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."

Comments

The ring that keeps on ringing

[erick99]

I am surprised that this hasn't happened sooner but I believe it will happen. I wonder what sort of culture shock we will have when our home telephones are rendered useless because they ring non-stop? I am getting just over 400 email spam a day so 100 to 150 phone calls a day (especially at a cost of only a penny or so each according to the article) seems believable. While spam filtering rids me of all but two or three email spam a day in my inbox, is there a technology that will do the same for my home phone. God, this sure will be interesting (and yes, I understand I have employed a bit of hyperbole).

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[dsginter]

Here's what I don't get:

There exist many methods for anti-spam authentication. Why hasn't someone implemented one of them in an "Email 2.0" style service with the single feature being "not compatible with existing email, including spam"? After the first service opened up for business, there would be more. And more. Until Spam was gone for good.

We can see that people are getting to the point of ditching it entirely so why not move to something that fixes the problem at the expense of backward compatibility? This befuddles me to no end. I'd sign up in a heartbeat and so would everyone email user that I know.

Can we just FUCK backward compatibility for once? Why is it so damn important?

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[Tony Hoyle]

They already do this over standard dialup.

I get phone spam from the US, and I'm in the UK do-not-call equivalent (the TPS), so never get any UK based phone spam.

You can always tell it though... it's international with the number witheld, and the moment you pick it up someone with a US accent starts "Hi, you've won..." (I slam the phone down before he gets any further).

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[porcupine8]

Why hasn't someone implemented one of them in an "Email 2.0" style service with the single feature being "not compatible with existing email, including spam"?

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.

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[cas2000]

> There exist many methods for anti-spam
> authentication. Why hasn't someone implemented
> one of them in an "Email 2.0" style service with
> the single feature being "not compatible with
> existing email, including spam"? After the first
> service opened up for business, there would be
> more. And more. Until Spam was gone for good.

because that wouldn't work either.

idiot windows users would tell their mail software to remember their authentication password, and spammer viruses would be rewritten to look for those passwords and use them. within a very short time, the new "secure" authenticated mail protocol would be compromised by spammers.

as long as people are using insecure garbage like MS Windows & IE & Outlook on the net, there will be millions of spam zombies.

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[That's Unpossible!]

Why hasn't someone implemented one of them in an "Email 2.0" style service with the single feature being "not compatible with existing email, including spam"?

1. These exist already. They're called whitelists.

2. In addition to blocking spam, they block email from many legitimate sources, such as companies/mailing lists/etc trying to send you email from an address you aren't expecting. We get subscribers all the time who sign up and yet never get on because they have a whitelist service and are too stupid to let our email through.

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[kebes]

I agree with this post, and I think the replies to it are missing something when they say that backwards compatibility is important. How many email addresses do you have right now? I have about 6, with most of them forwarding to 2 key mailboxes. I do this partly to avoid spam (always give out the email address I don't care about to untrustworthy sources). The point is that I am already doing alot of work to avoid spam.

If I started using this hypothetical "email 2.0", I would, of course, keep an old "email 1.0" account running on my computer. At first only tech-savy people would use email2.0, but that would be enough for the technology to be deployed.. and eventually, when other people find out that it's possible to send and receive authenticated email without getting any spam, they would switch too.

My point is that it is not an "all or nothing" situation. We are all accustomed to evolving along with the technology, and maintaining multiple standards at the same time. Give us email 2.0, and email clients that can accept both the old and the new standard... and then, in 5 years, we can ditch the old standard.

Of course, we are moving in this direction with secure SMTP connections... but more needs to be done.

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[cpt kangarooski]

So you would mail empty boxes to people you didn't like?

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

I'm going to recommend something that comes as a shock to most people:

By now (2005) we all have caller ID, answering machines, call back, etc etc etc.

Here's a novel idea: If you don't want to pick up the phone, don't.

On the weekends, when I don't want to be disturbed, I turn the phone ringer off, the answering machine sound down, and ignore the things entirely.

If it's an important call, the answering machine will get it, and the caller id will grab the number.

If it's not important, they won't leave a message.

Very easy.

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[Anonymous Coward]

I've developed an extension to an existing bot for a Russian "enterprise" allowing to perform exactly this.

Like anyone else, I hate my job some days. But man, if I did stuff like that for a living, I'd hate my life. What a loser.

