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FTC Offers $50,000 For Best Way To Stop Robocalls
coondoggie writes "It's not clear if the Federal Trade Commission is throwing up its hands at the problem or just wants some new ideas about how to combat it, but the agency is now offering $50,000 to anyone who can create what it calls an innovative way to block illegal commercial robocalls on landlines and mobile phones."
Problem solved.
Death penalty. Probably a bit overkill, but likely effective.
Large fines to the telephone company that passed on the robocall. That will be more than enough incentive for them to figure a solution that avoids the fines by stopping the robocalls.
It seems the best way to make corporations comply is to have rules that have teeth. Regardless of what you're going to implement, if you're not planning on executing it, it doesn't matter.
There are rules, enforce them. If it's not enough, make the whole foodchain (corporations that advertise and service providers that do the dirty work ) that supplies such robocalls pay for it - 10% of their yearly income to begin with and $1,000 per call.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Sieze all company assets, pierce the corporate veil, go after the owners, fine them to the tune of 10x gross revenue.
Also, they are advertising or selling something. Make the company that makes/sells the product responsible for the actions of their contracted sales force.
See sentence 1.
Kick their doors down and shoot their dog...
Allow the recipient of the call to charge for picking up. Obviously you wouldn't charge your friends anything, but a robocall you could charge up to $5 maybe. The telco would do the collection and accounting.
Have some feds buy some land lines and cell phones. Give them a few credit cards. Then when the robocall comes in, answer it and buy whatever they are selling.
Track the transaction, figure out who is responsible, and then arrest them.
If they are in another country, contact that government and have them arrest them. If they won't, sanctions. If that doesn't work threaten to cut their cable.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
A solution where you add numbers which you want to accept calls from, rest don't get through. Now give me my money.
What is a robocall? We just don't have them where I live (Western Europe).
Also, since we don't have robocalls, and have never had them, how difficult can it be?
How about a simple small minimum charge per phonecall from the phone companies? They make more money, robocallers can't afford the premium on call-spamming, customers will hardly notice the difference, everybody wins.
Make the carriers detect specific calling patterns and delay/block/penalize continuation of such patterns. ...so it actually solves two problems.
That should catch any robocalls.
It may also catch non-robocalls such as direct marketing calls.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Originating phone provider pays $1000/call.
Done. Easy. Solved.
Why are people posting their ideas here? Didn't they see the part about the prize?
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Just run the phone number equivalent of a blacklist directory. Exempt such directories from any legal liability, and just make it compulsory for telcos to provide (as an opt-in service) call filtering based on the blacklisting.
The carriers always know the calling number even if the caller id is blocked, so it should work if done at the exchange.
Alternatively, someone could throw together a little telephony device (or app in the case of smartphones) that sits in between the phone and the wall socket and queries public blacklists based on caller ID, and screens out anonymous calls.
Not that hard surely?
Well we have privatized prisons now so it's easier to compete with places like China. Lets toss them in there for a while and let them live off 10-15 cents an hour. Lovely incarceration rate we have in the USA by the way.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Seriously. Eliminate phones. They suck.
I have always wanted to see something similar to a firewall embedded in phones that allows you to completely block specific phone numbers. They would get a short message stating they are blocked from the number. First time they call it's a pain, but you block them and enjoy the hassle-free life once more. The FTC could then have some way of citizens posting those numbers. FTC gets one heck of a lead sheet and my family and I can be assured that every time our phone rings, it's someone we actually want to call...
We've got a real plague of robocalls in the UK at the moment - I'll get a couple per weekend and if I'm at home for any reason during the week, I'll generally get 2-3 each afternoon. They're all from ambulance-chasing law firms trying to get people to bring lawsuits against banks following recent court verdicts on Payment Protection Insurance mis-selling.
Now, there's no denying that some of the banks were very naughty indeed on this issue. However, the robolawyers have no way of knowing whether the people they're contacting have ever taken out PPI and there have been many cases of people bringing suits on the basis of these calls despite never having taken out a loan with PPI.
My own modest proposal? Make the firms in question liable for a portion of the banks' own liabilities on PPI mis-selling (which are vast), remove any personal indemnities from the partners in said firms and do not allow them to apply for bankrupcy until they have disposed of absolutely all of their sale-able assets, including any internal organs that might have black market value.
Feels reasonable, all things considered.
Set up honey pot inbound numbers on the do-not-call list before they're even active. Have FTC staffers lead the pitchers on to find out where payment is to be directed. Then bam, seize assets and levy fines.
The existing phone system is a dinosaur. We should switch to a modern digital P2P system where everyone has an online identity. The first time someone wants you to receive and e-mail from them, charge them $0.01. The first time they want you to answer their call, charge them $0.05. We need an electronic currency that enables fast micro-transactions, and we need to stop acting like the world is still plastered with individual analog phone lines rather than being all digital. Simply put, we need to take advantage of he capabilities of the hardware we already built.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
I get tons more of those.
I agree with the Hefty fine, but I think that the fine should be a calculated as a percentage of the company's worth, with a minimum of $200,000 if the company is not worth anything. Then a fairly large percentage (25%), that way, a large company that has 100's of millions of dollars will not just laugh off a $50,000 fine. The fine has to truly hurt the company for it to be a deturrent.
The problem with robocalls is that there are humans behind. We propose a robotic solution for it.
Our company, Cyberdyne System, offer advanced technology in automatization, artificial intelligence and robotics. We propose to build smart assistants to help to solve some of today's world problems, including robocalls, internet trolls, lawyers, and politicians. A central mainframe will take orders and deliver them to the assistants, but they anyway will have an AI smart enough to make choices if they are offline. In a future we might make them look like humans, maybe using famous actor faces to make them look less intimidating.
If they would include these "automated calls by political parties, charities" then the contest might have a few more takers and quite a few more users if implemented.
Set up and advertise a number.
If people get a call they didn't solicit, encourage them to dial that number. It can be automated and will list the previous X calls to their number, with time, date and duration. Let them mark those calls as spam or not.
Collect the results nationally, the ones who are spam could easily be shut down in a matter of minutes by distributing a list of numbers that have seen a sharp rise in the number of complaints against them.
Additionally, callers can use it as a blacklist tied into their telco so that numbers they have PERSONALLY flagged can never, ever, ever again dial their number even if it's not accepted as "spam" on a national scale.
Then enforce valid Caller-ID numbers for even international calls even if they are never displayed to the end caller. Anyone spoofing a Caller-ID (or allowing Caller-ID's on their network to be spoofed by not just IGNORING what the sender has sent but replacing it with the Caller-ID info of the end transit) that's not been assigned to them loses all their connections.
A couple of bits of legislation, an automated call centre (which shouldn't be hard to set up for those people COMBATTING automated call centres), and you're done.
Sure, some will still get through, but will be killed quickly, will be nowhere near as profitable, will have real consequences, will stop the majority of users being subjected to it, and will look like you're actually getting off your backside and doing something about the problem.
Publish the home phone numbers of the people who run robocall businesses.
*FO to report a call as abusive or illegal. Too high a percentage of *FO responses gets your service terminated.
The problem is that most of the real difficult companies are hiding their numbers and identities. Any solution to that is going to reduce the usefulness of the phone system because it will allow unscrupulous bigger operators to block calls from certain origins (e.g. international calls routed through competing operators). Probably the only solution is some kind of IVR administering an audio CAPTCHA before allowing a phone to ring.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Can we block robo-slashdot-posting too?
The best fix is to make any automated dialing except those explicitly opted-into illegal. For everyone, including charities, non-profits and political campaigns.
95% of the automated calls I get are from places that are currently legal, anyway.
Isn't the main problem that it is trivial to fake or block the real caller ID? If this was fixed, finding the actual source of the calls for prosecution would be straightforward. Right now, they are forging the numbers in a way even the phone companies can't seem to find the origin for the calls. That seems like a problem... and a solvable one.
today is spelling optional day.
