FCC Fails, Robocalls (and Complaints) Increase, Along with Number-Hijacking (forbes.com) 110
"Despite new initiatives by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and carriers, robocalls aren't on the wane," reports Forbes.
"Americans are still facing a scourge of 200 million unwanted robocalls a day, according to a report from Transaction Network Services (TNS), a major telecommunications network and services company. And nearly 30% of all U.S. calls were negative (nuisance, scam or fraud calls) in the first six months of the year, TNS said..." Nuisance calls jumped 38% from the third quarter of last year, while high-risk calls -- such as scammers targeting identity theft -- were up 28%, TNS said. And the FCC actually saw an 8% increase year-over year in consumer robocall complaints when comparing February-June 2019 to February-June 2018, as cited by TNS in the report. There is a limit to what major U.S. carriers can do. They are only a small part of the problem, TNS said. While 70% of all calls (normal calls and unwanted calls) come from major U.S. carriers, only 12% of the high-risk calls are from the big carriers. That means the problem lies with lesser-known providers...
A growing threat is robocall hijacking -- when a subscriber's number is hijacked by a bad guy -- doubling over last year's figure, TNS said. TNS estimates that 1 in 1,700 numbers were hijacked by spoofers in 28 day-period. In the last report the frequency was only 1 in 4,000. In one case of hijacking, a spoofer placed over 36,000 scam calls in a 3-day period according to the TNS report.
Another spoofing threat cited in the report is that of legitimate toll-free numbers of leading tech companies. Here, the scammer will claim there is something wrong with the victim's account at the company and try to get personal information.
You can stop getting robocalls with a "simple but very effective" solution, according to the article. Both Android and iOS phones have a "Do Not Disturb" option in Settings -- so just enable that for everyone except your own contacts.
"Americans are still facing a scourge of 200 million unwanted robocalls a day, according to a report from Transaction Network Services (TNS), a major telecommunications network and services company. And nearly 30% of all U.S. calls were negative (nuisance, scam or fraud calls) in the first six months of the year, TNS said..." Nuisance calls jumped 38% from the third quarter of last year, while high-risk calls -- such as scammers targeting identity theft -- were up 28%, TNS said. And the FCC actually saw an 8% increase year-over year in consumer robocall complaints when comparing February-June 2019 to February-June 2018, as cited by TNS in the report. There is a limit to what major U.S. carriers can do. They are only a small part of the problem, TNS said. While 70% of all calls (normal calls and unwanted calls) come from major U.S. carriers, only 12% of the high-risk calls are from the big carriers. That means the problem lies with lesser-known providers...
A growing threat is robocall hijacking -- when a subscriber's number is hijacked by a bad guy -- doubling over last year's figure, TNS said. TNS estimates that 1 in 1,700 numbers were hijacked by spoofers in 28 day-period. In the last report the frequency was only 1 in 4,000. In one case of hijacking, a spoofer placed over 36,000 scam calls in a 3-day period according to the TNS report.
Another spoofing threat cited in the report is that of legitimate toll-free numbers of leading tech companies. Here, the scammer will claim there is something wrong with the victim's account at the company and try to get personal information.
You can stop getting robocalls with a "simple but very effective" solution, according to the article. Both Android and iOS phones have a "Do Not Disturb" option in Settings -- so just enable that for everyone except your own contacts.
Robo/scam calls not a problem for me. (Score:2)
Re:Until (Score:4, Funny)
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Ai fakes your mothers voice and leaves a message telling you to buy viagra...
Wouldn't work. I already know that Mom is more of a Levitra gal.
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Good luck with that -- she's dead.
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More realisticly... (Score:1)
AI fakes your son's voice and spoofed from his actual phone number, claiming he was arrested for some minor offense and needs you to buy $100 in gift cards for bond money.
Why only a minor crime with low bond? Well, which is more likely to raise your "this must be fake, I'm calling the FBI" alarm bells, that your son was arrested for something minor or that he went overseas without telling you and got arrested on a major felony?
