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Ask HN: What happens when you block/mark as spam a call or text?

14 points by dsalzman ↗ HN
I’ve been getting more and more spam calls and texts. I always try to block and mark as spam but the same “people” just call back from other numbers offering business loans. “Anthony Schmidt” is a prolific dialerbot.

What is happening on the backend here and why can this not be fixed?

6 comments

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cweagans
I, too, find myself wondering why this seems to be such an intractable problem. Maybe it's just misaligned incentives? That is, the phone companies really only care as much as they need to in order to prevent you leaving for another phone company.

From a technical perspective, it doesn't seem to be _that_ difficult: it seems like KYC but for anyone who wants automated access to telephone networks. I know there are some existing efforts there that are more technically comprehensive than that (SHAKEN/STIR), but I don't know where they're at in terms of adoption/rollout.

tim-tday
Nothing. The carriers get paid for the calls so they are incentivized to NOT block them. It is remarkable how stupid and slow someone can be when incentivized to not make progress.