How long before these companies set up a prize pool to bypass whatever ideas $50K buys for FTC?
Just sayin' :-)
For the phone networks, it should be trivial to detect that a single caller is calling hundreds of different numbers where the other side of the line is always the first to disconnect the call, typically when the full (repetitive) message is still in full play/hasn't been fully delivered yet. That should suffice to flag such a caller as harasser/spammer.
In addition, humans will typically call mostly people they know, whereas robocallers (and spammers in general) do the opposite, which is to mostly call strangers that they don't know. (Don't tell me the phone companies don't already have your network of contacts/social network stored somewhere... I don't buy it).
Convert all calls to VOIP.... Land line, cell, all of them.
Utilize known reputation, and centralized collection technologies to weed out the "spammers"...
IPS type technology could monitor for "intrusions" into the system with some creative changes.
This could even spawn a market for "home based" blocking where you purchase a device, similar to a firewall, that would only allow the people you want to contact to call you back. DHCP and NAT for the VOIP calls may be an issue here, but certificate based authentication models could be put in place to "trust" known sources regardless of their IP.
It's all going VOIP eventually anyway.
I did make my own phone firewall in 2001, after some dick harassed me on the phone.
It’s just a software answering machine that has a phone book as a white list, and a group/entry-to-behavior mapping list so I can have different behaviors for different groups.
I even added a functionality so I can switch it to different modes like "away", "sleeping", etc, like with an instant messenger.
It’s only a small python script, that used to run on CapiSuite, and now on (the horrible over-engineered mess that is) Asterisk on my landline. (I would port it to Android, but the fuckin' thing doesn't [or at least didn't] have any fuckin' APIs to handle calls!! [Which is completely silly, since Nokia had those APIs since the very first J2ME-compatible phone, and later even added EAX-like sound APIs, which were really cool.])
And it served me very well all those years.
Of course nowadays, I'm going for a purely instant-messenger-based solution (read: XMPP and Jingle), and do away with primitive stuff (including SIP/Skype).
Well, as soon as everyone gets off of Skype.
no text ;)
Enforce a law to create a "*SPAM" or #666 or such number/feature that flags the caller as spam. Then have the carriers increase the price for their calls exponentially based on the number of people that flag them as spam. Eventually it'll cost too much for these companies. Also people should be allowed to block numbers that are flagged as SPAM entirely.
Create an inbound CAPTCHA system. Problem solved. Caller annoyed. Of course, this would also prevent legitimate automated calls, but will create new jobs!
http://www.mafiasecurity.com maf
This isn't really a solution, but I want to be able to tell my mobile phone (or provider) that I only want certain calls to ring through, or that I'm automatically rejecting certain calls. This is sort of like how I mark some emails as spam. I want to be able to tell my iPhone that I don't want Rogers to allow 888-555-1212 through. You know, that number that calls you every day, and there's just a click on the other end of the phone when you answer.
There would be bonus points given to this process if the numbers were then passed to a centralized database, where they were ranked by number of callers blocking, number of calls blocked, etc. Then the FTC/CRTC/whomever would investigate the worst (potential) offenders, and move down the list.
www.clarke.ca
Micropayments.
Every call costs a penny. Too bad it wasn't my idea.
Hm, an automated call-tracing software combined with a couple of Predator drones... it's just a computer, so the worst thing that happens is some collateral data loss in the data center, right?
1. Require telcos provide a "call identifier" for every incoming call on your phone to you in real time (i.e. the actual caller ID, along with the displayed one), either by phone or online (in your regular online account area)
2. Set up a site/phone center which allows you to enter/give that unique ID to the FCC, and log your name and address or submit anonymously
3. Based on the data provided, prosecute the originator of the calls, distribute fines to group tuning in complaints
4. Profit!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
DTMF activated question and answer phone message. i.e. you record a message "Please dial the answer to this maths question to be connected; what is 25 + 17 ? Dial this into the phone now." You setup a simple pin that then actually starts the ringer on the phone when entered.
With a phone address book that will bypass this for known callers and numbers (and maybe recent callers that passed). Not really innovative but effective enough. Solution should be simple/cheap/one-chip-digital.
You can then extend this to have the phone dial back a configured number (free phone, 800 number) with the DTMF of 1 in 100 numbers that call you and fail the test.
Of course this shifts the problem to simply pay more money for cheap labor answering challenge questions but the only way to defeat this use of the telephone network is to make it economically nonviable.
This same problem domain as SPAM email, we only needs to make every sender incur a cost to send and CPU power can be that cost, just implement hashcash inside SMTP protocol and the receiver gets to decide how hard (computationally) the problem is, allow the client/sever to exchange cookies to setup good will and reputation over time with many transactions. SPAM problem solved. Now we just need a compute mathematical algorithm that works where one end can create a maths computation problem and compute the solution (by knowing all the data) in very short amount of time, but then hand the problem to the other end to solve (by removing some information) and make is scalable exponentially and iteratively to it keeps working a CPU power gets better. Sure botnets can give them this CPU resource but now the infected user will notice when their CPU is being maxed out and probably get it cleaned sooner!
Let me report the number, they go to the address for that number and take billy clubs with them, if they find a computer hooked to multiple phone lines for marketing or robot calls.. Whoever is there they beat the crap out of them and destroy the equipment leaving the pieces all over the place.
Robot calls will stop almost overnight.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Get rid of free local calls, and make the caller pay a higher charge for calls to mobile phones (instead of the receiver getting billed minutes for the mobile portion of the call). This is how it works in most of europe, and they don't get nearly as many robocalls.
While I don't answer calls if I don't recognize the number, my wife answered one a couple of months back. It was an AI robocall. As in, a not-quite turing AI that asked questions and responded as if someone was there and even had an answer if interrupted. It wasn't a perfect call, you could _just_ realize it wasn't a human but it was subtle.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I only answer if you're in my contact list and not in the "Spammer" or "Spammer2" contact list (I exceeded the capacity of the first list). I don't answer Unknown and certainly don't answer Blocked calls.
I like the idea of being able to have a phone company managed black list that just keeps the calls from reaching my phone.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
BAN anonymous calls or otherwise hiding their numbers and identities. I can't think of a single legitimate reason why a call should be anonymous.
REQUIRE carriers to supply valid CID information or otherwise allow calls to be identified.
REQUIRE carriers to have valid information that matches a phone number with a company.
I have been wanting to do this for some time at home. How about setting up a linux machine that answers all phone calls (without my phone ringing) and plays a voice that says something like:
"You are talking to number 1234567, home of the xtracto family, press 8 if you want to talk to a person",
Maybe changing the number to reach a person randomly per call. It is not until the caller pressess that number that the phone will ring, and this is when I will answer (or, if there is no one home, my robo-answer will ask the caller to leave a message.
That's sort of a "captcha" but for telephone. Finally, I would give a special code to friends/family to dial just after the call with the robo-answer has connected so that they can directly ring the phone (longer that the one digit announced by the robot).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Oh that's easy.
Huge fines, but with the added requirement that the phone company must pay it if the caller cannot be identified.
"The phone company" being the company where the trace gets lost. The concept that the sender is responsible for provisioning his own caller id is a ludicrous design flaw. Something more akin to ANI is needed (host based)... plus some very aggressive regulatory enforcement. It's a political 3rd rail, however.
Kill the rule that allows for automated messages to be sent, ALL PHONE CALLS MUST BE FROM A LIVE PERSON WHO CAN INTERACT WITH THE RECEIVER.
Stop allowing Phone Companies to be Billing agencies for other companies.
Stop allowing call spoofing, where you receive a call and it's a hand up or something else, you call back and you get the Telephone company message "Sorry but this number is no longer in service."
Read the fucking web, there are thousands of gripes about robocalling violations.
Stop all Surveys and Presidential robocalls also.
Stop allowing companies to SELL OUR FUCKING INFORMATION.
Fine the telemarketer Managers and the companies large fees.