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[Anonymous Coward]

Because some calls I want to receive are time sensitive. If the police are calling to tell me my fiance was in an accident, I want to know that now, not later when I get around to checking my messages.

Why don't people understand the very basic idea that it's my property. My phone line. My telephone. I want to use it my way. It's not there to subsidize their business model. Why the fuck should I bear the burden of paying for someone elses business? Fucking pieces of shit.

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[Sentry21]

I was thinking of something similar a while ago, when I was struggling to set up a mail system that was new and improved, and yet worked with the previous configuration the company had.

What I've decided is that e-mail needs to be simpler. Instead of four different daemons (IMAPd, POP3d, SMTPd, LDAP, and optionally an SQL server) running seven different protocols and standards (SMTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP, SQL, SASL, SSL, TLS, SQL) that still don't work together because the e-mail clients all suck (with the possible exception of Evolution, which everyone here used to use until they switched to Windows from Linux) and don't work as expected.

What I thought of was a single, simple e-mail system. One daemon, handling incoming and outgoing messages, and handling local delivery and mail retrieval as well. One protocol for doing all of this.

The remote host connects. By default, they have 'anonymous' access unless they match an ACL (they can provide username/password, use TLS auth, SASL, SSL, check remote host, check remote ident, etc). Anonymous hosts generally have no access, though sites can allow access for things like browsing a support forum or access to a public contact book (since this system is basically a threaded message storage system).

Authenticated users (generally) can access 'their mail' - mailboxes can be created and assigned to groups, which provides them access to read/write those mailboxes, or users, which provides access to users only.

Messages can be flagged in all manner of ways, such as 'shared'/'public' (so anyone can go to 'Dan's Shared Mail' and see any messages that are there), 'replied to' (and the reply is automatically threaded to the original message as well), and so on.

Messages are always sent through the mail server assigned to the account one is sending from - all your configuration data stays on the server, so all you need is the servername, username, and password (depending on how ACLs are set up), and you're in. You can use any client on any machine, including web-based clients, and have immediate access to all of your mail and all mail functions.

Messages can be reassigned to other users, groups, or mailboxes (so messages bound for support@ but sent to sales@ by a confused user can be easily redirected back to support@).

Servers can establish one-time connections to other servers (for the purposes of sending mail from one server to another) or persistant connections (for e.g. mailbox sharing, collaboration across domains or companies, outsourcing of customer support to a third party company, and so forth).

Since, in this new mail system, users have to authenticate to their local mail server to be able to send mail (unless the remote host allows anonymous reciept), it would eliminate spam by allowing admins to block/filter non-authenticated messages, and/or to block authenticated users and/or hosts that send unsolicited e-mail.

It would have one protocol that would provide access to all the functions of the server - the address book, the mailboxes, sending/recieving, and so on. One persistant connection can be established, or the client can be put into batch mode, where it does essentially burst transmissions - sending and recieving all at once, syncronizing all relevant data, and then disconnecting (for offline use or in situations where connections cost money, such as dial-up or GSM data streams).

For backwards-compatibility, servers could provide the option for SMTP, POP3, IMAP, and LDAP access, so that the rest of the internet would be able to send them messages and recieve their data. As time goes on, and more and more software is designed that utilizes this protocol/architecture, admins could slowly drop support for older protocols. Once a good mail client supports it, for example, and an office migrates to that client (or to a selection of clients), then the admin could remove compatibility with IMAP/POP3.

Well, that's my rant. I've probably just described something like Exchange or Groupwise (which I've never used so I know nothing about them), but hey, it was fun.

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[morcheeba]

When I first got my "email 1.0" address, nobody that needed to email me had one. They got them eventually, though -- funny how that worked out :-)

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[walt-sjc]

Even easier with an Asterisk phone system. I already have whitelists, blacklists, and greylists setup. Quite easy really.

I don't get ANY telemarketing calls anymore and I'm not even on the DoNotCall list.

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[porcupine8]

The only real difference between USENET and the other things you listed (Yahoo! Groups, Slashdot, K5, blog comments, etc.) is moderation. Join an unmoderated Y! Group, and you'll get plenty of spam. I had to set the one I owned to moderate new members to keep it out. Same for most unmoderated forums I've seen - eventually, they're overrun by spammers and trolls. And what is the difference between a live moderator and an email filter? The live moderator takes more time.

