Why Robo-Calls Can't Be Stopped (washingtonpost.com) 338
"When your phone rings, there's about a 50 percent chance it's a spam robo-call," reports the Washington Post. Now a computer science professor who's researched robo-call technologies reveals the economics behind automatically dialing phone numbers "either randomly, or from massive databases compiled from automated Web searches, leaked databases of personal information and marketing data."
It doesn't matter whether you've signed up with the federal Do Not Call Registry, although companies that call numbers on the list are supposed to be subject to large fines. The robo-callers ignore the list, and evade penalties because they can mask the true origins of their calls.... Each call costs a fraction of a cent -- and a successful robo-call scam can net millions of dollars. That more than pays for all the calls people ignored or hung up on, and provides cash for the next round. Casting an enormous net at low cost lets these scammers find a few gullible victims who can fund the whole operation...
Partly that's because their costs are low. Most phone calls are made and connected via the Internet, so robo-call companies can make tens of thousands, or even millions, of calls very cheaply. Many of the illegal robo-calls targeting the United States probably come from overseas -- which used to be extremely expensive but now is far cheaper...
Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission has been asking U.S. phone companies to filter calls and police their own systems to keep out robo-calls. It hasn't worked, mainly because it's too costly and technically difficult for phone companies to do that. It's hard to detect fake Caller ID information, and wrongly blocking a legitimate call could cause them legal problems.
The professor's article suggests guarding your phone number like you guard your credit card numbers. "Don't give your phone number to strangers, businesses or websites unless it's absolutely necessary."
"Of course, your phone number may already be widely known and available, either from telephone directories or websites, or just because you've had it for many years. In that case, you probably can't stop getting robo-calls."
Partly that's because their costs are low. Most phone calls are made and connected via the Internet, so robo-call companies can make tens of thousands, or even millions, of calls very cheaply. Many of the illegal robo-calls targeting the United States probably come from overseas -- which used to be extremely expensive but now is far cheaper...
Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission has been asking U.S. phone companies to filter calls and police their own systems to keep out robo-calls. It hasn't worked, mainly because it's too costly and technically difficult for phone companies to do that. It's hard to detect fake Caller ID information, and wrongly blocking a legitimate call could cause them legal problems.
The professor's article suggests guarding your phone number like you guard your credit card numbers. "Don't give your phone number to strangers, businesses or websites unless it's absolutely necessary."
"Of course, your phone number may already be widely known and available, either from telephone directories or websites, or just because you've had it for many years. In that case, you probably can't stop getting robo-calls."
Online order forms require it (Score:5, Informative)
It is a nearly-universal business practice: if you are ordering a product or service online, they will require a phone number. The form won't submit unless you put in a valid one.
You really can't refuse to do business with people on these grounds; all competitors require a phone number as well. Further, if you put someone else's number up there, it's fraud.
You can complain. If they respond at all, it will be a roundabout way of saying "too bad."
Re: Online order forms require it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Online order forms require it (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if it's possible to have a reporting and billing system like this:
1. Answer a call, it's spam/scam
2. While the call is in progress, key in #, the last four digits of your number, # (or some sequence that confirms the recipient's number, and a sequence to identify the type of call, e.g. 55 for spam, 66 for scam)
3. That sequence immediately bills the caller $1 and/or blacklists the calling number.
This depends on being able to trace and identify the caller while the call is still in progress.
Or: just charge per call (Score:5, Interesting)
it should cost 5 cents for every call placed. The money would go to the carrier of the person receiving the call and taken from the carrier of the person making the call. It would be up to each carrier to decide how to bill or refund the money to keep this simple.
I can easily afford 5 cents a call (note not 5 cents a minute). And Likely they would reimburse me an other casual callers, just not industrial scale ones.
This way no one has to actively do anything, like report a call. It just snuffs out the tragedy of the commons with a trivial fee.
SIT tones (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Or: just charge per call (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Or: just charge per call (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait, you people don't pay to make calls, but pay to *receive* them? Holy crap your country really is backwards. Do you get paid when you gas up your car?
How the hell did this happen? And how did it only happen in the past two years?
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I never get a spam call on my cellphone. It costs them too much.
I don't ask you to call my mobile either, that's your choice that you made, so you pay for it.
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I am stunned that it is the reverse in the US. Sounds pretty stupid to me. And here in Denmark we don't get robocalls either.
