Robocall Fines Rise To $10,000 Per Call Under Newly Passed Law (theverge.com) 62
After months of negotiations, Congress approved a landmark bill on Thursday to stop the flood of illegal robocalls. The president is expected to sign it into law within the next few days. The Verge reports: The Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act, or the TRACED Act, empowers the federal government with new abilities to go after illegal robocallers. Once TRACED is enacted, the Federal Communications Commission could fine robocallers up to $10,000 per call. It also would require major carriers like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile to deploy a new technology called STIR/SHAKEN into their networks, which will make it easier for consumers to know if they're receiving a call from a spoofed number.
The House voted overwhelmingly to approve the measure earlier this month, and Thursday's unanimous Senate vote means the bill only requires President Trump's signature to become law. Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) said that the bill should be signed into law within the "next week or so."
The House voted overwhelmingly to approve the measure earlier this month, and Thursday's unanimous Senate vote means the bill only requires President Trump's signature to become law. Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) said that the bill should be signed into law within the "next week or so."
fines can't stop over seas call centers! (Score:4, Informative)
fines can't stop over seas call centers!
Re: fines can't stop over seas call centers! (Score:4, Insightful)
Presumably not, but that's where STIR/SHAKEN comes in. As far as I can see, it's a way to, basically, both validate and give reputation to carriers for SIP calls, which is where most of these come from.
It should help with SIP calls, yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah STIR should help with SIP calls, which are less expensive. SHAKEN, for PTSN, has been around a while and doesn't help that much. The traditional global telephone system just isn't designed cryptographic signatures. STIR will increase the cost of robocalls, and therefore reduce their frequency.
Of course SIP calls very often switch over to PTSN before they are terminated, so call centers can use SIP internationally, then go through a US PTSN gateway to lose the STIR header.
A problem with STIR is that a lot of legitimate calls won't/can't be attested at the highest level so if you choose not to answer unattested calls or calls with only a C level attestation, you'll miss some legitimate calls. STIR can attest some calls to a certain degree, it can't say that a call is spoofed. Only that's it's not verified to a particular level.
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if you choose not to answer unattested calls or calls with only a C level attestation, you'll miss some legitimate calls.
Legitimate callers can leave a voicemail.
Problem solved.
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Legitimate callers can send me an email, so I don't have to listen to them go "uhhh" and "ummm" for 30 seconds before pressing 7 and doing it all over again.
Voicemail is painfully bad. Transcription is a vast improvement, but that tends to mean farming it out to the Google.
Also, some of us who are half deaf really don't like communication with vocal cords and eardrums, since they don't work too well on a good day.
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"Voicemail is painfully bad. Transcription is a vast improvement, but that tends to mean farming it out to the Google."
Maybe you have better service.
When I upgraded my Verizon service last year with a new iPhone XS, I started getting the transcription. It's total crap. Click on a voicemail, and it's often not responsive for 15-30 seconds...I'm guessing that it's transcribing during this time. And then the transcription is wrong enough to not be usable in at least half of the cases.
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It won't stop illegal international calls from international numbers, but should shut down the ones routing through US numbers to avoid international tolls. And the cost of international tolls will shut down most.
Re: fines can't stop over seas call centers! (Score:4, Interesting)
They effectively fine the person that gives them a local number for illegal purposes. It won't stop illegal international calls from international numbers, but should shut down the ones routing through US numbers to avoid international tolls. And the cost of international tolls will shut down most.
I'd wager that it's far more likely that this law will do absolutely nothing.
This is like making murder more illegal by calling it a hate crime.
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More like making DUI more illegal by taking the license and cars of drunks. And that worked.
Did it? By what metric? Sure, we have plenty of DUI arrests, vehicles seized, fines collected, and people jailed. But we also have plenty of drunk drivers.
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Hardly. What worked is making it more socially irresponsible. Back in the 70s/80s, getting a DUI was mostly viewed as an "Oh Shit, I got caught". Now, even your friends will think less of you.