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I go one better. Anyone not in my contacts gets voicemail, but my voicemail greeting is just 5 minutes of silence to prevent anyone from leaving a message which would subsequently annoy me with a notification.
I never use voicemail since most messages from people I know are "Hey it's me, call me back". I already know who it is and that they called thanks to caller ID (I also block all anonymous calls). If someone needs to get an actual message to me, they can SMS or email.
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Anyone not in my contacts goes to voicemail. If it's someone I want/need to talk to, I call them back. Most others don't bother to leave a voicemail. The ones that do are often entertaining, especially when it's some ridiculous robo-voice telling me that I'm about to be arrested for some nefarious something-or-other.
And when I'm sleeping, the phone is on airplane mode. If anyone is dying I can find out in the morning. I'm not a doctor.
That's what the 'do not disturb' setting does. If a person is not in my contacts, they go straight to voicemail. If it is an important call, then hopefully the caller will leave a voicemail and you can then return the call. Most legit callers do.
The only drawback is sometimes you may not receive information in a timely matter, referring to your 'if anyone is dying' comment. God forbid it is not a close family member or relative dying and you won't be so casual with the 'I'm not a doctor' attitude and mi
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Presumably your relatives will be on your contacts and can call you. However if it is the police or hospital and they are NOT on your contacts, then you won't know anyone called until you check your phone.
He said he puts his phone in airplane mode when he sleeps. Absolutely zero communication of any kind.
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Some of us have jobs where we may get escalated support calls from anywhere in the world.
Re: Robo/scam calls not a problem for me. (Score:2)
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So you can turn off your personal phone at night, not your work phone. This does not automatically cut the number of robocalls in half, it provides another phone to host robocalls during the day.
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They better be paying you very well then.
If any company requires me to be on call 24/7 and they are either not paying me well enough, or the job does not really require it, I'll tell them to go fuck themselves as I march out the door.
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We exchange on-call duties. I'm usually the "third tier" or "the guy you call when _everyone_ is confused".
Re:Robo/scam calls not a problem for me. (Score:4, Funny)
The ones that do are often entertaining, especially when it's some ridiculous robo-voice telling me that I'm about to be arrested for some nefarious something-or-other.
I'm waiting for a convergence of the most popular robo-calls: You're about to be arrested by the IRS unless you call back to take advantage of the lower credit-card rate you've earned because of your excellent payment record and use that card to renew the computer support you bought from the company that's now going out of business and wants to refund your subscription.
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Check out Kitboga [youtube.com]. He handles a lot of phone scammers.
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Which works until the robocallers start faking numbers that are likely to be in your contacts list, such as major banks or businesses, some of whom you may have dealings with.
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Banks DO call (Score:1)
"If my bank wants to contact me, they'll do it through their app or by mail. "
Um, maybe if you told them to do it through their app or email, otherwise if a bank wants to call you for something urgent, like an account compromise, they will contact you any way they can.
A good bank will limit the message to "There is an issue with your account, please call us on the number that is on your statement/that is on our web site/that is widely published."
A good bank will also have a "be alert for fakers" blurb in th
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otherwise if a bank wants to call you for something urgent, like an account compromise, they will contact you any way they can.
This points out the fallacy of giving your number to anyone on the promise that they'll only call you if it is "urgent". You're letting them decide what is urgent, and of course, everything they want to tell you is urgent to them.
Here's how you stop your bank/etc from deciding that they need to call you with some bit of urgent (to them) info: don't give them a phone number to call. That "urgent" account issue problem call they make doesn't trigger any time limits on fraud mitigation they are required to pe
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Of course, I imagine the hurdle of faking email headers or otherwise making an email appear legit by using company logos or what have you must be insurmountable in comparison.
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My bad, I misread "mail" as "email". I was not, apparently, the only one.
The header information is the thing that can be forged.
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Congratulations, you apparently don't have any teenage kids or other significant responsibilities.
Millenial solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Figures that the proposed solution would come from someone who doesn't have a landline.
I have found that if you say "hello" in a foreign language they usually hang up.