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the VOIP call has to enter a portal somewhere. That's the point where the charge is accessed. No payment no portal entry for Voip.
Re: Online order forms require it (Score:5, Insightful)
How about simply cutting through their bullshit. Those telecoms also make money on the calls so they allow it to happen on purpose.
Here is how to stop, OHH FUCKING LOOK this fucking phone line made 1,000 calls in the last hour, could it possibly be a scammer, do people make that many calls, no, well cut them off, done and finished.
They are total fucking liars and cunts, they can totally 100% control this, they choose not to because they profit from it. Limit the number of calls any line can make in any set time period, done and finished.
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They already know the ID of the caller. Have you ever heard of the phone company giving away free service because they couldn't figure out who to bill?
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That's the benefit of the back propagating spam fee. Each carrier in the chain gets the choice to either propagate the fee back towards the caller or eat the cost itself (guess which they'll choose!).
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Re: Online order forms require it (Score:5, Interesting)
the carrier that transferred the call to my carrier gets billed. THey bill whoever gave it to them, and so on.
If you reach a point where it can't be tracked the carrier that can't track the incoming origin is where the net cost lands.
See how long they put up with not being able to trace their inputs!
Re: Online order forms require it (Score:2)
Source has been masked?
Just drop the call.
Legit VOIP services should not do this, and if they do, they'll fix it real quick.
Re: Online order forms require it (Score:5, Insightful)
When a phone call completes, have an option for the recipient to charge them $1.00. The phone company keeps half.
Another requirement should be that if the caller can't be identified and billed, the phone company still has to pay you.
Anonymous spoofing will end real quick.
Re: Online order forms require it (Score:4, Interesting)
We know what carrier every number belongs to thanks to number portability. That database exists and is updated frequently, or you couldn't port your number to a new carrier. This database enables carriers to connect outgoing call to the carrier who can complete the call.
All that needs to happen is for ATT, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile to verify that an inbound call seeking to be completed on their network comes from the carrier that number belongs to. If it doesn't, then it should be rejected. If those four carriers alone started doing this, I'm pretty sure robocalls would collapse because so many of them wouldn't get through.
One step better would be for all carriers to reject any inbound call using ANI that doesn't belong to that subscriber. Since individual carriers know what number blocks they are associated with and which blocks belong to their subscribers (all necessary for proper call termination), that database essentially exists, too.
All this mumbo-jumbo of "what about VoIP" misses the point; the calls have to enter the public phone network someplace, and ultimately in the jungle of low-rent VoIP carriers are circuits that enable them to terminate calls on the major carriers, those circuits cost money and the carrier is keeping track of inbound calls.
The fact that carriers haven't done anything like this really means they're part of the problem, making revenue off of it and are loathe to threaten that revenue.
Re: Online order forms require it (Score:2)
$500 is the right price.
Re: Online order forms require it (Score:2)
The reason is that the cost is nothing. (Score:3)
They should turn it into a source or revenue for the phone companies. When a phone call completes, have an option for the recipient to charge them $1.00. The phone company keeps half.
Even if it was a penny it would probably work...
^^^^
This is it.
The reason that there are a billion robocalls a day is that there is no cost to making a call. They don't pay for the resources they use.
Even a penny a call would stop the robocalls dead. Even a tenth of a cent would stop them dead.
Re:Online order forms require it (Score:5, Interesting)
The spam calls I receive do not mention my name or any other identifying information.
As far as I can see, they are just calling numbers randomly.
I am skeptical that keeping your phone number confidential will make any difference at all.
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Mod parent up, please. This is directly on the mark.
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The spam calls I receive do not mention my name or any other identifying information.
As far as I can see, they are just calling numbers randomly.
I am skeptical that keeping your phone number confidential will make any difference at all.
Completely agree. Most of the calls I receive have the same matching 1-XXX-XXX prefix. As I no longer live in that town or have any friends there, I can safely ignore them but my assumption is they are just calling all 9999 numbers in that prefix with another random number in that same prefix. I know the number is spoofed too because I originally tried to call a few of them back out of curiosity and I also get people regularly calling "me" back so I know they are using my number to call other people as
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I'm still waiting for this to change. I suspect that the main reason people have a phone number nowadays is because it's basically expected that you have one. However, the vast majority of calls I get are junk, to the point where my ringer is permanently off if I'm not expecting a call. Anyone who wants to get a hold of me generally uses other methods to do so. Robocalls, scams, and other garbage have basically broken the phone system to the point where it's no longer a reliable way to get a hold of som
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"It is a nearly-universal business practice: if you are ordering a product or service online, they will require a phone number."
