volume of spam than the FCC’s rate limits allow reporting.
> It appears these companies have very poor anti abuse practices. When I contacted them for help they basically refused to reveal how my number was obtained
How would a service provider know how your customer obtained your number?
But you reporting that you're receiving unwanted calls/texts from one of their customers should of course still trigger some action on their side – if indeed that's the number that contacted you, per the above.
Yep, I get spam from "Onvoy, LLC" which is a Sinch company. I don't see either on this list and I've filed FCC complaints.
My vague guess is that these many providers have existed primarily to facilitate robocalling - to force the FCC to play wack-a-mole to get rid of them and FCC is now acting on them en masse, which might be more effective. But people who know this stuff might pipe up on the question.
But voice services existed before cell phones!
They were delivered over copper cables between phone exchanges and people's homes. Some people and especially businesses still have these 'landlines'.
I would imagine that most customers of the companies on this list use neither landlines nor cell phones to access their voice services. Instead they likely use some sort of IP-based voice protocol like SIP or IAX.
I fear the FCC will start reversing this progress once the new guy takes the reins. Without further comment:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/18/media/brendan-carr-trump-fcc-...
I was pretty shocked that when I complained to my state regulator about Verizon completely ignoring an issue with my business lines, I quickly got a call from a VP at Verizon grovelling and asking me what he could do for me. I said I needed my issue fixed, and then made what I thought was a crazy unrelated request- I wanted FIOS run all the way down the street to my business, and I'd been told previously that Verizon had no plans to expand FIOS in my area. Well, they fixed my issue within an hour, and within two weeks, they rolled trucks, ran the fiber down the street, and we had FIOS service up and running. They were obviously good and afraid of the state regulator.
The best thing they could do is make it impossible to spoof numbers or at least be able to reject them. Even then, you should be able to block anyone calling from a number that you cannot call back.
For once in the modern(?) history of the Republican party, the incoming administration is hellbent on pursuing one of the party's core values: Small government. You bet public servants who want to keep enjoying the nectar will frantically try to make themselves look useful.
Bookmark this comment, and check on how you feel about everything in 4 years.
"Small government" is dumb for any highly developed country, and the people that want that are about to find out this harsh reality. The very wealthy and big corporations probably benefit - for a while - until things start happening like CEO's being assassinated in the street. Good thing stuff like that is not happening.
Thank you for demonstrating:
> Listen - without fail, the folks who want to make huge budget cuts because of the face value of certain programs, do not understand what those programs actually do and how the budgets add up.
What did you mean by this?
(This isn't true of state/local governments, those have limited budgets.)
More to the point, if you shut down 100% of everything that looks like spending it wouldn't save anything important. The federal government is an insurance agency and all the money goes to Medicare/Social Security payments and military wages. You could shut down the miltary I guess.
Entire countries default fairly often, the USA is no exception if such a fate befalls us. We've already had our security ratings dropped once before.
>More to the point, if you shut down 100% of everything that looks like spending it wouldn't save anything important.
So you're saying reducing expenditures won't reduce expenditures. Also, war is peace and freedom is slavery; I implore you to consider WTF you're actually saying.
>The federal government is an insurance agency and all the money goes to Medicare/Social Security payments and military wages. You could shut down the miltary I guess.
As cited[1] by another commenter, Social Security + Medicare account for 36% of the budget with the military accounting for 14%. Together they're 50% of the budget.
Meanwhile, we are $35.46 trillion dollars in debt.[2]
These crazy numbers must be balanced sooner or later, and the costs to do so will be cheaper the sooner we do it. Every single part of the government needs to be cut and likely in most cases eliminated outright, that includes Social Security and Medicare and the military.
Spending even more money (that we don't have) in the hopes that we get more money and more efficient government as we've been repeatedly doing for fucking decades is a fool's errand.
The bottom line if we are borrowing money to make ends meet is: We. Do. Not. Have. Money.
Tear the government down until that red ink is no more. It's stupid that even this basic piece of financial logic is considered crazy and controversial.
[1]: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
[2]: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
Best practice: When citing another commenter, make sure it's not the one who's insistent you're dead wrong about your central talking point.
But of course, even those three combined are still 49% (less than half) of government expenditures. Even adding the military still only accounts for 63%.