Aside from that basic problem with your argument, email and discussion forums/groups/communities/etc have fundamentally different purposes. I go to a discussion forum to discuss a specific topic of interest to me and other people who go there. I don't care much if every person interested in X goes to the X discussion board, I just talk to the people interested in X that happen to be there.

I use my email to communicate with family, friends, business associates, classmates, etc - specific people. I don't care if the person I meet at a conference does or can post on the same discussion boards I do, unless it happens to be a discussion board about whatever the conference was about. I do, however, want them to be able to email me, regardless of what type of email they use. Now, I do have a couple of different email addresses that I use for different purposes. But this would require me to have that, plus both an "email 1.0" and an "email 2.0" address for each purpose so that if the person I meet at that conference that I want to do business with doesn't have email 2.0 yet, they can still contact me. And when I meet them, I'd have to ask them which I should give them.

And I still don't really see the benefit for this added annoyance. I already have really good filtering. I can't see how it would make spammers send less spam whether or not I see the spam, so it wouldn't save bandwidth. Once the spammers figure out how to use Email 2.0, we'd just have to start using filters there, too.

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[PyroMosh]

So you basicly read everything anyway? Doesn't sount terribly useful to me.

I run my own domain. Aside from running a web site that's basicly just a dumping ground for files for me, I use it for my email.

If use myname@example.org as my primary email address, then I'll use that for giving out purposes to friends, etc.

Everyone else follow this simple format: If I sign up for a msn account, I'll use msn@example.org If I sign up for a carfax thingy, I'll use carfax@example.org It all forwards to myname@example.org anyway, but this way, if I ever recieve any spam, I instantly know where they got my address, and I can blacklist anything with that address in the header.

So far, I have 5 addresses blacklisted, from the past 3 years, simply because I'm careful about where I use my email address and what checkboxes are checked when I sign up for something.

I do not do this with my business sites, because well, frankly, I need my address published for those. They get a ton of spam. But I have a plan to work around that too.

Re:The ring that keeps on ringing

[Drakonite]

Really, though, you shouldn't be hard to those people - their jobs are bad enough as it is. Setting the phone down would be a lot nicer to them; then they'll merely get bored.

You make their job horrible and they'll either quit or demand more money. The more people that quit or demand more money the more money the telemarketing company will have to pay to keep employees. The more money the telemarketing company have to pay the less money they make. The less money they make the more expensive that form of 'advertising' becomes. The more expensive the advertising the less likely they are to perform it, or at least hopefully they less likely they are to bother anyone who has made it perfectly clear they aren't going to buy anything.

I see a GREAT reason to be a complete asshole to telemarketers.

This can extend beyond the phone as well. There are (or at least used to be) a couple telemarketing/phone survey companies in my town. The last person I know who mentioned they were doing telemarketing work received a backhand and at least 15 minutes of me yelling in their ear about the evils of being a telemarketer.

Friends don't let friends be telemarketers!

Silly Idea

[fembots]

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.

Re:Silly Idea

[blanks]

Yes this would make it more expensive for the spammers to make the calls, and maybe it will keep some of the companies from following through, but with telemarketing if I remember correctly, the costs could be up to .25 per call (connected call) so anything less this this would be doable.

Also keep in mind that a way around this would be to have a dozens (hundreds?) of VOIP services, meaning you would just need a system to switch between "lines". And that technology all ready exists.

Better fix this

[BWJones]

"The average enterprise or household could see as much as 150 calls a day from these telemarketers. It has to happen, because it is a market force that takes the market feedback and makes it into a profitable approach."

Ah, so this is how they are going to use all that dark fiber. :-P

Seriously though, it would be in the phone companies best interest to figure out how to block this. After the legislation for the do not call list, calls to our home plummeted. And rightly so. If I have to deal with telemarketers calling my home again, I will simply have the phone company disconnect my land line, especially with the prospect of 100-150 calls/day. Most people that really need to get ahold of me immediately can use the cell phone or email/IM me anyway. As for calling people at work, I cannot figure out how businesses will tolerate this. Businesses will be more likely to pressure phone companies to limit this kind of activity as it impacts productivity.

So, I don't really care how they do it, but from an end users perspective......They can either fix the loopholes and prevent phone spam or they will lose business.