Buy a dozen empty prepaid cards from eBay for a buck or 2, then you own the number you never answer to, so no fraud.
Enforce the Do Not Call registry (Score:3)
Did this in Canada and made things worse... (Score:5, Informative)
All it did was move calls to overseas (India being a big one) and by publishing the "Do Not Call" list all they did was provide the callers with a list of numbers that they knew people would pick up if they were called.
Ironically, the people who are bothered the least are the ones that didn't sign up for the "Do Not Call" list.
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The international handshaking agreements between the telecoms companies of various nations means that the country receiving the call gets paid a small amount of the fees being charged by the originating telco.
This is why the overseas robocall problem doesn't go away easily. However, there is no technical reason why it should not be possible for you to set up some simple rules, such as:-
1. Block all international calls...
2.
I also like the i
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I sure as hell don't want my telco storing a whitelist of my contacts. Those kinds of relationships are just begging to be sold for profit. I don't even want them holding a blacklist. My phone device should be able to do that just fine. If only those things weren't disabled so the telco could profit by selling me services which do the same thing...
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I sure as hell don't want my telco storing a whitelist of my contacts.
It would be trivial for them to figure out your contacts by themselves.
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The ultimate solution to this is primarily technological in nature.
The real problem though is that these robocallers make money...
The ultimate solution is not merely technological but rather financial. Even if they are hacking PBXs and getting the phone calls for free, there is still someone's time involved somewhere. There needs to be a way to quickly report them in real time so that the telecoms can disconnect them as well as a way to make it unprofitable. If on average it takes 100 calls to get one victim, if just 5% of those first 100 had to ability to report it, you could shut them down the majority of time before they reached
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No, the problem is that it would be far too easy for these
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to reach any of those indian call centers, you usually do not call an indian number.
instead you will call a number in usa. because they like to pretend like the call center is in usa.
Re:Enforce the Do Not Call registry (Score:5, Interesting)
If they're making money off of this, then at some point a payment gets made someplace traceable where it can be prosecuted, no? It's not all bitcoin - the targets wouldn't be savvy enough to pay that way, right?
Anyway, if these things cost fractions of a cent to make, then the answer is to make all phone calls cost 1 or 2 cents - paid by the caller. I'd sure pay that for the calls I care to make in order to stop receiving the ones I don't want. Kind of like the idea of using a transaction fee to shut down robo-trading. If it hasn't happened yet, it's because lobbyists are paying for it not to happen.
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It only takes one conscientious citizen to humor a robo-spammer long enough to get the real name/contact information behind the call, after which that company can be reported so the FTC can enforce their severe Do Not Call fines.
Years ago I tried just that & it failed to work. I suppose I wasn't a good enough actor. Every time they saw through my subterfuge & hung up. I did play along with the IRS guy with the british/nigerian accent for about 5 minutes before he got exasperated & told me a warrant has been issued & the police are on the way to arrest me! I couldn't stop from busting up laughing when he told me to go to a CVS for a payment card. "YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?!" & I said hell ya!
btw, you could be
Robocalls (Score:2)
I've never in my life experienced a robocall. If we can avoid them in Europe, so can the US.
Re:Robocalls (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never in my life experienced a robocall. If we can avoid them in Europe, so can the US.
Most European countries ban anonymous spoofing.
America does not.
America's political system does not respond well to geographically distributed problems. If all the robocalls happened in a single swing state, they would stop tomorrow.
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All of the blocked numbers are scammers that told me I've won something, somewhere where I never participated and similar things. I could not tell whether they were robocalls or not, since I usually hang up long before.
It's difficult to say how
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I've never in my life experienced a robocall. If we can avoid them in Europe, so can the US.
I live in France and I regularly get telemarketing calls (which are typically included in the robocall category as far as I can tell). As for calls made by an automaton I receive a handful per year; typically scams telling me to call some expensive phone number. So no, Europe is not immune to either telemarketing calls or robocalls.