Just FY2024 alone we were $1.83 trillion dollars short.[1] Cuts must happen from everywhere in government in order to bring sense back into the balance sheets. Also importantly, cuts must happen in order to make tax increases actually palatable to the electorate.
Cuts alone won't balance the cash flow, the revenue (taxes, et al.) must also increase and for that to happen taxes must be hiked and for that to be palatable the government must first lead by example in fiscal discipline by cutting expenditures wholesale.
DOGE is an unprecedented first step because their job is to bring the presumed-frivolous-by-some nature of government expenditures to light and prove them frivolous period. Actual cuts must come from the House who are tasked with the power of the purse and the Executive who are tasked with executing the budget, DOGE doesn't have any authority itself.
For once Republicans are declaring they really will pursue Small Government, I want to see that happen because we've never so much as tried. I'm sick and tired of Big Government and want to see another world, even if cuts will be fucking painful.
[1]: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
The funny thing about this is how little happens to them when they do. Like Argentina's supposed to be the worst case scenario? The country best known for eating a lot of beef? You don't see them being sold to Brazil or anything.
> These crazy numbers must be balanced sooner or later, and the costs to do so will be cheaper the sooner we do it. Every single part of the government needs to be cut and likely in most cases eliminated outright, that includes Social Security and Medicare and the military.
Even if you want to be a heartless economic optimizer, your goal should be aiming to make the economy bigger. Making old people starve isn't going to do that. Neither is letting Russia conquer Alaska.
Austerity like this is European thinking - and its result is those are poor countries, whereas we're #1 because we don't do that.
> Meanwhile, we are $35.46 trillion dollars in debt.[2]
That's not the number that matters. You want this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S
It's basically the current cost to us to borrow money. It's up a little, which does need to be dealt with, but it isn't historically high.
The way we should deal with it is a VAT or DBCFT. (And that's a Republican proposal from 2016.)
> The bottom line if we are borrowing money to make ends meet is: We. Do. Not. Have. Money.
We aren't borrowing money because we have to - we do it because it lets us sell bonds to other countries, which makes them subjects of the US financial empire; they have to use our banks. It's that global reserve currency thing.
But if we had to for some reason, we can simply create more money (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin) or just order people to produce things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950). The cost to this is inflation, but that's a benefit if the alternative is deflation.
(Technically, inflation is caused by the Fed, if you believe Milton Friedman. But printing money requires the Fed to raise interest rates to match. So either they raise interest rates and cause unemployment, or they don't raise them and cause inflation.)
Meanwhile, between NY State and NY City, there are a total of almost 1 million government employees. I can tell where the inefficiency lies and it's not the fed headcount lol.
But who knows, maybe they'll finally cut social security and medicare that makes up 55% of the federal budget. We'll have rampant homelessness on every street from old people, just like the pre-1800s, but that's the vibe they are going for.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Healthcare system reform would go a long way to reducing those costs, if somehow we could muster the political will.
If the tax collected isn't enough to fund it, maybe we could eliminate the cap on that tax for starters.
Eliminating SS or cutting benefits is going to utterly screw millions of elderly.
DOGE is 100% fake. If it was real Musk would be appointed at the real thing, OMB, which is an actual agency. He's just going to put up reports saying they should fire individual people for being too woke (or trying to prosecute him for his habit of harassing young women at SpaceX) and nobody is going to read it.
But that one isn't real either because government spending is controlled by Congress. The executive branch has little power to reduce it.
The normal complaint about the EU's approach to regulation is that it's too vague and companies won't do business there in case they're found in breach of the vague laws.
In practice, at least on this subject, this just isn't a problem. I can't link to the directive that outlaws spam phone calls (it predates GDPR) but the telecoms clearly get told to stop facilitating them and yet I've never heard of a company that claims they were erroneously barred from the market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking#2600_hertz
And yeah, you are overanalysing. Despite having read and enjoyed Mitnick’s Ghost in the Wires¹ I had absolutely forgotten 2600 was the specific frequency and had to hop around a few links to recall what this was about. Who would self-congratulate on something so small?
Hacker News is ostensibly about curiosity, so explaining references is absolutely on topic. And being lazy is a hacker trait, I personally dislike when I don’t pursue something interesting because there was no easy link to follow.
The irony in your comment is something else. Don’t assume bad faith.