Trace the calls. You already monitor all of our lives anyways.
Repeat violators will be SHOT.
Don't let out of country business buy phone services in the US.
Let Anonymous go after them. They are great at track people down who piss them off, and their retaliation will be swift and painful.
Lets start with some of those.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
RoboCop.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
What you need to do is combine the Epic Fine solution with
1 tag the Bank/payment processors for providing services to these folks (last link US link in the chain for foreign banks)
2 fine the businesses the call is on behalf of unless it can be proven this was done without authorization (Joe Job prevention)
3 climb the corporate ladder and put the CxOs on the hook for part of the fines
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The legal Robocalls are just as annoying as the illegals. Ban 'em all.
Fine the operator, but make the fine transferable to the next operator in line.
If you get a robocall, your operator is fined. Your operator gets your phone number and the exact time of the call, so they can see which of their operators / peers the call came from. The fine gets passed further in the system until some operator loses track or the culprit is found.
What?
Just allow the person receiving the call to hit *99 and have it charge a fee back to the robocaller. If the phone in question is on a do not call list, the caller gets assessed a fee for violating it. Nothing persuade a change in behavior more than having to pay money.
A "Do Not Call" list. If you are on it (for a small-ish annual fee, to administer the system probably), then marketing/survey/sales people are not allowed to call you unless you have specifically requested a call. If you receive a call, you report the calling number to the FTC.
The main problems with that system are two-fold - the calling party uses a withheld number, and they refuse to say who they are calling from if asked.
The other major problem with this and the vast majority of systems that implement some kind of punitive deterrent, such as fines, are that the company calling is a Marketing company or (at this time of the US political cycle) a political entity trying to get their candidate elected. The marketing companies can shut down and start up again under another name with relative impunity in a corporate game of whack-a-mole with the FTC. To truly tackle the problem, you would need to go after the Marketing company's clients whose products are being sold/marketed.
a simple captcha type mechanism would work. Just have a voice say something like "Six Eight Nine Five" in varying voice, maybe even the person whose phone it is could record their own 10 voice digits, which would make it harder for the bots to recognize. The program in the phone could randomize the numbers every time, and a person listening would easily be able to hear the code and punch it in to get connected, whereas a bot would have a much more difficult time. People could also have whitelists of numbers that automatically bypass this too so that a kid calling his parents for an emergency doesnt have to go through the routine and waste time. I want credit for this idea. 8d6d35aa3d393dd5d38f5a015074b42ce7a5a0ad82e82058328ae2e4a052538f. if i see this idea getting used that is my proof that it was my idea :D
BAN anonymous calls or otherwise hiding their numbers and identities. I can't think of a single legitimate reason why a call should be anonymous.
People use phones to report drug dealers to the police; do you want this done to you when it turns out that the policeman is working for the cartel?
REQUIRE carriers to supply valid CID information or otherwise allow calls to be identified.
Apart from the above; carriers currently do some very bad tricks to block incoming VOIP calls. These would become much worse if they could always identify which were VOIP and which were non-VOIP calls.
REQUIRE carriers to have valid information that matches a phone number with a company.
Apart from all the above; many people go ex-directory in order to avoid their former spouses. There have been a number of cases where the compromise of the phone company's directory has lead to these people being killed or worse.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Best most permeant way is drone strike the call centers or a nonviolent approach would be to tax the companys for doing robot calls
I can't think of a way to stop it but I can think of a way to slow it down until more intelligent robocallers come out: a random sound/voice based capcha-like system that must be answered correctly for the call to be completed.
i used to get repeat calls a good bit... after the initial call and determining it's a telemarketer i block the number with a call filter which causes it to go directly to my google voicemail. i then setup an alternate google voicemail message for a select group called spam-callers and add those numbers to it. so now when the repeat robocall/telemarketer calls they hear "doo doo doo, im sorry but the number you've called has been disconnect or no longer in service"
I haven't received any repeat calls in months... and they used to call at least once a week.
too bad this is too convoluted for the average person.
Why on earth do we have to do the work of the FTC? It's not enough that they have a cozy government job they now farm out, in the form of a contest, their work. I do have to give them credit. They probably would have just hired some consultant company to do the work and get charged a few million dollars for the plan. So it's at least cheaper... Why on earth do we have these agencies that can't do their own work is beyond me...
Here's a novel idea, make it a crime and actually punish offenders! Hefty fines based on a per household per time called. Major prison time for every household actually swindled in a fraud. Make it a Federal level crime, like most scammers small-time telemarketers move from state-to-state to avoid being prosecuted under local state laws. We are probably stuck with the bigger outfits (most of them do "follow the rules") as most boiler rooms are actually run by the major telecoms and they pay their politicians very well to prevent meaningful laws from being passed.
We used to get robocalls, silent calls and Indian "Microsoft Support" scammers all the time, until we bought a call screening machine from TrueCall ( http://www.truecall.co.uk ), and they've all stopped entirely now. The device answers the phone and asks the caller to state their name. If they don't, it disconnects and you never even know they called. If they do, it rings the phone and says "You have a call from [recorded name]" which you can choose to accept or reject. It will learn the people you let through so they only have to give their name the first time they call.
Scammers, robots and silent calls just don't get through at all. (I'm not a representative of the company, and there are probably plenty of other similar gadgets.)
I cut my land-line a few months ago and haven't received a single unsolicited call since. Problem solved. As an added bonus, cable television is also now gone.
Change the law so that the phone companies bill the caller, not the callee. Make it prohibitively expensive to do it, and the problem will solve itself.
Seems like all the solutions involve getting the carriers to give a shit about the problem.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
They can't hide their identity from the carrier connecting the call. The carrier has to open a connection both ways. I realize that this doesn't mean you've traced a call to its origin, but you would at least have the ANI information at the carrier side. You can't block that like you can block caller ID because it's used for actually billing the call.
What we need is to have a way to block calls to sequential numbers, and have carriers share information about callers. If the caller is spoofing different phone numbers with every call, it's likely they're robodialing. Especially if they're spoofing other numbers that are on their call list.
Isn't that sort of like blaming fed ex because the unabomber's bombs didn't have a return address on them? You really want the phone company to have to come up with intrusive ways of tracking everyone just to cover their own liability?
The OP was talking about businesses, not people.If you're a legitimate business, there is no reason to obfuscate your phone number.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Run a client-side app on your phone that implements a little game of "Simon Says" for any phone number that isn't on your whitelist. It'll take out telemarketers, too, because they don't have 3 minutes to spend playing games to get to you (and most are robodialed anyway).
"Hi, your number isn't on my whitelist, so you need to play a little game of Simon Says in order to make my number ring or reach my voicemail. Press 7 to continue" [caller presses 7]
"I'm sorry, Simon didn't say to continue" [click]
[human caller tries again, presses nothing when told to press 3]
"Good, you understand the rules. SIMON SAYS, enter the first 3 digits of pi to continue, omitting the decimal point"
[caller enters 314]
"Congratulations, you aren't an elected official from the midwestern US! Press 1 to continue"
[caller enters 1, then swears violently a second later when he realizes he was tricked]
"I'm sorry, Simon didn't say to press 1" [click]
[Caller tries again, this time gets a new challenge, like...]
"There are two kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary, and those who don't. If you were starting a company to make X-10 compatible products and wanted a cute name that implied X-10++, but couldn't use X-11 because that's the name of Linux's graphics server, what single digit would arguably convey the same subtle inside joke without trademark infringement? Simon says, enter it now"
[Caller scratches his head, then has a flash of enlightenment and enters 3]
[System congratulates caller, tries to trick him into pressing 1 to continue, fails, throws another brainteaser at the caller, congratulates him for getting it right, tries to trick him into pressing a single digit again, has Simon tell him to press the digit, has simon tell him to press another, then tells him to press a third (without Simon), the caller isn't fooled]
"OK, you win. You clearly want to reach ${me} quite badly, and you're either a friend, a determined bill collector, or some pour soul in Bangalore who's getting paid almost nothing to endure hours and hours of brainteasers from others running the same software I am, so I'll put your call through."