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Very common now in the US, or at least in California, is the scam call in Mandarin. It apparently is requesting the person contact the Chinese embassy at a certain number.
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Here in BC, those are about the only scam calls I get on my cell phone. House phone is another matter though, most calls seem to be scams of some type
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Time wasting (Score:2)
If it didnâ(TM)t make me so angry I would spend more time wasting theirs. I think itâ(TM)s best for my stress is to hang up before saying anything.
How can you "guard a number" (Score:4, Insightful)
It's impossible to guard a number, when at this point they are simply calling all numbers in a valid area code, probably sharing any numbers that even voice mail picks up on...
Almost getting to the point where I wish there was an hour a day I could designate as a time it was possible to call me, that I could set arbitrarily - then the rest of the day have my number reported by the phone company as disconnected.
Yes we can (Score:5, Interesting)
I use asterisk to screen calls. If it is an previously unknown number a message will request the caller to press a number. If the number is correct the callerid will be added to a whitelist and the call connected.
What? (Score:5, Funny)
SubjectsSuck (Score:5, Insightful)
Any argument that we can't stop robo-calls because it's "too expensive" is just stupid. The cost of stopping them is miniscule compared to the cost of allowing them.
Re:SubjectsSuck (Score:5, Informative)
Any argument that we can't stop robo-calls because it's "too expensive" is just stupid. The cost of stopping them is miniscule compared to the cost of allowing them.
Cost of stopping them will have to be borne by the telco,.
Cost of allowing will by borne by you, not the telco.
So what would telco do?
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Cost of allowing will by borne by you, not the telco. So what would telco do?
Simple answer: government, represented by the people, forces telco.
At least, that's how it works here in Communist Europe. Americans prefer free market where telcos can assist in harassment for profit.
Re: SubjectsSuck (Score:2)
There is a good amount of expensive that comes into effect. There a lot of people who I need to call when I have repaired the equipment they sent in. I need to communicate that their equipment is fixed and arrange payment and get it back to them. Many of them no longer answer a call from a number they don't recognize. So there is telephone tag which wastes a lot of time. It delays them getting back their equipment and my company getting paid for the repair.
We are approaching the point where everybody refuse
How to make them pay (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever you receive a call from one of these scammers do what you can to talk to a live person. This is what costs them money. When I get a robo-call telling me about pack pain medication or having an import message from my credit card company, I always press whatever button I need to push to seem interested and speak with a representative. Then I keep that person on the phone for as long as possible until they give up and hang up on me.
If everyone did this, the overhead of these bastards would be too high to keep calling people. At worse, it would make them limit their calls to known suckers.
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Great idea for those, such as yourself, who value their time as worthless.
Phone companies are liars (Score:5, Informative)
They manage to find out enough information to make money don't they? Every single call can be traced... if they wanted to trace them. The key is that there is no motivation to do so. It is just easier to allow robo-calls and collect money from a subscriber.
Every system could implement a technology that when a person receives a robo-call they hang up and immediately dial... say Start or Pound 666... nice number for that shit, and it immediately drops an electronic note to the phone company that the last number that called was a robo. It all goes into a database and now they have at least the exit phone number attached to a business, whether that number is VoIP or Traditional is meaningless. That number itself like an IP address is registered to a business and then you go to that business and tell them... if you keep letting your telephony infrastructure make/forward robocalls we fine you into oblivion or force the telephone company to cut your phone/internet.
The problem is actually very easy to solve, the problem is political and businesses do not want to lose the revenue robo-calls generate. There really are lots of ways to solve this problem. But it will never be resolved because leaders don't actually care about citizens, they just care about your votes. We all can't be William Webster.
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The phone companies can easily log which tiny minority of their customers are making 50% of all calls and take steps to block them. They probably DO keep tabs on them, but only to maximize their revenues. And revenues come from the marks who received the calls too (in the USA).
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You have no idea of the underlying technologies and you just blather gut-level bullshit.
Meh, this isn't really about technology at all. Give the FCC the authority to fine $1 per spam call and customers something to dial to report the last call. Issue the fine to the phone company, tell them you can either pass the buck or pay up. Very soon afterwards they'll know what contact point it came from and update their agreements to forward the charges. Eventually that'll trickle down to the end customer who'll probably see this as a $1 start charge that's refunded in say 24 hours unless the caller co
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Ajit Pai will not last longer than the Trump presidency and this is not a partisan issue. Either the telcos will fix the problem, or they will be fined, or people will eventually stop getting phone service. The only reason I use my phone is to call businesses which don't respond to email in a timely manner. Since all of my friends and family are on chat apps, I have no problem blocking all incoming calls.