¹ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10256723-ghost-in-the-wi...
I wasn’t responding to your comment, I was would have kept it to myself as it wasn’t necessarily directed towards you personally
> Don't assume bad faith
Yes this is a personal shortcoming I am working on :)
> Bill discovered that a recorder he owned could also play the tone at 2600 Hz with the same effect.
I hadn't realised this was true: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ITfQGEASYvU
(ref: https://xkcd.com/1053/)
To me the whole system is archaic - i know gen z would never ever take a call from someone they don't know, or even call each other - it's simply not something you do - it would be like reading your spam mails.
And i'm coming to the same conclusion, answering random people is naive.
Practically we need something new though.
But I read about a situation which would probably open the doors a bit...
see https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/12/02/toronto-public-librar...
A girl got lost. She wanted to call her mom, but the girl had left her phone at home. So she went to the library to phone her mom. The librarian refused to let the girl make a call. [N.B. Yes, the librarian got in hot water for that move]
The girl eventually convinced a stranger to let the girl call her mom using the stranger's phone.
The mom, who was frantically trying to locate her daughter, took the call even though it was from an unknown number.
How many people would make an exception in that case of an unknown number calling?
>> How many people would make an exception in that case of an unknown number calling?
Duh! What a stupid question. Almost everyone in extreme distress due to losing their child would take anything, call, stranger knocking at the door, medium talking to the ether. Anything! :)
I get this is an Idiocracy-level type of question: "If you have one bucket that contains 2 gallons and another bucket that contains 7 gallons, how many buckets do you have?"
I know I didn't. Short-sighted reaction after getting inundated with mandarin-speaking spammers.
I don't know what the globally correct answer is. But "never pickup" seems too extreme (even if the person, calling on the unknown number, leaves a voicemail, if you can't reach them with a return call, what then?)
I can usually infer from the fact that I made an online order, sometimes they'll send me an SMS prior to sending but not always. Anyhow I did have my share of picking spam calls because of the necessity to ignore the "no unknowns" rule while expecting a package.
Overall I don't get that many calls yet that I'd have to configure the phone to reject ALL numbers not in the phone book. But call spam is definitely increasing, along with plain scam. I almost got my card stolen by a post office spoofing scam. And recently my bank cancelled my card and had to get a new one after someone from US tried to buy jewelry with it (I live in Romania) - probably leaked from one of the many online services I pay for. Now I switched to single-one-time-use cards from Revolut for all non-recurring payments, unfortunately it's too much of a hassle to do so for recurring ones. And with increasing security vulnerabilities my only protection is separate bank accounts and keeping only small amounts of money on the account linked to the debit card. No credit, only debit.
She could send an SMS.
A personalized Viking Raider takes your package on a saga to your chosen destination, looting and pillaging on the way while yelling battlecries and occasionally throwing an axe.
Extra charge if longboat is required.
Which is why people who pick up are great targets for whatever garbage is being peddled.
It's sad there really isn't much you can do about it. I tried do-not-call lists, answering and telling them to stop calling me, reporting them - all was apparently a waste of time.
And then block all calls from the same area code as your cell phone.
Unfortunately some businesses have started marking them as spam because they don't like not having the direct personal email of each user
Businesses block fake email generators because they’re overwhelmingly used by fraudsters/spammers/etc trying to abuse systems.
Anybody who’s ever run an internet service that allows open registration or has a free plan knows this the hard way.
On the flip side, it only took me a few days to fix my friend's business domain so they could send emails to Gmail users.
In Singapore, they've enacted SMS identifiers and you've got to register your company to send SMSes via shorthand.
Looks like we'll want to do the same to general phone numbers. If I knew my bank or a government office was calling me I'd happily answer.
But 99% of the time it's robo callers claiming to be the bank hahaha sigh.
I don't think it's a generation thing, I think it's that what we generally consider normal has changed, but that some people got left behind in the old normal.
I’m saying that if two people have each other in their contacts lists and are on friendly terms, it’s not rude to call them if you need to talk to them.
Maybe I misunderstood, though. Sounds like you were talking about cold calling someone you don’t know. I agree that’s rude if the person is not expecting random inbound calls or isn’t in a professional context were there’s an expectation of receiving a call, and has been for generations.