On another note. Serious question to all the Slashdotters: Has anyone here actually bought ANYTHING from a telemarketer who called you? I have never purchased any good or service solicited over the phone, and I am wondering who it is that actually keeps these knuckleheads in business.

Re:Better fix this

[shawn(at)fsu]

I think one of us is missing the point. I think from what I understand that this will only affect people who use VoIP. Course I could be wrong. If it only effacting poeple like vonage users I don't think the telcos will be doing much to fix this. Thinking further it will be like spam in taht there probably wont be a quick and easy fix.

Re:Better fix this

[blanks]

To answer your question, most telemarketing is either collections or credit cards, or charities. I have had many friends that have worked in collections and charities and you wouldnt belive the amount of positive sales they would get.

Re:Better fix this

[networkBoy]

get a 1-900 number. Simple.

All your friends have an unlisted number that is held private, or have a code to bypass the billing on the 1-900 line. Everyone else pays a buck a min. (15 min. minimum). I'll let them telemarketers pay me ~$180/Hour (figuring an average 5 min. call).
-nB

Re:Better fix this

[alienw]

Actually, the phone company would want to encourage it. Phone companies hate VoIP and would love to see it die.

However, I can't see this becoming a problem. VoIP traffic is very easy to block. If you get a telemarketer, block them. It's not like they can change their internet provider every other day, and VoIP traffic, being two-way, is rather difficult to proxy through a hijacked machine (unlike email). And it's rather difficult to move a call center to another country.

Re:Better fix this

[nmos]

Telemarketers probably don't call 900 numbers but I've been toying with something similar. It seems like you could take a page from the "porn dialer" people and get a number in some country where the phone company charges very high fees and is willing to pass on a cut to you for generating traffic on their lines. As long as it "looks" like a normal US # it might take the marketers a while to catch on.

Vroom!

[greg_barton]

Gentlemen, start up your whitelists!

What?

[bigtallmofo]

You mean U.S. laws don't apply everywhere? We should get that law changed!

They will throw themselves upon the firewalls...

[FyRE666]

Russia, China, India... Who'd have thought these would be new sources of spam?! I routinely block these domains/net blocks from sending email into our networks (along with a few of the other well known spam sludge pits), so would it really be that difficult to firewall out all VOIP traffic from these places too? Maybe if enough people just cut them off they'd change their attitudes to providing havens for (mostly) American spam "companies".

In fact, I'd imagine these call centres would be easier to firewall off the 'net than spammers, as it would be harder to switch net blocks once a blackhole service was set up to list the offending address ranges.

Call Blocking?

[Ironsides]

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?

Not automated. Hmm

[wowbagger]

So, when one of these turkeys calls me, I can keep them on the line until I traceroute where his call is coming from, then go after him and his ISP with any number of legal charges as well as possible DDoSs.

Yes, that sounds like a GREAT way to make money.

Re:Not automated. Hmm

[GeckoX]

Yeah, cause grandma jean has a whole trove of zombie machines out there just waiting to DDoS the first sucker that dares to spam her VOIP phone.

Common knowledge tells us that Telemarketing in general should not be a viable business. And yet, it is isn't it?

Re:Not automated. Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I got a spam that I went through the same spiel with. Checked the headers, did some dns lookups, etc. etc. Finally I found the responsible ISP.

Problem was, when I sent my subpoena to Novosibirsk all I got back was a legal notice saying, and I quote...

"In Soviet Russia, jurisdiction limits YOU."

The joys of computer controlled phones!

[garcia]

And with VoIP it would be quite easy to enable an easy to update whitelist for inbound calls. People could use something like the various spam blocking sites (i.e. Spamhaus) that would put and end to that crap.

There are so many possibilities for controlling this crap that I don't even want to go into it. Personally? I would use my addressbook (LDAP?) as the whitelist. Anyone else would get a message to find another way to contact me to be added to the whitelist, to enter the passcode to get through, or they be routed to /dev/null.

Anyone showing up as "UNKNOWN", "UNAVAILABLE", or originating numbers coming from outside the country would automatically be re-routed to /dev/null. I would sort of expect these options to be built into the software and easily enabled by end users as that would make the most sense.

Yeah, it could cause you to lose some callers. How many times do people call you that you don't know and that you actually want to hear from? I'll take the 1 caller a year that doesn't know the passcode and can't find another way to contact me.