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Oh. I like this approach. From other recent threads, say it in Cobol?
https://open-cobol.sourceforge... [sourceforge.io]
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Well, so is reading Slashdot.....
but, here we are.
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Re:Millenial solution (Score:4, Funny)
I just go after the Indians in the most ethnically insulting manner I can muster.
"Hey, what dot does your wife have on her head, a red one or some other color? Is it kind of "target" when you're aiming at her face?"
"Do you live in a cardboard box or a shanty town?"
"Why does your Jesus look like an elephant? Do you pray for peanuts?"
They often lose their shit and start screaming at you, sometimes even making all kinds of threats. I just laugh, and tell them it's a lot of garbage to pick through to get to the US, I'll bet they never make it, but I'll eat some beef while they work at it.
Am I horrible person? Probably, but calling me up to try and steal from me pretty much means you've abandoned the social contract.
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I just go after the Indians in the most ethnically insulting manner I can muster. "Hey, what dot does your wife have on her head, a red one or some other color? Is it kind of "target" when you're aiming at her face?"
You know, European football leagues are going though quite a bit of excitement right now based on this kind of thing. It seems that some fans understand that riling up an opposing player is best done using "the most ethnically insulting manner" they can. For some players, that means making monkey noises when they're lined up to make a PK. It outrages the player because of course the fans that are doing it are racist, and the club they support is racist if the club doesn't clamp down on it, and the other clu
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Another tack:
Ask if they believe in karma and do they understand how much agony they're spreading? How are they going to make up for all that? Tell them if they care about their co-workers' karma they need to get all of them to quit too. Or sabotage the company. Make the world a better place and they'll be rewarded for it.
It seems to have gotten traction a few times.
FCC did not "fail" (Score:2)
They are doing exactly what they are being told to do.
My robocalls have gone way down (Score:2)
I was getting about 2-3 robocalls a day for quite a while, sometimes more.
For some reason though, the number of robocalls I have gotten dropped off dramatically starting maybe three months ago or so - now I'm getting about one a week.
This is only anecdotal of course and others may be facing a barrage still. But because I am doing nothing different - I have the same call blocking apps I've always used - I have to think something has changed structurally to make this better. I use T-Mobile as a service, per
Re: My robocalls have gone way down (Score:1)
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My experience was the same, and I'm on a different carrier.
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Do Not Disturb (Score:2)
so just enable that for everyone except your own contacts.
This mostly works for me on Android (OnePlus 6). But even though it doesn't ring, it still will flash the call up on the display and interrupt what I'm doing if I'm using the phone at the time the call comes in. Or it will interrupt my music if I'm in the car with Android Auto hooked up. So it's not 100% effective. We need a "No, really, don't disturb at all" setting.
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Yeah, on IOS is't like it never happened. If a call is blocked , you'll never know.
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Strange timing (Score:5, Informative)
I think it is strange that initiatives that the FCC approved just in the last 90 days have been "shown" to be ineffective in the 180 days prior to their approval/implementation.
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Re: Strange timing (Score:2)
The shaken/stir protocols are still a few months out. Nothing real has happened yet that anybody serious cares about.
Except (Score:2)
>"You can stop getting robocalls with a "simple but very effective" solution, according to the article. Both Android and iOS phones have a "Do Not Disturb" option in Settings -- so just enable that for everyone except your own contacts."
That is all good and well, and I have done that for years (actually, with an app). But that is not usable for anyone that needs to use their mobile phone for legitimate unknown callers (open business, for example). It also *has* to send unwanted calls to voicemail, whe
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It's a terrible solution. It's basically saying "The only real answer is to give up and turn off your phone. The scammers have won the war." There are real solutions but it takes the willpower to implement them, something which the FCC and the phone companies are severely lacking.
Re: Except (Score:1)
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There is never a reason to allow someone to fake any number they feel like. Legitimate businesses need to fake their own legitimate numbers, but it's easy to set up a system where you can only spoof a number if you can prove ownership. Anything else? tough, you can't spoof the number, and only your real number will show on caller id. If a call comes in from overseas cla
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The FCC and NTIA have the jurisdiction, but are loathe to battle their overlords, who are NOT the US people. Their overlords are the phone companies/telcos.