And, obviously, in a work/professional/commercial setting it's always OK to call if they've given you their number. It feels weird, but it's OK.
Delivery Drivers/taxis use their own phones to tell you if their arrival times will change.
Medical calls can come from personal phones.
Isn't that the definition of a "generational thing"?
Now I have to think every time, is this someone I have to text first? Or do they consider texting then calling redundant? Anyhow, I think both are important communication techniques, adults should be able to do remote direct verbal and async written.
After the FB leak, I got a maybe 6-8 spam calls over the next month, and that was it again. It’s maybe 1-2 per year, and they are easy to recognize because they call from different countries.
I thought it was maybe Germany having stricter regulations, but people on Reddits /r/de do complain about spam calls, so no idea.
Whenever I get a temporary number for the US I get spam SMS and calls.
Occasionally I check the caller list on my dsl box - probably low single figure spam calls per year.
On this front, the Bundesnetzagentur (https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Vportal/TK/Aerger/start....) does its job quite well, for decades at this point.
So the public phone system now supports it, but the problem is that not all providers support it yet, which fundamentally weakens the system. Of course, you can’t just add a new “protocol version” to an over-100 year old phone system with zero time to do a migration.*
But now that it’s been a few years, we are reaching a point where, at least for the US, the FCC wants to ban any provider who hasn’t added support.
*simplification
That's up to your carrier.
In general "hosted" services will hide the actual token from the end user, though they may offer either filtering features or the ability to tag calls in the Caller ID based on their signature.
Trunking services designed to feed in to a customer-controlled PBX will usually offer either the same sorts of filtering/tagging or complete passthrough of the token.
End to end authenticated calls is the ideal state, but I don't think we're fully there yet.
Rolling this out is like when the world first rolled out DKIM/SPF for email. You need to reach a critical mass of adoption before the data is useful.
The last "Microsoft" support call was years ago.
My work mobile number is listed on the company website. I need to answer unknown calls from anywhere in the world, although I only get them every two months or so.
I can easily look through my whole call history. This year I seem to have had about six spam calls, and for the first time I bothered to work out how to block a number on Android — three of the calls were from the same number within a few days of each other.
I'm curious how this works in the USA for people that need to answer work calls — does the receptionist at a large company find 9 out of 10 calls coming in are spam? In some countries there are specific ranges for different types of numbers (all UK mobile phone numbers begin with 7, all numbers beginning with 3 are businesses/etc) which allows the spammer some basic filtering, but that's not the case in the USA.
That's your answer right there. Finland is a small country with a very niche language of just about 5M people - it's too expensive to teach people Finnish good enough to convincingly scam off the elderly, not enough marks to return that investment, and you need a sizable population of poor and desperate/dumb people to act unknowingly as money mules.
In contrast, for English language scams, you got 340 million Americans, 68 million Brits and dozens if not hundreds of millions of people speaking primarily English in former colonies (India, Australia) that are potential marks. And to make it better for Indian scammers, people there are already used to Indian call center accents so their alarm bells don't go off immediately.
For German language scams, it's 84M in Germany, 9M in Austria and 4.4 million German speakers in Switzerland. For us, it's mostly scams based in Turkey, because there are a lot of Turks who learn German because they have relatives here or their parents had a stint in the 60s-90s.
Just read [1] that our local telecom authorities (NKOM) report good progress when it comes to preventing people from abusing Norwegian telephone numbers to spam/scam Norwegians.
[1]: https://www.tek.no/nyheter/nyhet/i/jQgEl0/nytt-digitalt-skjo...
French link: https://www.fftelecoms.org/nos-travaux-et-champs-dactions/ca...
I suspect folks in Gen Z are also less concerned with calls from medical/emergency/etc. services. That said, habits have certainly shifted. With very few exceptions, I'm not going to make a personal call out of the blue at this point.
They’re almost all AI calls now. The AI’s force a specific progression, are rude, and will argue with you. Some are programmed to claim to be human. It’s usually the same AI’s selling the same products connecting me to the same telemarketers. Some know my voice.
I can’t stand robocalls because nothing good comes from it either way. I don’t get to encourage new people. Their sales hurt by contacting the same people for stuff they’ve already been disqualified for. If I heard new offerings, I might buy or donate. For example, one was St. Jude’s reminder which I responded to on their web site.