YMMV.

Re:The joys of computer controlled phones!

[sribe]

Yeah, it could cause you to lose some callers. How many times do people call you that you don't know and that you actually want to hear from?

Well, if you own a business where you sell a product or service, you hope it happens pretty dang often!

Re:The joys of computer controlled phones!

[FreeLinux]

Anyone else would get a message to find another way to contact me to be added to the whitelist, to enter the passcode to get through, or they be routed to /dev/null.

Anyone showing up as "UNKNOWN", "UNAVAILABLE", or originating numbers coming from outside the country would automatically be re-routed to /dev/null. I would sort of expect these options to be built into the software and easily enabled by end users as that would make the most sense.

This is already available and has been for years. It's called Anonymous Call Rejection(ACR)

I'm sorry if I Slashdot The Campbells.

Culture shock

[Tackhead]

> I wonder what sort of culture shock we will have when our home telephones are rendered useless because they ring non-stop?

It's already starting.

Ignoring people who have abandoned land-line phones for wireless, most of my friends are in the "phone by appointment only" mode.

If you want to talk to me on a land line, email (or IM) me first and tell me when you'll call. Otherwise, the damn thing stays unplugged, and/or with the ringer off. If I ain't expecting someone's call, it ain't getting answered.

Re:Culture shock

[panaceaa]

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.

Re:Culture shock

[b0bby]

Isn't that what an answering machine is for? You don't recognize the caller id, you let them talk to the machine. If it's important, then you pick up. Otherwise, delete.

Re:Culture shock

[panaceaa]

You make a great point. But I've found that generally in a big emergency (like an injury car crash) people don't leave messages at first. Though in more common minor emergencies (like being locked out) people generally do. So while most of the time waiting for a voice mail will work just fine, sometimes it won't.

I haven't thought about the way I handle these things before now. But now that I am thinking about it, I recall that:

- I'll answer random calls if I don't know specifically where my girlfriend is.
- If I know where she is, then I'll let callers leave a message.

Of course there's often exceptions but that's generally how things work. Plus, the screen on my phone is pretty illegible since I fell on it while rollerblading... so I basically answer it when anyone calls except when my girlfriend is around, and then I let people leave a message unless I'm expecting them to call.

Herm wait . . .

[OverlordQ]

so the DNCL only covers POTS Spam? IMO my number is in there, so no matter where they're coming from or through, be it POTS or VoiP they can't call me, further more theres'a nice tidbit on that DNCL site:

33. Are telemarketing calls from overseas covered?

Yes. Any telemarketers calling U.S. consumers are covered, regardless of where they are calling from. If a company within the U.S. solicits sales through an overseas professional telemarketer, that U.S. company may be liable for any violations by the telemarketer. The FTC can initiate enforcement actions against such companies.

New MaBell filter

[Overzeetop]

You can automatically block all VoIP call from your phone for just $1. For $5.99 you can add a whitelist. Or you can just tell all your friends to get a MaBell line and save that $5.99! Sounds like a win-win for the Bells!

Re:New MaBell filter

[edudspg]

Anyone that runs a voip system can always have the system route UNKNOWN or ANONYMOUS callers to a computer based screening tool. One bored gent wrote an elaborate voice-mail maze for telemarketers to wander into.

Telemarketer Torture

So far the only prank SIP call I have received was one from a buddy that was testing his SIP knowledge and wanted to see if he could really make my phone ring.

re-routing

[COMON$]

until I start re-routing their calls to each other. Think of it, a simple firewall that sits on your network that re-routs overseas calls to each other. Just keep a list of numbers and add new ones as they come in, completely automated...get a couple thousand Voice over IP users to do this and viola, problem solved. Old fashioned ping of death, DOS attacks. Perfectly legitimate because I am just returning their calls right???

Mark my words...

[rscrawford]

This is just more proof that the Internet is the worst thing that could have ever happened to our civilization. No, really. It'll all end in tears and heartbreak.

We need laws, but tools too

[Frater 219]

We're going to need some basic trespassing legislation here: in brief, a recognition that my phone is my property and that your freedom of commercial speech does not extend to the use of my property to carry your speech at my costs.