(ring, ring... no answer, goes to voicemail)
"Oh dear, there's no answer. Look, since you've been such a good sport, Simon says to leave your message, then enter your callback number."
(for anybody who's wondering, I really did program something like once as a joke & programming exercise at the first company I worked for after college using Dialogic Visual Voice Pro. I've been meaning to try re-implementing it with Asterisk, and maybe even try to implement it as a client-side app for Android phones, if only to filter out calls from candidates during election years)
Why can't we have a phone number whitelist just like I have for MAC addresses on my wireless router? Everything else dumps to VM.
I save all telemarketers and robo calls in my calling log under the name No. Now if I could just tell my phone to block these calls my problem will be solved. Now they still get through with new numbers but it has slowed down a lot.
No. "Valid" CID is any phone number I own on any account. I want my VoIP service set up to use my Google Voice number for outgoing calls. That should be allowed under the rules, and currently is. Google Voice spoofs the caller ID when someone calls your GV number and forwards the call, and that's how the caller's number shows up on your phone.
It's only as ludicrous as it is for email. Email is exactly the same way and people are satisfied with this setup, as there's no better alternative. SPF records in DNS are not a requirement of email, but they haven't solved the problem either.
Outlaw them. Oh wait, I forgot, this is the US so its an unspeakable sin to pass any law that may make any sort of commerce even slightly inconvenient.
How do you stop the businesses using the private lines where they aren't identified? This is a hard problem like stopping IP spoofing if you aren't allowed to use IPSEC.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
This is how we lose our freedoms. An annoyance leads to bans and requirements that impact much more important matters.
rtfa-troll points out below that anonymous calls are vital for tipsters and whistleblowers. Are you willing to sacrifice that very important check for the sake of not getting a robocall?
More importantly, there are bans and requirements in place *now* that should prevent these robocalls from happening. Where did you get the idea that criminals follow the law?
So then companies will contract out to individuals to make calls for them. Same problem.
I propose that all robocalls use an unused audio frequency to indicate whether the call had been placed with malicious intent, thus making call blocking an easy problem -- simply block any calls with the evil tone set.
Psychiatric treatment centers never use caller id and are often not listed numbers. First eliminate the stigma attached to these disorders, then you can talk about taking away their right to privacy regarding medical problems.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Everyone has the wrong idea about how this works.
The robocalls are almost all over VOIP and originate outside the country.
Or if they are inside the country they can be moved so easily it's impossible to nail them down.
The originating number is easily spoofed. They are basically impossible to track.
any solution they come up with will be very intrusive, collect all of our phone traffic, and likely not catch a single "robo-caller"
If your phone doesn't know the calling number, it answers for you, the caller must correctly answer a question you have recorded. You can decide if the question should be personal or general. The question could be "How do you know me?" Acceptable answers could be "I'm your pool contractor" or "I met you at the Python user group last week." Voice recognition app that can look at your calendar and other info should enable this.
-Develop some sonic pattern that can frazzle their system into oblivion -Use skill testing questions before dialing. I also wish we could get those fuckers that text me on my cellphone telling me i won an iPad. I don't want the iPad! leave me alone.
They can't hide their identity from the carrier connecting the call.
Not from the first carrier; but if the first (or nth) hides it from the next (or n+1th) then the ones after than have no way to trace it back. Unfortunately there are legitimate and not legitimate reasons for carriers to do this. This includes privacy regulations in some countries making it illegal to pass this on.
The carrier has to open a connection both ways.
The connection is always opened hop by hop; E.g. at one phone exchange you get told by your neighbour "open circuit 52" and then you get a voice connection in both directions on the same wire. This means that they can do the two directions without having any idea where the call originated.
I realize that this doesn't mean you've traced a call to its origin, but you would at least have the ANI information at the carrier side. You can't block that like you can block caller ID because it's used for actually billing the call.
That's likely true in the USA, but doesn't apply to international circuits (have a look on Google for "can't trace" scam call). All this was pretty well documented related to the Indian company doing Microsoft Windows virus scam calls that was covered here not so long ago on Slashdot. Unfortunately, even a US company can simply route their call out to India over VOIP and then back again, so that's a sufficient loophole to cover everyone.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
That is only because people don't fully implement the solution. If you blocked when SPF was not validated correctly, or if they don't have an SPF record, you could catch a lot more. This is the problem, it is a solution, but not fully implemented.
I placed a program on Slashdot.net that does this. Its called 'jcblock'. Just enter its name in the Search window. I also placed a similar program for an Android 2.2 smartphone on there. Its called 'JCBloc'. Unfortunately the Andoid folks blocked a needed permission in versions of Android after 2.2. There have been over 150 downloads of jcblock and over 30 of JCBloc. For further details read the README files for the programs.
For a robot call to be effictive, it must be trying to promote something (say, some kind of interest group) or or sell some product or service on behalf of some company or person - Just fine the hell out of the entity that is being promoted.
Problem solved.
Where's my 50k please?
how do you differentiate between legit calls, like services calling to leave you a message that your prescriptions are ready, or to remind you of an appointment?
The government monitors all the phone calls anyways, start flagging the ones that sound like robo calls (ones where no one is there to answer the phone until you say hello 10 times to get someone's attention) and other behavioral type attributes that can be identified. Look at call duration. If there were 1000 calls an hour, each lasting under 30 seconds, then you know that is a robo caller as they don't leave messages. You can train IT systems to do that, and the monitoring infrastructure in the DHS and FBI are already there.
Why can't we have a phone number whitelist just like I have for MAC addresses on my wireless router? Everything else dumps to VM.
Because when my daughter's car breaks down and she has to borrow a phone she won't be able to get through to me.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
At home with my landline, I found just running an asterisk server with a voice menu stating that we don't accept cold calls and instructing them to press some random number to ring through to my phone or voice mail worked very well. I never had an unsolicited phone call get through. WIth my Android cell phone, it just sends calls from people not in my contacts list straight to voice mail. If they really want to talk to me, they can leave a message and I'll call them back. With this system, I also never see an unsolicited call. Doesn't keep the system from having to deal with the traffic, but at least it keeps the call short.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
... short rope.
Problem solved.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
Stop letting the politicians give themselves exclusions to the rules. Robocalls have been up 500% at my home during the past few months preceding this election. Personally I won't vote for any candidate who does robocall my house. The "Do Not Call" list is available to them and my home number is on it. If they have so little regard for my preference and my opinion on that matter that they still call me, why should I believe that they care even a little bit about my opinion on anything else?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
What makes you think the businesses who make the blocked calls are upstanding enough not to just start using burner cellphones then?
Ban land lines as Un-Eco Friendly, wasting all that hot air.
Then enforce Caller ID, if you place a call, even if your a robot, you automatically give up the right to hide your registration.
A. most people will no longer use the existing telephony infrastructure
B. Caller ID can be filtered by personal pattern filters that would eventually crowd source Banned Black Lists
Problem solved, robo callers wither and die.
Yes, something like SPF would work great for both email and caller ID - IF everyone nationwide agreed to do it at once. And even then, what do you do about calls from international call centers? We can't enforce our calling system on the world.
Slashdot hating on "anonymous calls"? Oh the irony...
find a phone number that is disconnected. you know the recording: SIT tone, with the lady
saying "we're sorry the number you have reached is no longer in service....beep beep beep...."
RECORD this to your answer machine. Robocall listen for the SIT tone and delete your
number!! I have had this system online for a month and no longer get those retarded calls!!
