Sprint Cracks Down on TTY Relay Abuses

An anonymous reader writes "Sprint thinks it has found a way to keep West African scam artists from using Sprint's deaf-relay service to defraud people." Our previous two stories have background information.

Comments

Blocking IP addresses? Only a matter of time...

[eaglebtc]

From the article:

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Sprint spokesman Steve Lunceford, would not detail how Sprint is trying to block the calls other than to say the company is looking at problematic Internet-protocol addresses and finding ways to block them before calls go through to operators.

So far, the effort appears successful. The volume of Internet-relay calls has returned to the level it was in early January, before massive abuse of the system began, Lunceford said.
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This is only a temporary fix. If they're blocking specific IP addresses, then the scammers will start using proxies. I suppose they could also start blocking anything from a proxy server, but there might be legitimate deaf people using Anonymizer or similar service that would no longer be able to get through.

Is it possible to tell whether a particular HTTP request is coming from a proxy server, without knowing the IP address? Perhaps there is a descriptor in the packet somewhere that says it is going to be forwarded beyond the "apparent" destination?

hardware based challenge/response system

[pneuma_66]

In the past, anyone who needed to use the tty system had to own a piece of hardware to communicate to the relay, however, now with internet based relay calls, they only need to access a computer hooked up to the net.
I think the requirement for specialized hardware is the key to ending the abuse of the system. My idea would be to use a device, where the relay gives you code, and then you input it into the device, and it spits out a response. This would still keep the calls anonymous, but, would add a level of security to stop the scammers.