Others are taking action. There’s regulatory penalties for repeated calls, calls outside a certain time, etc. You need to be on the do not call list to be sure. You can send the companies a cease and desist or a lawsuit in small claims under the TCPA. There’s law firms semi-automating that, too. If in the U.S., use that if they keep harassing you.
All of this has happened before, and it will happen again.
Any new media, any form of communications we invent, develops this cancer as it grows into mainstream awareness. The more people a new tool can reach, the more rewarding it becomes to marketers and salesmen, who all flock to it - and as they do, they accelerate the growth of the medium while also displacing and degrading the intended/legitimate usages of it. Soon enough, the medium turns into barren wasteland full of threats to users' sanity and wallets. Only once it goes so bad that people stop using the medium, and/or find a better alternative, do things get better - the cancer dies off as its nourishment supply, i.e. the audience, goes elsewhere. But the disease follows them there. And, if didn't inflict terminal damage to the old medium, chances are that old medium will experience a second spring[1], albeit in a much more diminished shape, becoming a niche hobby or internal technical tool[1].
Advertising is what destroyed AM/FM radio (remains a niche). It's what destroyed outdoor information displays (now existing only to show ads). It's what denies us beautiful vistas (all obstructed by billboards). It's what killed OTA TV, then cable TV[2]. It's what killed e-mail[3]. It's what killed the phone system, and it's what will kill any new thing we move to.
This problem will not go away until we start treating the actual disease - advertising. And by treating I mean the equivalent of radiation therapy[4]; anything else, anything narrowly targeted, leaves space for the disease to come back with extra force - the line between "outright scam" and "legitimate communication" is fuzzy, and salesmen and marketers are very creative at blurring it further.
And no, adding crypto (the legitimate kind) to the mix - authentication protocols, encrypted handshakes, whatnot - will not help, for the same reason your immune system isn't of much help against real cancer either. Sure, it'll get harder for a random Joe the Scammer to do their fly-by-night salesmanship, but advertisers in general can afford to implement all the schemes marking them as AAA tier 1 legitimate communication.
After all, if you look at the web, who's actually pushing most of the security stuff? Unsurprisingly, biggest players in adtech. Improving the medium's immune system is in their interest - they're still invisible to it, and getting rid of the most obnoxious scams secures their own ability to feed on all of us.
--
[0] - Well, kinda. It also includes bits of activities classified under "sales" and "marketing". I think the closest term encompassing them all might be "marketing communications", but "advertising" as understood by regular people covers most of it.
[1] - In rare cases, it may turn into a kind of "zombie mode", a blob of glowing radioactive mutated cancer, able to live out of background cosmic radiation, or such. I mean, how else can you describe the Fax system? You plug it in, wait a moment or three, and suddenly it starts spitting out ads!
[2] - The prime example why paying doesn't protect you from the disease. Once medium contracts advertising, the option to "pay instead of seeing ads" quickly turns into "pay and see ads anyway", and then "fuck you, pay more and see even more ads".
[3] - No, spam filter only catches the worst of it. "Legitimate" advertising still fills most of everyone's inboxes, which is a big reason why people flock to closed, gate-kept alternatives.
[4] - Or nuking it from orbit. Pick your own favorite exaggerated metaphor; it's the only way to be sure.
Anybody know if there is some program where I can get compensated for this harassment? (I vaguely remember of hearing about some program)
Honestly, the bad actors are not in this list. Everybody in this list has implemented rate limits per the previous filing and are in compliance with other aspects of the FCC.
WCB notified each Company on March 29, 2024, that its certification was noncompliant with section 64.6305 because the Company had failed to submit an updated RMD certification and updated robocall mitigation plan by the February 26, 2024 deadline. WCB's notification informed each Company that it must submit an updated certification and updated robocall mitigation plan in the Robocall Mitigation Database by Monday, April 29, 2024. After this second deadline, the Companies still had not updated their RMD certifications and robocall mitigation plans with the required information; as a result, WCB referred each Company to the Bureau to initiate removal proceedings.
2,411 companies have been deficient since February. The FCC sent them a strongly worded letter in March, giving then a new deadline in April. Roughly seven months later, the FCC is finally starting enforcement procedures.
To me, they’re trying to avoid any and all accusations that they’re moving unfairly quickly or terminating access without appropriate consideration if people missed the notice or needed more time to respond.