However, we're also going to need some software tools. A lot of sites, my own workplace included, are rolling out VoIP systems. Some of these are COTS systems of various levels of quality. Others (like us) are using open systems like Asterisk PBX and SIP Express Router (SER). Currently, as far as I have seen neither the proprietary nor the open tools have what it takes regarding abuse rejection:

• Dictionary attack rejection. Any caller who makes a vast number of wrong numbers in a day is just trying to guess numbers, and should be rejected.
• Call rate limiting. A single caller IP address should not be able to make a vast number of simultaneous or near-simultaneous inbound calls.
• Site-local blocklisting. One good way of telling if an IP address is going to spam me is if it has spammed the guy the next office over. The VoIP PBX is a good place to aggregate abuse information. Asterisk has the beginnings of a blocklist system, but it's not quite there yet.
• Distributed blocklisting. DNSBLs have worked very well in the email world, where a single highly reliable list such as Spamhaus SBL-XBL can deflect over 50% of spam. We will need this ability in VoIP.
• Abuse reporting. If I'm getting VoIP abuse from your site, I need a way to report it to you or your ISP. Likewise, VoIP sites that want to be reputable should offer call recipients a way of reporting harassment, spamming, and other sorts of abuse.

asterisk

[clymere]

my understanding is that its not hard to avoid such thigs if yo're running asterisk. The people i know runnign it use some sort of "telemarketer hell" function that leads these people through multiple layers of prompts, where they then leave a message which is promptly deleted.

I want to say its as simple as detecting whether they are using a blocked number. None of these people are going to offer up their number right? What are the legal issues around spoofing? I know this is another capability asterisk has, but I would think there would some issues with a telemarketer using this to outright lie about where they are calling from...of course, would be hard to catch them too.

Re:Silly Idea - We saw it coming

[Nom du Keyboard]

We didn't see email spams coming,

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.

Voicemail voicemail voicemail

[hoggoth]

"Hi this is John. I am screening my calls. Please leave a voicemail and I will call you back."
"Hi John, this is Pete. You just tried to call me, and left me voicemail about my attempted call a few minutes ago. Please call me back."

Re:They will throw themselves upon the firewalls..

[Hoi Polloi]

"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.

Re:Cell phones -- missing the point

[Nom du Keyboard]

Hopefully, the cell phone companies see this coming and will start to work on technology to drop calls from known offenders.

You're missing the point here. The cell phone companies want you to use your phone. You don't have unlimited cell phone service. The more minutes you use, the more you pay. This is to their advantage, because where else are you going to go?

Re:zerg

[BWJones]

Actually, yes, you did. Don't believe me? Go back and check your credit card bill.

Actually, no I did not and all my credit card bills are scrutinized carefully. If anybody charges anything to my credit card that is not authorized, they are committing fraud and will be prosecuted as such. I don't know about your credit card companies, but mine have been very good about this. Any purchases that fall outside my normal purchase pattern are flagged and my credit card company calls me to ensure that they are legitimate. For instance, when I bought 4Runner on my card, American Express called to ensure that it was indeed an authorized purchase. Same for other purchases that while small (like the shareware I bought from India last week), even resulted in a call from my company to ensure it was approved.

Even if 99.9% of people they cold-called call back and demand that the charges get removed, enough people won't call back. Do the math and you'll find this is highly profitable.

If companies can be documented doing this as a matter of business practice, it is fraud and prosecutable under existing US law. I can think of more than a dozen laws this violates.

Re:Since it's Voice over IP...

[Big_Breaker]

The article is talking about marketting spam launched using VOIP on the caller side. The receiver will get the call on any old telephone hook-up IE POTS or VOIP.

A firewall won't do a thing to protect you. A caller ID based black list of challenge/response system could though.

Re:waste a telemarketers time

[rubycodez]

better yet, we need to port ELIZA to voice recognition/speach synthesis. Plug 'em into that, and it doesn't even matter if the recognition rate is say 60% or so.

prediction is absurd, voip spam will be *lower*

[xlurker]

Prediction may be right in the short term *but* in the long term I predict that blocking spam calls on voip lines will be *much* easier then blocking telemarketers on conventional landline systems.

Why?

Because the user has many software tools availible here that simply aren't doable on landline systems. Hell, the easiest first method of screening is using a simple whitelist. Can you do that with normal landlines???