SS7 is a sieve. It has been a sieve, and NO ONE WANTS TO SPEND MONEY to upgrade their stuff, lest the Wall Street overlords punish them with stock price castigation.
So we're basically fucked.
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I would not expect any benefit from the FCC since the appointment of Ajit Pai. The legal changes necessary to block fraudulent robocalls are the same changes needed to stop "unsolicited bulk calls" of any sort, and the FCC is not going to cut off that source of paying customers for telcos. They are also not going to change anything that reduces monthly phone use, even though so much of the phone use is from robocallers and especially fraudulent robocallers.
Responsibility (Score:4, Interesting)
The only real solution is to hold the source network responsible, and after proper channels suspend access in. There is no motivation for service providers here and overseas to ensure quality customers. If you start abusing your Internet, service providers here will cut you off. If entire networks are spammers we stop accepting mail from them (unfortunately maybe taking legitimate email down with it). Start rejecting calls. These folks connect to the PSTN network somewhere and have an account somewhere
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How about being able to report scam numbers to your provider, through an app? All providers offer apps full of crap nobody needs, but not useful things like reporting scam numbers.
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How about being able to report scam numbers to your provider, through an app? All providers offer apps full of crap nobody needs, but not useful things like reporting scam numbers.
What number are you going to report? I live in the Southern US, I really doubt the Canadian IRS is calling my from a local area code, and certainly not from a number with the same first 3 digits as my number (especially since my sister is the only person I know with those numbers matching mine). Even if you report a number you aren't reporting the actual number the call is originating from.
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That's something for your provider to figure out. You get a scam/spam call from number 123456789, you report number 123456789. Your provider should be able to trace back the call, or interact with the provider of the original call number, etc.
Same as e-mail, really. I don't care whether the spam e-mail comes from a legitimate domain which was hacked, or wherever. I report the e-mail as spam and my e-mail provider takes action.
Re: Except (Score:2)
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There are real solutions but it takes the willpower to implement them, something which the FCC and the phone companies are severely lacking.
The phone companies have plenty of will power but it is to make money off of unsolicited phone calls.
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My plan was to route all my calls through a personal PBX in the cloud and take them via forwarded VOIP. Waaay too much of a pain in the ass, and now I just check voicemail daily for unknown callers.
System is broken, and the phone companies better realize it soon or they will become completely redundant.
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And none of this helps at all for land lines.
What's a land line?
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>"What's a land line?"
You know, those millions of lines in 98% of all businesses and a significant number of homes...
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For land lines, run them into a TAD and send them to asterisk to press a number to speak to a human. Since the majority of such calls are connected by computer, this will stop them completely. Don't ring any phones until the caller completes a captcha.
I thought they were still talking about measures.. (Score:1)
I figured that being government, it would take a year or 2 before anything really happened.
If they actually implemented something they are really doing horribly. Nothing is improved yet.
I have actually started to embrace the "lower your credit card interest rate" calls by talking to these people, insisting they read off my credit card number to me to verify (instead of the other way around they want), and providing them bogus information to look me up. While they are "looking me up". I hang up.
The Verizon
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I always ask for whatever it is they are calling about. If it is a Credit Card thing I require that they provide the Credit Card number they are calling about. If it is a "your confirmation number was chosen" thing, I require the confirmation number. If it is a "Computer Support" scammer, I require the particular license key they are calling about.
Other callers (Politicians, Survey Companies, etc) are required to provide the telephone number at which I can call them back.
They all usually just hang up imm
Google (Score:3)
Oddly I get calls from (actual) Google about every 3 weeks. Not fake Google scammers but real google. First question is them asking for my account number. I always tell them no, ask to speak to a manager, have some fight with them, and then eventually give in because they refuse to move forward without it. Why canâ(TM)t Google of all people understand that they called me
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or they could do their job?` (Score:2)
That's like the police saying they can't do anything about the burglars so everyone should just add more personal security instead.