I have one from Verizon since they are my carrier. For free it does an amazing job blocking spam calls. If I was willing to pay (I’m not) it would tell me what kind of spam call it is.
Not worth the price.
I still don’t answer calls unless they’re in my address book or I’m expecting one. But I get very very few calls anyway thanks to the app.
And they are allowed to leave voicemails, which they never do. Real callers do if I get an unexpected genuine call.
Add in the features iOS has had in the last few releases to be able to see transcriptions of voicemails, now live as they’re being left, and most of the hassle is gone.
The spammers trained everyone to stop answering. I shouldn’t have to do any of this. But it’s better than it was a few years ago.
Text is the new spam hell for me.
Never saw that
I think iOS 17 (last September) was when they added live transcription as it was being left in the lock screen if you press the icon to see it.
Or maybe it was 18 this September.
If you meant the Pixel feature then there are probably lots of videos and posts covering it.
I thought you meant you could do that on your OG 3310 so I was curious.
https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en
> Call Assist answers the call and asks who's calling and why
We've allowed the entire telephone medium to get corrupted by scams. It has been ruined.
I wasn't aware Google didn't extend the service to other phones, I wonder why that is? It can't be a hardware specific feature.
It is.
Automatic screening is exclusive to Pixel devices:
https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en
But I doubt there is any Pixel-only hardware involved.
They’re like the Facebook/instagram of SMS, talk a big game but happily let all the stuff continue to happen.
Aha, the list was linked from the original URL, but dang unfortunately changed it to the plain text news release https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-408083A1.txt which doesn't link to the list. The original URL was https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-could-block-over-2400-provi..., which links to https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-24-1235A1.pdf, which lists the providers that will be shut down. And I'm happy to see that my SIP provider isn't on it.
So perhaps inbound calls and inbound texts will be fine?
I would contact the provider and ask them their intentions, and if you are not satisfied leave while you still can.
However having said that, I'm not sure it will keep working if the original provider goes bust. If it's the same as in the UK, under the hood the implementation requires the original owner of the number range to do forwarding. So it's worth checking if the owner of the range of numbers containing your number - often a different company - is on the list
(Edited to add) Actually it looks like the US has a centralised implementation: https://10xpeople.com/blog/switching-carriers-and-retaining-...
(source: wikipedia and I worked in a small segment of the mobile network operator market for a short while)
I have some questions 1) are these telcos effectively pass-thru operators for actual spammers ? in other words, just a paper entity working with 1-2 customers ?
2) Do these VOIP providers act as resellers for the big telcos ? If yes, how does the telco contracting/onboarding fail so hard at screening for bad actors as potential customers (is there a law like KYC for them at all ?)
3) Finally, once onboarded don't the big telcos have some incentive to boot bad actors from their busy networks ?
They are created/supported by the robocallers.
ETA: Whew, my SIP provider isn't on the list.
For a long time the area was serviced by AT&T, who probably started with phone lines and then progressed over time to dial up and then more modern cable / broadband. They probably bundled in home phone service for many years.
When the local ISP built out all their gigabit fiber infrastructure they probably felt they had to offer some kind of phone service to compete, and went with VOIP since they weren't going to build out a whole telephone network infrastructure. I'd bet most people don't use it, but they need to offer it to be viable for certain older customers that don't want to give up their home phones.
I briefly set up a home phone on the provided VOIP, just for fun and nostalgia, but it was pretty annoying with sometimes getting disconnected and needing a manual power cycle to reconnect so I stopped using it.
I feel like there is a shadow cartel where all telcos agree to suck as much as possible so there's no real incentive to switch. Also aggregators love re-bills where you pay them for another provider's invoice but they can't do anything service-wise on it.
At my work (in charge of 140 Windows laptops/iPhones) the only way T-Mobile would give me a deal on 30 new iPhones was by selling me 50 new SIMs for lines I told them I absolutely didn't need. I'm turning those off now. Don't even get me started on Granite or Telepacific, each of which make Comcast and AT&T look like shining examples of greatness.
AT&T and Verizon (dual sim)
On another note, I want a phone that complete has no connection to the phone system, ie. no phone number, but has cell connectivity so that I can make data calls using whatsapp or similar. Can someone please make this?