Also, I have a brother and father-in-law, both of whom are "functional" alcoholics. The brother lost his license, and continued to drive. There's virtually nothing that's going to stop him until he gets caught again, or kills someone.
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Yeah, nothing like overreaction and punishing every citizen of a country for the bad manners of a few shitheads. By the way, you realize this would pretty much cut all international trade between us and a bunch of countries because you couldn't conduct business. So sure, let's throw the world into global recession.
Less knee jerk next time please.
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On the other hand, you would really only have to do it once before everyone realizes "Oh shit!!! They are serious!!!" and get their act together. This problem has been going on for years now, and one of the biggest reasons is there is little motivation for these places to do anything about it. They've had plenty of time to address the problem, but they haven't. Doing something like this will provide the motivation. This new law really isn't going to do shit.
Though I'm a bigger fan of fining the telecoms
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Either me or everyone in the US is missing something here.
I almost never get robocalls on my UK mobile phone. Why? Because it costs the caller 0.35 GBP to talk to me. It doesn't matter if they're from the US, or from India, or wherever. Nobody cares if the number is spoofed -- the rate of return is just too low for spam calling to be cost-effective.
The US *must* already have some wayof dealing with this back-propagation of cost, because if you call my UK mobile from the US you're going to get charge
It's ALL BS (Score:1)
You and I both know the phone companies could, if they wanted to, give customers a whitelist function in which the phone companies could verify the origin of the call prior to it being forwarded.
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Yes, this means NOTHING as long as the telcos enable these jackasses
Re: It's ALL BS (Score:3)
Pssst: genius, that's essentially what STIR/SHAKEN *is*. Are you paying attention?
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Well genius, where is it?
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Had it for a few months now.
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How do they do that, when the call the company is getting is one that was, in turn, forward to them? Who can you trust? Ultimately, you can't trust anyone.... I think the only thing you could possibly do to mitigate this would be to have form of out-of-band callback to the calling number, where the recipient effectively calls back the caller at the number they are claiming to be from to ask them if they are really calling them, and until the calling number can actually directly respond to this, the call
Follow the money! (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is, most folks just hang up on robocalls and don't bother to report them. You want them reported? Pay the fines to the people who /receive/ the call. Suddenly everyone in the US will be anxiously awaiting their next robocall, so they can report it and get a check for ten grand (or the equivalent in rupees :- )
Next, motivate the feds to actually hunt down the call centers: Pay the call recipient FIRST, and then let the FCC recover the money from the robocallers.
Re:Follow the money! (Score:4, Interesting)
You can't report them effectively.
All you can do is give your number, the time the call occurred, and the number the call displayed for Caller ID (which is spoofed).
Your telco won't give up any helpful information, and often can't, because they just accept calls originating from anywhere and pass them through, no questions asked.
Re:Follow the money! (Score:4, Insightful)
Why involve the FCC? The telco causing the subscribers telephone to ring should be paying the fine, in advance. The telco is then free to go after whoever handed the call to them for completion to recoup that fine (and absolutely not a single penny more). Further, the fine should be fixed at $10,000.00 PER CALL and should have an expedited hearing procedure which requires no more evidence than that the call was received. There should be no appeal routes. The telco must pay the fine to the subscriber within 7 days after which there should be a penalty of $1,000.00 per HOUR for each hour that the penalty is not paid to the subscriber.
This would solve the problem in very short order.
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This would solve the problem in very short order.
This would create a new scam where spammers call cooperating "victims" for profit-sharing.
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call lists unaffected (Score:4, Informative)
They query a service to provide a number. They get one number. You are a list of one. They can take you off their list to call, but the actual place where the outsourced list lives is untouched. You will get a short blackout period, then get back on the list.
The "take my number off your list" magic phrase should require the number be marked "do not call" on that list, and the list, and the organization who sold the list. Then the one who sold the list must notify all buyers of the list to mark that number "do not call". The lists are duplicated and hidden so that they can claim plausible deniability in trying to remove a number, so they can call infinite times, and not break the law.