If the call is going through, the phone company is billing it! That means there's a record. No need to bana anonymous numbers or anything quite so drastic. Instead, set up a system where if you are robocalled, you can call a number at the FTC and give them your number, and the time you were robocalled, and permission to request your phone records for that number for that time +/- 5 minutes. Given such information, the FTC should be given streamlined acces to warrants to access the phone company(-ies) involved records to identify the calling number, the legal entity billed, and then issue a HEFTY fine of say 10% of that legal entities net worth... The legal mechanisms are already in place, someone just needs to get off their ass and use them. To be fair, they may need some tweaking so it isn't too diffcult to do.
I use Asterisk to prompt unknown callers with "Press 1 to be connected" before my phone will ring. Works like a charm.
Oh, should I have sugar-coated that?
More government regulation is *not* the way to solve this any more than you'd suggest more government regulation being the best way to solve annoying or intrusive internet speech. At least the government is doing the right thing by offering money to spur a private solution.
The OP was talking about businesses, not people.If you're a legitimate business, there is no reason to obfuscate your phone number.
Wrong. There are many cases where a businesses make outbound calls on unlisted numbers, and deliver the inbound phone number as the CID on all those lines. In some cases you may have call centers in different states, but they are all serviced by a single inbound 800 number, as another example. I've seen small businesses setup to where the owner's cell phone, landline, and home phone all have the same CID so they can conduct work business using any of those three phones without their private number being spread around.
answer all calls with a robo-answerer... no one uses phones anymore, all communication now happens on facebook/twitter.
Implemented at the switch level, exponentially increase the time before a new call can be placed from the same number based on the number of calls already placed recently. In other words, hangup to dial would normally be instantaneous. After a certain number of calls in a certain time frame, that would increase to a second between dials, then 2, then 4, etc. The idea would be to throttle the heavy call volumes that robocalls generate, thus increasing costs and thus decreasing the incentive to use them. Robocalls would still happen, but the volume would decrease.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Simple: In order to complete a call, you have to enter a captcha into the phone (eg, you are told a string of numbers and then must enter them.) Applies to all outgoing calls except for 911. Now where's my 50 quid?
Actually enforce the fucking law and put these assholes out of business permanently.
You can set outgoing calls in a company to be the same generic company number while leaving their private numbers still hidden.
can stop robocalls.
Why can't we have a phone number whitelist just like I have for MAC addresses on my wireless router? Everything else dumps to VM.
I believe this will do what you want (if you have an Android phone):
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/a-better-way-to-block-unwanted-calls-on-your-android-phone/
That is all that is needed is to give all customers a free tool to whitelist what calls can come through to their phone, ideally it would be a whitelist plus a pin code to get through in the event that telemarketers fake their caller ID to be someone on your whitelist.
I installed 3CX on a computer and let it answer every incoming call. If the caller isn't sentient enough to follow a simple instruction (press a number to be connected to a real human) then the call just drops and we never even know it happened. We haven't had a single robocall or telemarketer get through in over 2 years.
There have been a number of cases where the compromise of the phone company's directory has lead to these people being killed or worse.
What's worse than being killed? I'm pretty sure there's nothing. No matter if someone is tortured or raped, I'm pretty sure they'd rather not die, most of all.
Because Exceptions are how we write laws today, and it sucks.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
When I lived in Missouri we very rarely got these unwanted calls. The reason is because the companies that use these tactics quickly learned that Missouri's no-call list had some very real and very vicious teeth to it, so they made sure to comply with it.
Unlike the paper-tiger that is every other no-call list, Missouri's law allows the AG to sue violators to the tune of $5k per violation. It didn't take very many million-dollar lawsuits against these companies before word started getting around not to fuck with Missouri's no-call law. The money recovered from these lawsuits gave the state budget a little extra kick, so it was a good deal all around. I believe the Missouri law even allows for individuals to file lawsuits against violators if they so choose.
If everyone would just copy Missouri's methods the problem would be greatly reduced.
The only robocalls I get are from scumbag politicians (i.e. all of them), and the FTC has no intention of stopping them.
the cousin of the guy who runs the ftc will come up with a totally ineffective but fancy sounding solution and receive the cash.
remove the ability to hide phone numbers from caller ID on all company numbers and then lower the rates on all calls made from company numbers. Then increase the cost per call on all calls made from private numbers the more calls you make from that number. ...exponentially increase the time before a new call can be placed from the same number based on the number of calls already placed recently. ..." for those private numbers.
You could also add in,
Set up an automated system that recognizes the audio of pre-recorded calls, hijacks the call, waits and injects the necessary tones to get to a human, then plays Rick Astley's hit "Never Gonna Give You Up."
I can't think of any reason that VOIP providers wanting to call the PSTN shouldn't be paying for legitimate SIP handoffs from a carrier. I don't have any problem with banning VOIP -> PSTN fee free calls.
People use phones to report drug dealers to the police
If people want to make confidential calls using the PSTN there are pay phones. That system has worked fine for almost a century.
And your point is? Yes I did not advocate that it had to be implemented, I just said that the solution would work, if fully implemented. International regulations, interfaces, etc. all do funky things to trying to create a homogeneous environment for things to work. I am just pointing out that it would have worked, just like if caller ID were required at the phone company (ie. who is paying the bill) on every phone number sent around the world (just like SPF). It is not .. thus the point is moot.
Why would carriers have any objection delivering calls from competing carriers that pay handoff fees? If you mean carriers that don't pay handoff fees that sounds like a feature not a bug.
What happens when I promote the hell out of your business, and then file a complaint about "your" marketing practices?
Alternatively, I use a robocall service, pay them cash from my secret slush fund and say that I know nothing and I think that one of my competitors is trying to blacken my name and get me fined?
Totally apples & eggplants. The block is robocalls, people aren't robocalls. Plus you can already block anonymous calls. People may be soylent green but they ain't robots. And if they need a test bed for it I'm in. I get a minimum of 7 robot calls every day. Same firms, different numbers and caller id's, and they won't stop. I tell them I will have them fined by the FTC and they laugh and say they can't be stopped. As punishment for threatening them I get the same call every hour,24/7 for a week or more. That is what needs to be stopped. I hope they hurry.
This doesn't solve the root of the problem, but it sure helped us out a TON.
Many years ago when the robocalls were getting unbearable, and before do-not-call lists were common (or enforced), we bought a Telezapper and put it in place.
It was incredible, in a few short days the number of cold calls dwindled to virtually nothing. I believe it worked by sending a disconnect signal when you picked up the phone causing the robocaller to disconnect. The result would be no-one on the other side ("hello? hello?"), but the net affect was having our number be systematically removed from the marketing lists since it was perceived as being invalid.
I think the new Telezappers have been improved to cater for the fact that some robocallers got better about being fooled by the disconnect signal.
That doesn't work. In fact when I tell the person that you can eventually get to that he can be fined he laughs. Says either the FTC can't do a thing in India, just the FTC can't do a thing. I get 7 a day, and I can't stop them. The FTC is right we need a technology because no phone company has found a way to block anything but anonymous calls, and that doesn't help.
What's worse than being killed?
Public speaking.
It's the only way to be sure.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
sue them under federal law, TCPA.
I've registered for the do-not-call list and I still get 3-5 robo calls a day.
Running a Asterisk pbx here.
I'm thinking of putting an audio captcha on my line that will only pass the call through if answered correctly.
There are often multiple companies that work off the same number. Some employees can actually be working for multiple companies at the same time. (This happened twice for me) So if you were to call and their caller ID says you are Company A while you are calling for Company B the customer gets confused.
For the first Job that happened there were two consulting companies. One did Business Intelligence other did system level work. My job was in the middle While I was hired at the Systems Consulting company. The BI company would often have me work under their name and they would pay the Systems Consulting company for my time. However to the customer sees the other company name on the phone, and will get confused and assume it is a sales call from an other company and not answer your business questions.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Large fines to the telephone company that passed on the robocall.
Do not fine the phone companies. Instead place a simple flat $1 per call tax on all anonymous, untraceable, and/or robocalls.