On the other hand, I don't think catching the spammers is all that useful, but if you do manage to catch
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No, it will not harm the prepaid cell phone users, and is a straw-man post.
The MNVO's are only part of the problem and only possible because of the "original" problem. If they can get a contract for service from a traditional telco then the telco is also complicit in the problem and specifically why I said that there is no motivation to put and end to the problem because money. It talks and the bullshit walks.
The telco's are liars because it is good business to lie about this problem. Everyone running mo
Just don't answer (Score:5, Insightful)
If your phone rings, and you don't know the calling number - just let it go into voicemail. If it's important, they will leave a message which you can retrieve at your convenience (or if like me you use Google Voice, the voicemail is transcribed to quasi-accurate text). Almost always it's some marketing scam. Fuk Them.
Re:Just don't answer (Score:5, Informative)
That's great, unless you're a freelancer or small business and have to answer calls in case it's a customer.
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I don't want it to even alert me unless the person is in my contacts list.
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I would be all for this, but sometimes I interact with a website which insists that I receive a call to get a 2FA code. Or similar.
But in general, yeah, fukk'em.
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If they had that feature, you could turn it on and off for times you were expecting a call.
Useless Channels (Score:5, Insightful)
Notice that people have been moving away from phone calls and email for years now. Robocalls/spam are a large part of the reason why. If those old systems aren't capable of stopping the crapflood, then people will move to systems that are.
128-bit phone numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
The only way keeping your phone number a secret might reduce spam calls is if the current successor to NANPA (Neustar?) takes a currently-unused areacode, then uses it as the prefix for a random 40-digit phone number (approx. number of decimal digits in the largest unsigned 128-bit value), then allows consumers to link an unlimited number of randomly-picked numbers to your "real" one (and allow you to know what number an incoming call dialed, so you could program your phone to ignore incoming calls to your "real" number, but allow incoming calls to one of your incoming 40-digit numbers to ring).
Then, whenever you had to give someone "your number", you'd peel an unused 40-digit number from the metaphorical stack & give it to them (probably, via an app running on your phone).
If a specific incoming number of yours started attracting too many junk calls, you could unceremoniously nuke it & unlink it from your real number. Likewise, since you'd give a unique inbound number to everyone, you could do 'traitor tracking' & punish businesses that failed to safeguard your number.
Random dialing would cease to work, because a robocaller could literally try random numbers for HOURS before hitting a valid one... especially if the system were designed to detect and frustrate such attempts.
The same service could reserve the shorter numbers (say, 12-16 digits) for more public purposes. Say, I might buy a 16-digit number & post it to social media after linking it to a service that charges callers $20 to complete the call (if I answer) & pays ME $15 for answering it if I agree to talk to the caller for at least a minute. We could ALL have the equivalent of 1990s-era 900/976 numbers to give out to the public & use dollars as a tool for screening our calls. I might even set up one number with a $5 charge explicitly FOR telemarketers to call me at, agreeing to give them 5 minutes of my time in exchange for paying me to listen.
Or... I could point one number to a bot that answers the call, then makes the caller play "Simon Says" & spend 10-20 minutes answering captcha-like puzzles for the privilege of making my phone ring (or the privilege of leaving me a message) for free.
Re: 128-bit phone numbers (Score:2)
Building on random-dialing prevention, they could set aside all the 40-digit numbers so that attempting to dial an invalid number cost the caller 10 cents, but dialing a valid number was free. That alone would quickly reduce random dialing by telemarketers by destroying the profitability of dialing random numbers.
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The phone company could easily plant a few honeypot numbers in each exchange. Land on one of those and it's $9.95 plus $4.99 per additional minute. They'd be earning that fee, so there's their motivation
Trouble is, I suspect that people dialing in through a VoIP gateway have some means of hiding their origin on the Internet side. And some poor gateway provider will get saddled with the charges. Which might not be all bad, as I suspect that gateways that do not authenticate properly will get hit and be moti
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> Obviously the fail here is when they start using your known contacts that were leaked out by social media and other parasites
That's the beauty of giving everyone a different number to call you at... if the phonebook of a friend or relative gets inhaled by malware, all that's been compromised is LITERALLY a single phone number used by exactly one person to call you. It's a lot easier to nuke a number used by only one person to contact you and give them a new number to reach you at than to change your On
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> Please focus on solutions that work for everyone.