The system is broken by design to operate lawlessly.
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I'm already on the national Do Not Call list, since the day it was implemented, and the jackasses still call me incessantly.
What needs to happen is that the ability to cause Caller-ID to display a number that you are not verified as owning needs to be removed from the entire phone system, utterly and completely, no exceptions, no bypass, period, no matter where you're calling from.
Actual fines that will be paid (Score:2)
zero$
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agreed!
oh, and our monthly bill will be $20.87 more each month to pay the FCC to do nothing whatsoever.
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the Federal Communications Commission could fine robocallers
I think whether they actually issue any fines or not depends on whether Ajit Pai has been offered a position on their board after he finishes his term of "public service".
Fail to see how this will help... (Score:1)
The scam calls are all spoofed and untraceable anyway. These companies have zero accountability as it is, what will upping the fine do?
What’s the point? (Score:2)
Re: What’s the point? (Score:2)
Fines should go to most backtraced company (Score:1)
I keep saying that the fines should go to the most backtraced company that could be found. And that the phone companies should threaten to or to actually cut off all phone calls to companies that don't comply.
This will incentive the phone companies to backtrace a phone call back to the VoIP company that's serving these fraudulent phone calls, and this will force the VoIP companies to crack down on it's users.
Does this apply to politicians? (Score:2)
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ok, so, hang on. (Score:2)
The first part of this "new fines" are predicated on catching the culprits which is apparently insanely difficult to do. If there's a crime where authorities are powerless to find the culprit, the size of the fine is of no consequence. Raising the fine doesn't have any effect.
The second part, "which will make it easier for consumers to know if they're receiving a call from a spoofed number" puts the onus on the consumer, it seems to me, to pursue bringing the culprit to justice. (I can see the conversati
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easily nullified (Score:2)
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Make up your mind. I thought Trump was "racist", and a whole lot of these guys are from Dominican Republic and other Central/South American countries.
Maybe a nice donation to the Clinton Foundation would've got them some results though.
Trump (Score:1)
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Did you actually ever trust him before?
my robocall filter (Score:3)
I have a simple solution for robocalls. When you call me you reach my PBX, which is Asterisk installed in a cheap PC. It makes you pass an intelligence test: if you do not pass it hangs up, and if you do pass it rings my home phone and cell phone. When I first set this up I wondered how complex I needed to make the intelligence test. I started with asking the caller to press 1, and I haven't needed to improve it since.
My solution only works for land lines, so to protect my cell phone I only answer calls forwarded to me by my PBX, and I only give out my land line telephone number.
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I'm using a similar solution, but I check my logs and occasionally add spam calls that did not make it through to a blacklist. If you're on the blacklist, I let Lenny take the call. This is a lot more fun when the caller is a person and not a robo caller, but Lenny did manage to get forwarded from the robot to a real person on one of these calls.
Lenny (Score:2)
I used to send callers who did not press 1 to Lenny, but removed him after my banker tried to be polite to him.
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I hate Comcast as much as the next person but they have done some right things with their phone service.
Meaningless law (Score:2)
Giving the feds the right to sue is meaningless. DOJ is already busy with more important work so staff and money will not be allocated to robocalls. Maybe 5 callers will get hit, the DOJ will issue 1,000 press releases crowing about the success of the law, 10,000 web sites will write an article and the calls will continue..
If the victim- the person called- had the tight to make a civil claim for $10,000 the "advertise on TV' lawyers would have a field day with automatically generated demands for Visa acc
Useless (Score:2)
Like most punitive laws, this only works if you can catch the perp. It does nothing to take away the perp's motivation to use robodialing as a way to make money.
Less of an issue now (Score:2)
... after the latest iPhone update. Anyone not in my contacts list goes straight to voice mail. Most spammers don't leave a message.