How about they just do their jobs instead of asking the public to inconvenience themsevels to make up for their impotence?
Whitelisting (Score:3, Interesting)
My email is whitelisted, if you are no in my contacts it gets deleted
My Phone is whitelisted, not in my contacts, no ring, no vibrate.
Its not hard
Treat your communications like you treat your home.
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So, if my sons phone is flat, it's flat. No great panic.
Do you carry a spare phone with you just incase one breaks down, you leave it somewhere or it gets stolen ?
I could survive without too many issues with having no phone at all. Mind you I grew up having to wait until I saw a person the next day or later in the week to be able to chat to them.
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Back then emergency calls couldn't get through anyway because the daughter had the phone line tied up for hours.
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How on earth did previous generations ever survive without the ability to have instant connectivity ?
In some cases, they didn't. In some emergency situations, every second counts.
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How did we ever survive without cell phones? I know, we had synchronization events planned when to expect people to be at a certain position at a certain time. My mom called it "be home for dinner at 6".
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What if you give your phone number to a business (like a contractor or Uber Eats or whatever), and someone from that organization needs to call you from a number you've never been called from? How do you answer the phone and talk to that person?
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There already is a solution to fix it... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are absolutely real solutions -- but the carriers have no interest in implementing them. Here's the thing -- carriers on the receiving end of any call get the charge the carrier placing the call. *They are making money from spam calls*. And a lot of money. To the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars (AT&T, for example). If the problem goes away, so does that profit center.
A real solution is to pass long the BTN (Bill To Number) that is attached to each and every call on the network. That BTN is the number that actually originated the call -- not just the CallerID. It can't be spoofed. Passing it along to the end-user will allow you to see two phone numbers -- where the number originated from, and what they say their CallerID is. If the two are out of whack -- for example, if the CallerID shows your kid's school and the BTN shows someplace in China or India, you can block it (or have your phone automatically block it -- or here's a concept, have your carrier block it.
My org has a large enough phone switch where we get raw SS7 information (out-of-band info that exists on the phone network). We built a spam-filter out of Kamailio/OpenSER that uses the BTN field to block calls -- just like an email spam checker does. If a call is obviously bad (like for example, if our org gets tens or hundreds of calls from the same number at a time, or if of they are call-walking), we block it. If it's questionable, we send them to an IVR where they have to hit 1 to connect to the user, and simply allow everything else through. Last month we blocked over 100,000 calls with maybe a dozen false-positives at most. It wasn't hard to implement, and maybe took a full week to implement, test and put into production.
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> A real solution is to pass long the BTN (Bill To Number) that is attached to each and every call on the network.
This. This is how we caught the Scientology Usenet spammer, way back in the day, tying up 3 modems for 12 hours a night on interstate calls to sucker ISP's that let people pay their first bill with cash or cashier's checks, Scientology members buying accounts "for their brother". They were flooding alt.religion.scientology with 300 forged messages a night, each about 30 KBytes in size, to pre
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The difference is, he was using a real phone line, with Ma Bell and an actual billed number behind it. Today's phone spammers use bulk VoIP, which allows faking all the SS7 information. There's not an actual phone line involved, just a trunk connection from a VoIP provider. And those can be anywhere in the world, where US laws don't apply.
And they don't even give a fuck if you somehow find their name, they're doing this to make money, not spread kook ideas. This is the descendant of Canter and Seigel, not
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Any solution like that is going to require a lot of maintenance by the public and tech-based solutions invite gaming the system. The nefarious group only has to get a new number and the whole thing starts over again. Ya gotta make 'em pay.
How about a nationwide harassment reporting system? Here's how it could work:
Just like the old *69 and other *xx codes, (If you don't know what those are, in the days before ubiquitous caller ID, voicemail and smart phones, if you missed a call you just dialed *69 to be co
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Want to stop Robocalls? (Score:1)
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WHat makes you think they don't do this already?