Nothing EVER literally works for "everyone"... but if you really want to be pedantic about it, the app is for user convenience.
If push really came to shove, even somebody with a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] could call their telephone service provider's customer service number to generate and obtain another batch of 10-25 40-digit numbers assigned to their phone and write them down on a page of the phone's paper "phone book" using its included pencil
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There are plenty of ways to slow them down (Score:2)
If the cellular carriers actually cared.
They could use their monitoring tools to track call levels by number, and assign weights to the caller based on call frequency during a time period.
After weights were assigned to numbers, the carriers could create an "alternate billing rate" for calls originating from those numbers. The actual numbers, not a spoofed caller-id...
Many people don't actually make many calls, it's all texts and other IM services.
Someone could create audio captchas for incoming calls to fer
simplest "unsolvable" problem in human history (Score:2)
You just need a system to credit the person called by ten cents for every call received from the originating party (whether answered, or not).
Even better if each phone owner can establish his or her own price. I'd probably set mine my inbound threshold at 25 cents to see how that goes, initially.
Mostly these small tithes would just slosh back and forth and be largely a wash for many people.
But somehow you need to make sure that your phone company doesn't install a tollbooth and then take a bite of 50% or mo
The Phone Companies Can Solve Robocalls Overnight (Score:5, Insightful)
Robocalls CAN BE STOPPED.
It's the phone companies who can't be stopped! From letting 50% of all calls come from a tiny minority of customers and not flag that as suspicious behavior. And remember, in the USA they charge the chump receiving the call as well. We should end that, how bow dah?
communication needs a cost (Score:2)
If the average is 50% (Score:2)
then there are a lot of people who never get them, to make up for how many I get. For me, it's one real call for every 20 or so robocalls.
Got a comical one last week - deep male voice, saying, "Hi, this is Barbara with the Visa/Mastercard Alert system..."
When will the phone system become useless (Score:2)
This paper is a scam (Score:2)
The referenced paper cost $33 to download and it is pretty much shit - there are good reasons why none of what it proposes will work. The abstract of the paper does not even hint and what the paper is about. Yes we should work on robo calling - follow the work of people like Professor Henning Schulzrinne at Columbia university.
It's trivial to stop (Score:2)
No it's not. The phone companies don't depend on caller ID. They know exactly who is making the call - that's how they know to bill them, o
I block spam calls (Score:2)
I use nomorobo on my land line - works well. On my cell phone I use Call Blocker by Vlad Lee. It blocks all calls from numbers not in my contacts or whitelist. Blocked calls can leave a voicemail.
I want extension numbers added (Score:2)
I think all numbers should get 5 extra digits. Let the PBX or mobile phone decided which of the 100,000 extra numbers to answer and let the rest go to a voice mail system. That would make my phone useful as a voice device again and end the scams.
It is actually trivial to stop this (Score:2)
Simply have customers enter a *number AFTER spam call. While you and I see DiD # (ones that the customers use), the phone company gets a LOT more data. Then once say 100 phone calls from a single number over a day have entered *#. block that # for a day.
TO makes this work fast, have all of the western phone companies cooperate to a central DB. Once they get 100 spread over all of them, then shut down that line. The cost of this coming from place
Horse Hockey (Score:2)
Let me file a complaint that a call was bogus, and if shown true I get $1. This will cost the phone company money, seeing as they are the only ones that can fix the problem they will suddenly be motivated to fix the problem.
I only wish my scam calls were 50%, I'm pushing close to 90%. Not because I get more of them than most, but most of my communication is via text messages nowdays.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Robocalls (Score:3)
You can't begin to stop them while you're not enforcing laws to do exactly that.
Even then you can't stop them completely but you can certainly punish them historically. The UK ICO has gained powers last year to not only fine those companies (as it always has) but to now push those fines to the company directors even if the company goes bust (the trick was: dial a million people, wait until you're fined, shut up shop, start a new company with the same people and phone lists).
