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VoIP to Fuel Plague of 'Dialing for Dollars'/Spam
Ant writes "Broadband Reports says Internet News is exploring how telemarketers world-wide are realizing they can dodge long-distance costs (and U.S. "Do Not Call" restraints) by voice spamming VoIP users. Different from SPIT (spam over internet telephony) because it's not automated, an analyst in the article predicts homes and businesses could see some 150 calls a day from overseas call centers."
What happens if the cost of each almost-continuous call is incremental?
Say the first 10 VOIP calls are free, and if you make the 11th call within 5 minutes of the 10th call, you pay 1 cent, and if you make your 12th call within 5 minutes of your 11th call, you pay 2 cents, then 4 cents, 8 cents and so on.
Private callers shouldn't have to pay anything due to the engaging nature of personal calls.
Businesses will have to register to get exemption from the charges, thus easily identifiable.
Like spam filters, this won't stop spammers from spamming, but hopefully it's enough to make it less profitable.
We didn't see email spams coming, but we should definitely do something on VOIP when we have the opportunity.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
So how long until someone hunts down those IPs and offers up a list for call blocking of them? Also, how long until someone writes a program that will DDoS of some form or another those same call centers or something similar that will harass the call centers?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Actually we did. The infamous Green Card Lawyers carpet-bombing Usenet told everybody paying attention that we stop it now, or it will only get worse.
Problem with politicians is that they don't react to a problem until after it has grown out of control. And they don't listen to the people who do see it coming.
That's why to this day, CB radio skips clear around the world. They didn't listen to the experts about assigning frequencies. Even now, with spam a problem for everyone, there is little in the way of effective law against it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Why on earth would I (or anyone) use this? The entire point of email is communicating with people. If I got an "email 2.0" address, but nobody who needs to email me has one, what would be the point in me having it? And if it got popular enough that the people I want to communicate with all had it, wouldn't the spammers just get it, too?
Now, I could maybe understanding coming up with something like this for intra-company communications or something, where a specific list of people would get the new format of email and they could all talk to each other but nobody from the outside could email in. But they'd still need traditional email for any communications outside the company. And what company could do any business these days without emailing (or receiving email from) anyone outside?
I just can't see any way at all that something like that would work.
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Maybe this works for you, but in my life things don't always go as planned. If my girlfriend is in an emergency situation (and it has happened), she contacts me by phone. Because it is an emergency, it may be from a phone number I do not recognize. She will likely not have access to email or IM before calling me. So a random call comes in from a random number... and guess what? I have to answer it because I care about her and it might be her. Until other less-obtrusive technologies like IM are ubiquitous and can be used in emergencies, this cannot change for me.
VOIP spam is a really scary and almost unavoidable future. To combat it, I only give out my cell phone to people I know. I always give businesses my home or work number. But if it starts to be a problem, I bet a lot of the profiling techniques already used for filtering email will start happening on phone networks. And thankfully, I have never heard of a VOIP open relay, so we'll have a better chance at stopping the problem at its source.
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"Russia, China, India... Who'd have thought these would be new sources of spam?!"
Make sure you add to your list America's own 2nd/3rd world state, Florida.
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