Question: How can they even spoof numbers? (Score:1)
Re:Question: How can they even spoof numbers? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because the number in Caller ID in the US is the number the caller says they are using. They can put in any number they feel like. The "real" number, where the bill goes, is not shown to the recipient.
There is a somewhat legitimate reason for this: If my bank's call center is actually calling me, they would like the main number for the call center to be the one shown to me. It's the number I'd call back, instead of the one-of-hundreds-of-numbers that the agent's call happened to use this time (Plus they'd want to hand out an 800- number instead of a real phone number anyway). This is used as a fig leaf to claim the FCC can't fix it.
It is extremely easy to fix for within-the-US calls, in that the FCC could require carriers to only relay calls if the caller ID matches a phone number owned by the same company as the one they want to display. But that would cost the phone companies money, so the FCC doesn't want to do that.
This fix wouldn't work for international calls in that the US carrier isn't going to know the billing details surrounding a call that originates outside the US. They know the originating number, but they wouldn't know if the caller ID number was owned by the same company.
For most countries, that's relatively easy for the end user to deal with - if the call is obviously coming from India, it's not your bank down the street. Which would make the robocalls not nearly as effective for fraud, and thus reduce the number of calls.....though we do get plenty of "Your family back home needs money now" calls in Chinese, and presumably putting a Chinese number on those would lend authenticity.
But there's still one loophole: Canada. Canada and the US share the same country code, so calls from Canada look to a US person like a call from the US, since there's no country code (Canadians have been hit with US-based robocalls for the same reason). And US phone companies (theoretically) can't know the billing of a Canadian company. So we would still need an agreement with Canada to fix robocalls that cross the border.
Flag verified calls (Score:1)
If carriers would flag calls as "vouched for" or "not vouched for" as part of the caller-ID information, recipients could use that to decide to ignore the call or not.
Anything from a telco that didn't "vouch for their own callers" that hits my telco would automatically be marked as "not vouched for." Ditto anything from a telco that, according to my telco, had a history of "falsely vouching for" callers.
For cell phones, the phone itself could just send the call to voicemail or a voice response unit or audi
So just give up (Score:2)
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The advice given, of not answering your phone if you don't know the number, is pretty much giving up and blaming the victim for the crime.
It's actually a simple paradigm shift. It changes the idea that the cell phone exists for the convenience of everyone else in the world to be able to contact you any time, any place, into the idea that the tool you are paying for is for your own convenience first and foremost.
If you find getting calls from spammers inconvenient, then this violates the "for your own convenience" concept and you simply block them. If you decide it is inconvenient for you to allow others to call you anywhere you are at any t
Money makes the world go round! (Score:1)
Just have fun with it (Score:3)
It's not like you cannot enjoy getting robocalls. Me and a couple friends started recording them and having our fun with them, make up appointments that we don't follow up to, have them "fix" our VMs (it took one of the MS scammers 3 snapshot reverts to figure out he's been "fixing" the same machine over and over), and their reaction when they notice they were wasting their time is absolutely priceless.
Find a credit card number generator that suits your needs in case you want to go that far, it usually takes them about 3-4 credit card issuers 'til they notice that you're pulling their leg. I usually turn the table around and yell at them that my credit cards work everywhere and that they're just too stupid to type the numbers correctly.
Sadly, recently I don't get calls anymore. I guess I need a new phone number.
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FCC Complaints go where...? (Score:2)
I've received text messages from realtors that have paid for a service that links my cell number to a street address for a house that I own, asking me if I'd consider selling the house. I reached out to the good ole better business bureau and was told that they didn't care. I reached out to the FCC, and they didn't even respond.
Summary: If you're a scammer, or buying data from the black market, there's nothing to worry about anymore. Just do you. The rest of us will build up a tolerance and then an imm
Re:FCC Complaints go where...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Electronically submitted complaints to the FCC go to /dev/null
Complaints sent via mail or courier are converted into two-ply "Constitutional" wipes.
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TNS (Score:1)