Since voip is run by software on your computer you *have* the possiblity of applying code to the screening process, in other words CAPCHA of one sort or the other, can you do this with landlines?? the captchas don't even have to be complicated. It could be a verbal command requesting the user do do a simple task (type a number, say a word, look up something on website, send an email). What ever it is, this is to time-comsuming for spammers. All of this is simply not possible on landlines.

I can't help but think that this "prediction" is simply the drawing of a parallel from email spam to voip spam. The reason why email spam is hard to block, is that you don't want to throw away legitimate email. Why is throwing away legit email bad? Because the legit sender already sent it and assumes you got it and will read it! That doesn't apply with voip. If you block a legit caller he immediately knows you didn't get his call! For this reason applying spam filters to voip is much easier than email.

redirecting spammers

[doppe1]

I have moved over to VoIP, and i had a better idea than joining the do not call list.

Redirect the call from spammers to one of the other spammers that calls me, so now the spammers are just all calling each other.

Don't know if all VoIP services have individual phone number redirecting, but i use Lingo, and they do :)

your solution:

[bani]

pbx with PIN number. anyone who doesnt enter the PIN gets silently dumped to voicemail -- your phone never rings. the PIN gets them to immediately ring through, bypassing voicemail.

simple. elegant. failsafe.

you're welcome.

Re:your solution:

[DerekLyons]

pbx with PIN number. anyone who doesnt enter the PIN gets silently dumped to voicemail -- your phone never rings. the PIN gets them to immediately ring through, bypassing voicemail.

simple. elegant. failsafe.

No. It's fail - dangerous .

What if the call had been from my father-in-laws hospice nurse, and she couldn't find the PIN? Or the nurse at his doctors office, (whose phone# field in their database almost certainly doesn't have a way to handle this)? I.E., at least twice in the last year a phone call about a medical emergency that I needed to know about now could have been dumped to voicemail - and who know when I would have heard it?

Not to mention the various brokers and realtors I work with on a daily basis. (Or am I supposed to hand out a PIN widely and hope they remember it? Where is the security in that?)

Failsafe does not mean cannot fail (as its commonly used in the vernacular). Fail safe means that failure causes no harm. And for this mechanism, I can postulate half a dozen ways it can cause harm without thinking - all real, and all things that have happened.

pining for POTS

[jpellino]

*sigh*
Cordless was supposed to be better.
- Yes, because I'm not tethered to a wall in my house.
- No, because the neighbors can eavesdrop.
Cell was supposed to be better,
- Yes, in that I'm not tethered to my house.
- No, in that it still doesn't work as well or as often as my landline.
VOIP was supposed to be better
- Yes because it's cheaper / no old stakeholders
- No because it's not protected like my landline,
- No because this new stuff can happen,
- Maybe since we're not sure is it an intermediate step or is this "it"

And how many times have we had to ask THAT question... CDs were "it". DVDs were "it". Cable was the last pipe we'd ever need. No make that IP over Powerlines. Scrap that - wireless broadband! This just in - WiFi Mesh. 802.11 A - I mean B... er, no, um... G! Oops - N!

And I thought they were making up that stuff in the Matrix movies about only trusting physical landlines...

150 is a lot if it's not automated

[cbreaker]

If someone has to be on the other end of the phone when you answer it, it will be a lot more dificult to get 150 calls a day out to every house. On the other hand, with spam, you just hit "Send" and you're done.

But I do see this becomming a problem. Maybe there will be a setting you can set to block all calls from IP, rendering the entire technology useless.

I won't have a problem completely disconnecting my phone if I get 15 calls a day from telemarketers though.

Sad, But True.

[Threatis]

As someone who worked as a Telemarketer for about a year, i can tell you that this will happen. the company that I recently worked for was putting together a "voIP team" to tackle all the new tech popping up around it. Sad that this is the world we live in now, where people feel the only way to sell a product is to market it directy to someone over something as personal as a Telephone.

no

[amyhughes]

If you hear the phone ring and walk to it to check the caller ID, the damage is already done: you've been interrupted. Picking up the phone to dispatch some telemarketer is actually the fun part.

150 calls per day

[NoGuffCheck]

I dont think this will ever happen, Ive been in telemarketing for 5 years and the hardest sells are always the customers who receive more cold calls a day from other telemarketing companies. Now if everyone was getting 150 calls per day I dont care what the call costs are, paying my wage is too expensive for my boss if im never going to make a sale.

new acronym proposal...