BAN anonymous calls or otherwise hiding their numbers and identities. I can't think of a single legitimate reason why a call should be anonymous. REQUIRE carriers to supply valid CID information or otherwise allow calls to be identified. REQUIRE carriers to have valid information that matches a phone number with a company.
Agreed. My response to the whole OP is, how about some enforcement and cooperation like we're seeing for anti-terrorism? Can't tell me the technology doesn't already exist and is in place to do "other things" like spy on everyone's calls. Probably take a few DHS folks a matter of days to identify ALL the robocall perpetrators in America, for crying out loud.
This is how we lose our freedoms. An annoyance leads to bans and requirements that impact much more important matters.
rtfa-troll points out below that anonymous calls are vital for tipsters and whistleblowers. Are you willing to sacrifice that very important check for the sake of not getting a robocall?
More importantly, there are bans and requirements in place *now* that should prevent these robocalls from happening. Where did you get the idea that criminals follow the law?
I have some bad news. The PATRIOT Act already took those freedoms away. Law enforcement doesn't get "Blocked" in the caller ID and your "anonymous tips" aren't truly anonymous. DHS knows what phone it came from, what carrier it went through, etc., etc., etc.
I think providing a true phone number of the caller, and some reasonably verified contact information for the entity using it, is completely reasonable. Yes.
It would be the only way from preventing some boiler room operation with their own PBX posing as some telephone company. "We just provide the phones! We're not responsible for our customers in the cubicles!" Well... then... you pay the fine. You're the last traceable hop.
Will we ever get it? No. No regulatory agency would be able to get past the politics. This contest is a smokescreen to make it look like they're doing something.
But you've introduced another problem. Want to cripple the NRA or the EFF? set up robocalls "on their behalf".
Free Martian Whores!
Make telephone numbers 16 digits or so, so everyone in the world can have millions of them. Now your phone service can include a secondary service through which you can assign yourself randomly generated phone numbers. Use those numbers when signing up for credit cards, web forms, Radio Shack, etc. Give customers the option of making each of their assigned numbers either ring, get silently logged, or get ignored. Only give your "real" number out to friends.
This will also let you know who's spamming you. "Oh, I gave 483929599838282300406192 out to Best Buy, and lo and behold a credit card telemarketer is logged as trying to call it.
Robocallers use outbound dialing services. I'm sure it's like anything else related to easy money, they have plausible deniability built in. So make the outbound dialing services responsible for illegal use of their outbound lines. Make the outbound dialers vet their clients. That's the only way to solve the problem.
I love it when just one person doesn't need something, they assume we all don't need it. Anonymous calls are a real necessity in many instances. My wife is a probation officer who frequently works from home. She has to call scumbags and their scumbag relatives frequently to conduct interviews. They do not need to know our home phone number. I can imagine there are other scenarios where blocking the number is prudent.
What's worse than being killed?
Killing someone else. Everybody has to die, not everybody has to kill.
Free Martian Whores!
Easy
1. Require all commercial calls to display accurate caller id information.
2. Require telephone company providers to disable the ability for caller id blocking and caller id spoofing on their networks
3. Require the use of the do not call list.
4. A doubling first time fine for violations for both the company providing the calling service and for the company providing the product or service they are hawking. Each subsequent fine will double. $1,000,000... $2,000,000... $4,000,000... $8,000,000 etc....
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
I run the phone system for a taxi company.
I need the ability to control the number that shows up on a caller ID system.
I do not want 1 of 165 numbers I have showing up on a customers phone when a calltaker calls them back of the callout system tells them their cab is at the location.
Our recognizable 800 is what I want to show up. So that people know who is calling. Not giving me control causes confusion of who is calling.
Taking away the power of responsible businesses is not the way to fix a problem with fuckwads.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
You win.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I've been looking into (just a bit) the most annoying of the ones that gets to me -- the fake "CARD SERVICES" calls. These are the ones that robocall numbers, ignoring the donotcall lists, play the recording calling themselves "card services" and offer a lower rate. Pressing to be removed does no good. If you do hold or press to talk to an operator, if you try to ask for a supervisor, a company name, a call back number, or to be removed from the list, they hang up (often cursing at you first).
If you do play along, they will pre-screen you and eventually pass you on to some kind of debt consolidation company. I don't yet know if it's one company or a group of them, but I do know that the telemarketers are not employees of that company. I believe they get paid either based on the number of successful transfers, or more standard "lead generation" once they capture your information.
The problem with playing along to find out who is ultimately making the money from the scam, is that to get to that group of people requires you to turn over too much private information to be worth the risk.
The company which profits from this kind of activity should, IMCO, but subject to RICO forfeitures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act
You have to go after whoever profits from the calls, and do it aggressively.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
All I need to do is to have any call that doesn't have a number given (no invalid or unavailable or withheld) go straight to ignored, then I don't care if the robocaller is calling me.
However, I cannot do this.
So make it a requirement for providong phone service.
That would cut down on a bunch of them. Check please.
The solution for this was invented and extensively tested over two hundred years ago.
The only trick is finding the people responsible for making the calls. That's where this guy comes in.
To the FTC: You're welcome. You can donate my $50k to the EFF.
I can't think of a single legitimate reason why a call should be anonymous
Hello, Oakland PD? Yes. I know who the gangbanger is that shot the officer...
Payphones, at least for now, still exist. Or there's also slipping an envelope under a door - a classic strategy. Hell, you could create a junk email account from your local library. There are still lots of ways to report information anonymously.
I agree that making anonymity harder is probably a bad thing to do, but it also shouldn't be made easy to annoy huge numbers of people trivially.
But you've introduced another problem. Want to cripple the NRA or the EFF? set up robocalls "on their behalf".
The NRA and EFF aren't "companies" as far as robocalls are concerned...they are political lobbying groups. As such, they could actually robocall as much as they want and not break any laws.
Like spam, I have yet to receive any telemarketing call from any entity I don't "have a relationship with" that isn't a scam of some sort. It may only be overpriced airfare to get a free cruise, but it's always some sort of scam. So, the obvious solution is to completely ban all telemarketing calls.
Where do you live that there are still payphones? Its pretty rare these days.
BAN anonymous calls or otherwise hiding their numbers and identities. I can't think of a single legitimate reason why a call should be anonymous.
I can think of a few, say for example you are a delivery driver for a local pizza place. Now you need to get in touch with the customer while on the road for some reason (maybe you're not sure where their address is because it was misentered by the person taking the order, or maybe the customer isn't answering their door despite your knocking, or they happen to be in an apartment complex that won't let you inside without a key and doesn't have a door buzzer. A quick phone call could alleviate all of those problems, but it's unlikely that you'd use a company phone for that task, you'd likely use your own cell phone. Well, do you necessarily want some random stranger to know your cell number?
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
Pay phones are an endangered species in the age of cellphones. Many have been removed entirely, and many more just aren't fixed when they break.
They shouldn't require handoff fees. For every call handed off, there is already a customer paying them to handle the call. If they stop accepting calls from Great Aunt Mildred, their own customer will be rightfully demanding a refund for services not rendered.
Handoff fees are wierd and politically regulated. I would reject a call on one circuit if I knew that would mean I would get it on another circuit at a higher handoff fee.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Allow all phones to block any call what so ever they like no matter where it is from.
Problem solved.
The companies keep closing down and setting up under a different name and/or location, always one step ahead of the law.
You missed it by THAT MUCH. CID is only part of the info and it can be altered and usually is. The part that cannot be altered is the ANI. Require that the ANI has to be passed as well. Some carriers will pass it, but most don't. If a user has a device that can use the ANI info, then you can trace and thus follow a call all the way back to the Point of Presence.(POP). Know the POP and you know who's door to knock on to see what the user account is that let them into the system. It is that simple. The problem is that corporations don't want you to know what vendors they are using to to make the calls for them. Sometimes call centers will do calls for several different banks or sales products, insurance... you name it. Just need agents trained on a particular companies product. If you know the ANI, you can more easily block any calls you don't like by category.