We have a do-not-call list called the TPS. Though not perfect it stops UK-based companies dialling UK-based households. I signed someone up to it who was having serious amounts of junk ringing all times of the day and they went from 2-3 calls a day to nothing. Maybe one a month, from someone in India.
The way to stop the remainder is easy: Hold the telecoms companies responsible. They have caller-ID records, they have traces, they know exactly who actually put those calls in, which provider they came from, and have the power to cut the contracts of those people who facilitated that call, they also know who facilitated the propagation of fake caller-ID and in a position to eliminate falsified Caller-ID. They don't do it, because nobody has made them.
It won't *stop* such calls being attempted. However, there is a way that stops such calls ever getting through, and you can do it yourself, and you don't even need to get your telecoms provider to sell you additional "call blocking" services (you think I'm going to pay you to NOT put obvious spam that you're allowing to happen through to me?). You turn your phone ringer off. Then you set your contacts to ring.
Bam. Problem solved. Now, to ring you, people have to be on your whitelist.
It's at this point people say "Yeah, but what if you're a company / self-employed and need random, unannounced people to ring you any time of the day or night to find work". Then you have an insoluble problem, my friend. You can limit the problem by using automated office services (it costs a pittance to hire a company to provide a business phone number where a real person the other end answers the call, takes down the caller's details and pass it on to you, or tries to ring you from the second they realise it's a genuine caller, while sounding like you have a enormous company with a posh receptionist), voicemail, or just finding a different communications medium (I haven't phoned a company except to complain in years).
Robocalls are easily fixable. You just need a regulator with a vague interest in doing so, legislation to stop the industry gaming the system, and then a small series of technical measures to prevent it interfering with the average person's life.
Case in point: I've had the same phone number for nearly 20 years. I used it for both business and personal use over that time, exclusively (I've not had any other number that I've ever used). I don't have any fancy call blocking. I'm on the TPS. I get a stray call once in a blue moon (anecdotally, my work colleagues in the same office get several a week). I don't answer anything from anyone I don't know. They ring once, don't get an answer (because it rings silently) and then that's it... end of. It'll be another month or more before anyone I don't know tries to ring again.
P.S. Political robocalls are basically illegal without explicit prior consent in the UK. Always have been. We also do not pay for receiving calls (even on mobiles) as some places do, so the cost is all on the sender and not on us. If the cost were on us too, we'd be up in arms.
Since GDPR, there is also a huge axe to hold over their heads about where they got your number from, and whether they can prove explicit consent (they can't just say "well, we got your number from a list from one of our commercial partners" - which partner, when, what authority do you think that gave YOU to call me, did I explicitly say YOU could ring me or even handle that information, who gave that partner explciti consent to share
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You can't begin to stop them while you're not enforcing laws to do exactly that.
You can't! Most of the calls are coming from countries where the laws aren't enforced.
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Until Trump came into office, they were.
Today? I doubt there is any effort at all. Ajit Pai testified to congress on the subject and thought it would be funny to make a joke out of spam callers.
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My favourite is to come on to them. Doesn't matter if it's a man or a woman. Talk dirty. Gets them every time.
I signed the papers on a new place the other day and I'm planning to use Asterisk to screen my calls. Two or three whitelisted numbers, block everything else.
...laura
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My favourite is to come on to them. Doesn't matter if it's a man or a woman.
90% of the calls I receive are neither man nor women.
They are robots.
Some of them are good. I try to trip them up by going off script, and some of them are capable of making reasonable responses and try to steer the conversation back on track.
If nothing else, robocalls are advancing the state-of-the-art in voice synthesis and recognition.
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This used to be true for me. In the last year or so however, 99.9% of all incoming calls on my mobile phone are scams and spams. Sometimes they don't even call but go straight to voicemail.
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Adding unwanted robocallers to a blacklist doesn't do any good because they don't ever use the same number twice.
You might stop 99% of them from getting through with the technique, but only until they adapt... at which point, you will be forced to utilize a more sophisticated means.
In actuality, I think the only way that robocalling can be controlled is via an independent reverse lookup on an incoming call. If the caller isn't really calling from the number that they say they are, then when you do the
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These assholes have made phones useless, and the only people that can stop it are the telcos. So make the telcos pay for the spam/scam call, problem goes away overnight.