[Lord Prox]

PHLEGM PHoning Longdstance by Eurasian Gangs / Marketers

The Human Factor...

[telemonster]

No, not the MacGyver episode. Spam email is supposidly very ineffective. Everyone receives thousands of spam mails, but who actually does business with the company? The return rates are supposidly very bad, perhaps 5 people per million messages sent.

Spam mail is sent with a computer, in bulk, really fast.

One saving grace is that the telemarketers will generally use peopl (yes, there are some IVR calls, but the majority are humans). So hopefully the rate of return on the bulk number of calls needed to get a sale will make this ineffective.

I was telling people this before... "VoIP and other cheap unregulated phone service is great... but it will degrade into a state like email flooded with garbage"

Oh, and for fun, next time a charity calls... ask what percentage goes to the organization they are representing. Fun game.

Sue them!!!

[www.sorehands.com]

Use the laws to file a lawsuit against the spammers that spam or the people who hire the spammers. Spamming is motivated by profit, lawsuits against spamers will remove that motivation.

I got spammed by Avtech Direct. I sent a demand letter, they were nasty in their response. I filed a lawsuit against them, and arranged for 15 other people to file lawsuits. When they appeared in court against me, I served them with the 20 other lawsuits. So far, only 5 of 21 cases were heard, they have over $11,000 in judgments against them. I have not seen any spam from them since.

Re:Sue them!!!

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Go to the Sheriff with the judgement and hire him to go in and start confiscating property. Show up with the Sheriff to helpfully point out particular items that they should take. The Sheriff with sell the items at auction, take his cut, give you the rest. At that time you will have the opportunity to purchase (along with the rest of the public) some of the choice items that you suggested the Sheriff should take, cheap. If it weren't for mechanisms such as this, nobody would pay any judgements. Make the system work for you.

VoIP Users Only?

[fo0]

The Thread suggests that this will be a problem for VoIP users only; but it seems to me that the overseas callcenters will call whoever they want regardless of what type of carrier the call-recepient uses. I don't think it is less expensive for them to call another VoIP line than it is for them to call a land-line or cell phone, but maybe I'm wrong.

Another thing... Is there a way that VoIP numbers are indexed or listed? Is there such thing as a listed or unlisted VoIP line?

Re:IP Blocking?

[Big_Al_B]

It depends on how the telemarketer connects to the VoIP network. If they're coming in from the PSTN, then the source IP will be the PSTN gateway where they enter the IP world.

While this isn't so bad if the telemarketer is running their own analog-to-IP telephone adaptor/IAD/Asterisk etc., it is quite problematic if the gateway belongs to a major carrier for a large exchange (say, for example, in NYC.)

PSTN carriers can't risk common carrier status by filtering or denying access to telemarketers (e.g. they can't operate like an ISP with an AUP against spamming) so they can't stop the traffic themselves. And you could be cutting off connectivity to large portions of the PSTN every time you apply a filter. Even if it worked for awhile, eventually you would notice severe end-to-end connectivity problems.

clarification?

[drew]

ok, so the slashdot summary makes it sound like only people who have VOIP service would have to worry about this, but as far as I can tell from reading the article, the problem is that if the spammers get VOIP service, it makes it cost effective for them to spam anyone, so once this catches on, we would all be at risk, right? i don't see anything in tfa about whether the spamee has to have VOIP for this to be a problem. or am i misreading something?

The only solution

[nurb432]

1 - receive spam ( regardless of what format )
2 - find responsible parties
3 - kill them
4 - repeat until spam stops.

I could not be happier.

[jafac]

The problem with the situation is;
too many people put up with it. too many people tolerate it. Companies would not engage in spam, if they did not believe it was profitable.

If the spam armageddon described in this article *does* come (and I'm feverishly praying it will) - then a critical mass of people will finally get fed up and do something about it.

Not something ineffective like the national do not call list, or the can-spam act.

Something effective.

Blood will flow.

It will be glorious.

No.

[www.sorehands.com]

It is based on what we think the fairness is. I don't think most people here would fault the MPAA for going that to someone who is copying DVDs and selling them on a street corner for $5/each.

whoa

[KZigurs]

You sure have a strange gf... Such number of emergencies.