The government is using the DNC list to make money... under the guise of "paying for the service"... and they make the whole process of complying a pain in the ass...
make it a simple web service that software vendors can use or a downloadable CSV file and people / business will take care of the rest...
they make it simple for the people because they don't want the masses to know how stupid they are but not on the other side...
Great idea, except that back in the 'good old days', there was more crime per capita so I think that tells you how effective those techniques were. Also, while you are dismembering people left and right, you might get a false conviction. How many innocent people you intending to drop in your medieval version of a wood chipper to 'stop' crime? Because, remember how hacking people up for criminal activities ended all the crime in the ancient world...
You sir, are a thug and an idiot.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The solve the problem, you must first turn the FTC into an organization that also looks out for the individual and the consumer, which it does not appear to do.
IMHO, the problem is: the FTC doesn't really want to keep people from getting calls, so they are just throwing up their hands, and saying that they can't do anything. It's hardly a matter or priorities.
The FTC did not take down of Microsoft's illegal monopoly because they are corrupt.
The FTC does not care about people--only economy stimulus.
If the cell phone companies would be forced to pay for spam calls, it would be stopped, but that is not going to happen because there are too many lobbyists in Washington D.C. looking out for commercial interests.
You can send me my $50,000 now.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Require US Telecom companies to support a new reporting structure for illegal calls.
Someone receives robocall, hangs up, dials *345, hangs up
*345 triggers phone company switch to dump log of previous call to database. Databases from all the phone companies are aggregated to FTC for investigators to use for pattern analysis to run down the companies.
Where is my $50k?
Ya, you right and those anonymous calls can then be tracked to their source and we no longer have Anonymous witnesses and the many cases that were solved using this method would be voided.
A better solution would be to allow anonymous call block with option to identify during the block message. Such a system would work as follows.
1) User sets up anonymous call block.
2) When an anonymous call is received it is intercepted (before winging the dialed number) by an answering service that notifies the caller that they have two options.
2.a) The caller can reveal their information to the called. And the call goes through.
2.b) The call is disconnected.
This way the phone owner can specify that they only want identified calls, and it doesn't compromise the anonymity of the caller against their will.
I used to head up the IT dept for an industry well known for making robocalls (auto-warranty/VSC). For almost 5 years I fought tooth and nail to get them to stop using dialers. When they weren't doing that, they were sending out postcards fraudulently claiming the vehicle owners warranty expired. You'd be surprised how many people fell for that and bought a service contract that they didn't need and coincidentally wouldn't pay out when they needed it. We were constantly in hot water with the FTC and various states' attorney generals. The only thing that really would slow our company down was A) FTC fines, B) Attorney General investigations and most importantly consumers that knew the laws, or would do 5 minutes of homework and would file a claim for each phone call they received from the company. As far as dialers go, we had one in house, plus we used one on the east coast and one on the west coast. When one company was in hot water with the FTC or state, we would switch to the other one. Towards the end of my time at the company, we started using a VOIP based one in Texas and one in South Dakota. We also started working with offshore companies specifically in the Philippines where they could not be touched. determining which carrier to sue would be a huge problem since all of the companies used multiple carriers to complete the calls, not to mention a call may originate with one carrier and end with another. All of these dialer companies kept their systems in Co-lo facilities, one of which is in the telco loop on Wilshire in LA. We would buy blocks of hundreds of 800 and 877 numbers and rotate between them, use them for a little while and then dump them for another block. The numbers were purchased through shell companies in states that are very pro business and pro privacy such as Nevada, and that shell company would be set up by another shell company in another state. Most of the companies however, reside in and around St. Louis Missouri, but the dialers exist everywhere. As I said, because of FTC and various state attorney generals, we began moving to dialers offshore. Good luck trying to go after carriers. Although I have set up many dialers, have done some trunk and phone system programming, Im not sure that there is a particular signal that differentiates a call from an automated device from that of a regular phone. There should be one required by law though. Secondly, depending on how much various agencies were coming down on us, we could adjust abandon rates, we could adjust how persistent our systems were (i.e. would it hangup at detection of voicemail or leave a message, would it call that number again and how often, would we allow a number to be removed from out lists, etc.., we could also adjust how many calls we want to make in a given period of time). Another thing to consider is this, many people get on lists by entering their mobile number. Although at one point it was illegal to call a cell phone, it's not enforced and worse, in many states you can not put your cell phone number a do not call registry. My company would download each states and the federal do not call list each month and scrub against our list. Make sure your number is on those lists, because it is even easier to file a claim against a company when they call. I believe the fine is something like $500 to $1500 for each instance a company calls you. Most time they settle out of court but event hen it costs them quite a bit. The best way to find out who these companies are is to actually answer the call and speak to the sales person. Record the call, and ask to be removed from the list! There is a good chance they'll call again but from a different number. Record the call again, and each time they call. Each time is a separate fine. Grab your phone records and file a claim in court. Report the number(s) to your state AG, the FTC and any web databases that track these companies. The best thing you can do is just cost these companies money, eventually they will close. FTC needs to go after these companies. States need to revoke their business licenses. This will never happen as call centers provide jobs and tax revenue. Anyhow, im just rambling as I am tired of these companies probably more than most.
Just make all plans be a "caller pays everything, receiver pays nothing" model. The shift in prices would even out for most users, but would make robocalling too expensive to be practical for most enterprises.
This is NOT rocket science, folks. The first link in the phone call, the first agency actually providing a "phone link", checks the calling number. No number? Disconnect immediately (or forward to the FBI or FCC). Is the Caller ID (number, not name) the same as the calling number? No: disconnect immediately (or forward to the FBI or FCC).
Number identified and verified? Great, let them make the call. The recipient can then identify the caller (absolutely, positively) and can then report or prosecute as he so elects.
Oh, this offends someone's sense of privacy? Screw you and your privacy: if you're going to call ME, you're violating MY privacy. So give a little, take a little. I am ready and willing to hang up on ANY caller who doesn't provide me a valid phone number. The problem right now is that it can be spoofed so easily. I get calls from 1-800-000-0000 all the time .. and the phone providers know it too and are doing damn all about it.
Won't work, last few robo calls I have gotten have been from the government (political campaigns mostly), thus we cannot rely on them to stop the issue.
I say we take away the phone system. I hardly use my phone to make calls anyway, it wont be missed.
People use phones to report drug dealers to the police; do you want this done to you when it turns out that the policeman is working for the cartel?
This argument seems bogus. If you hide the number, the police can't see it directly on their display, but I'm sure they could get it if they wanted to, by talking to the carriers, etc. It's just a bad idea to rely on a hidden number for anonymity in any case.
Lets make good use of the new drones !!!
Our local Crimestoppers is reachable via phone and Web--they proclaim that neither is traceable, and if they were lying and word got out that they could trace calls/website visits, the anonymous tips would dry up _real_ fast.
That having been said, if I had to submit an anonymous tip, especially concerning a crime by a public official or law enforcement officer, I would most likely use a pay phone or foreign anonymous proxy.
It's a little more complicated than that, and yes truly anonymous calls, on the POTS system should be banned. True anonymity never existed in the POTS system either, so you are not losing anything. If you want anonymity in the POTS system then use a random public phone, or wear a disguise and get a disposable cell phone with cash, and remember to only use it in public places you infrequently visit. Or, with VOIP technology, purchase a cheap termination account and use TOR to place your calls. It will be amazingly shitty quality, but it will be make the effort to identify you extraordinarily high. Only governments very interested might catch you.
What's missing in the discussion is some granularity on the identification of calls. There are two channels for this information, ANI and Caller ID. Caller ID is a carrier level service that is provided to customers. ANI is supposed to be an exchange of information between carriers. This is how you can request that your number is made "anonymous". Ostensibly, a request is passed to the carrier to hide that information.
The weird part is that ANI seems to be falling into a state of disrepair and Caller ID is being used almost extensively. This is more than likely due to business plan and billing changes that put emphasis on the amount of data used, instead of the minutes. I also imagine it is because of different methods used to log and identify calls since it is now being passed as data.
What needs to happen, for the POTS system , is that very strong laws are enforced that makes it a crime (actual crime with jail time) for forging identities that you don't have authorization by the owner to do so. I believe the state of Mississippi is the only one with laws on the books. It's fairly intelligent IIRC since it does not stop VOIP companies from changing Caller ID when it is appropriate to do so. An example would be a business phone system that does not have actual physical phone lines anymore, but does have 50 phone numbers that can be assigned to each desk phone extension for outgoing calls.
This happens with VOIP all day long. I can say this from experience. For any outgoing call I can set the Caller ID to be anything that I want. Now here is the strange part... somebody was doing this to me. After calling the carriers direct, they told me of the state of ANI, and that the true identity of the line calling me was not even being passed to them either. I was flabbergasted. Maybe they were giving me the run around, maybe not. All I know, is that I was not getting that information, and it was another carrier asking on my behalf.
The one true, absolutely effective, cannot-stop-it-cannot-bypass-it way to stop robocalls is the proper identification of the caller . Google Voice offers a service whereby you can block spam calls. It is very similar to a RBL for email and is crowd sourced apparently. If the telemarketers had no control over the identification of their phone numbers, and the carriers always had this information, then services like this can actually work. Google Voice does not have to display the "anonymous" call in order to block it in the future.
Now that is POTS. The future will be quite different and anonymous calls will be impossible. Meaning, it will not be possible to keep your identity from the person you are calling. It will be exchanges where the participants are identified to each other through encrypted identities, probably even managed with a CA.
Once you have that, all anonymous calls, or identities without relationships, will just be directed to leave you a voice message, text message, whatever. I imagine at the point telemarketing will have died since it will be nearly impossible to forcibly disturb a random person to deliver your toxic advertising scammy bullshit. Coupled with advanced algorithms to identify spammy messages, it will make life really difficult for those business plans. Something like 100,000,000 communication attempts to get one person, kind of difficult.
I know at least one person who, back in the landline era, had a TeleZapper, that would make telemarketers (human and robo) think your line had been disconnected. Amazingly simple: upon picking up the phone, the TeleZapper would play the first note of the "Do Mi Sol" tones you hear before the recording that a number has been disconnected.
I'm a recent newcomer to a cell phone (2005), and before that, I was landline only. The State of Florida has a no-call list, but I objected to paying to _not_ get sales calls, so whenever I got one, I simply invoked federal law and demanded to be put on the no-call lists of the telemarketing firm _and_ the company that hired them to make the calls--and snailmail me confirmation that I had been added. The end result of this was that the process would run up administrative costs for the telemarketer and I would be added to a "jerk list", which, although they're not supposed to tell this list to other telemarketers, you know they do. I snapped and started doing this when I started getting six calls a day, and the calls quickly dried up. Now that I'm (1) cell-phone-only and (2) on the (free) national no-call list, the telemarketing calls have all but dried up. I have to deal with the occasional political robocall, but that's it.
Near Philadelphia. I still see them at lots of gas stations.
They exist in poorer neighborhoods where people are making these sorts of anonymous calls.
Politically regulated is the FCC. Once it is down to fee structures that's something they can fix on their own.
That's indirect. Aunt Mildred's carrier pays a fee that gets passed through.
Send a Navy Seal Team after them.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
BAN anonymous calls or otherwise hiding their numbers and identities. I can't think of a single legitimate reason why a call should be anonymous.
If someone in your family has a medical issue they are not ready to talk to you about, they might disagree
REQUIRE carriers to supply valid CID information or otherwise allow calls to be identified.
My company has many offices. Each office that calls out, sends the CID of the main number (unless the line is marked to over-ride that with a DID). This is pretty much standard in any kind of support center, etc.
That main number is not owned by the phone companies in the local office areas. In fact, because of VOIP, even their DID numbers come into our main office, when outgoing (using least cost routing) might go out any office.
How on earth is the phone company going to verify any of that?
Now.. If there was a way to dial a number after one of these calls, that would use the OTHER number information that the phone system uses (but never sends to the client device) that would be handy. I know where I used to work at a Uni, if someone called in a bomb threat, there was a number to call (like *##) that flagged all the data at the central office and preserved it. This is the same number info 911 uses. I couldn't find out what the number was, but the police could take the time, date, and number they dialed, and go to the phone company and get the information on that flagged call.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
The problem I see is not so much that fines are big enough, it is that the laws are not enforced and fines not applied. Not sure if this is a political problem or a resources problem. I remember hearing on CBC that in the 5 years that the laws had been in place, something like only a handful a charges amounting to basically nothing had been made, dispite thousands upon thousands of complaints being made. Why create a law if you have no intention of enforcing it?
Also there is a BIG gaping loophole, that basically says if you have ANY buisness dealings with a company they have free reign to call you day and night over anything they wish. Political parties of course are also exempt.
Except payphones are practically extinct now.
I know Bell Canada offers it as a service. For a monthy fee...
There is an app, however because it duplicates a network service offered by your providor it is banned from the AppStore.
If you have a jailbroken phone I have heard you can install it.
Difficutly is, that is just blocks numbers. Which when the phone company is duplious in the whole scheme (i.e. they make money on it also), it is about the equilivent of trying to filter spam email by address. All they have to do is just keep changing their phone numbers. It would of course help to cut down on the number anyway.
rtfa-troll points out below that anonymous calls are vital for tipsters and whistleblowers. Are you willing to sacrifice that very important check for the sake of not getting a robocall?
All you have to do to make an anonymous call is go to any dollar store and pay cash for one of those minute phones (less than $20), make your call, and give it to some homeless guy, throw it in a dumpster, or leave it in a bar or somewhere.
Free Martian Whores!
It sure would work! The US phone company that made the connection would pay the fine if the foreign one didn't. This would then cause a renegotiation of that contract between US-co and non-US-co that requires enforcement on their end or no further calls will be connected.
Like I said, the dead-end pays the fine. After that, the free market sorts it out.
even General Baxter's 4 year old knows this!
Then you hold the company hiring the contractor responsible for the robocalls.
If you find a robocaller, they tend to be promoting a product or service. If you can't find the robocaller, you may be able to find the business hiring them. If you do find the robocaller, you force them to divulge their customer. Either way, you penalize those who do the calls, and those who contract the calls.
People don't robocall for shits and giggles, they do it to sell something or to get a message out. You can often tell what that message or product is by simply listening to the pitch. If you can't immediately do so, you sign up for the service and trace the payments. If it is just a message, it's a little harder, but it can be done.
Now, I don't suggest signing up yourself for anything, but the FTC or some other entity with a budget could do that. They then get the money back by taking it out of the hide of the robocaller and their customer in fines.
It's not a design flaw for some systems, currently our org. has auto-calling (legitimate, not spam/telemarketing/political/etc.) and we don't have enough lines locally to dial 8000+ contacts at once (more if they have additional notification options set in their account) so we hire a company to do these for us and they spoof the caller-id so when the recipients get them so they 1. know who is calling them, 2. who to call back (they don't call back the notification company they call back the local number they are spoofing) they can spoof it since it does belong to our org. and we authorize it
Not being able to do this would be very expensive, so there are legitimate reasons to at least spoof caller-id if you own the number (i can't think of any reason to block the number from being recognized though)
Burn phones are not completely untraceable if you are willing to do some detective work. Also, the cost of enough burn phones to stay in business over time might make the prospect of having to use them insufficiently profitable.
Pay Phones? What magical city do you live in where there are still working pay phones, let alone the kind where people haven't been covering the handset with "fluids".
Don't forget the share-holders, otherwise they'll hide behind the we are legally required by the SEC to conduct the company on their behalf line to get out of it.
You're still adding a cost for someone to do something that is generally considered to be a good action. You're still letting the annoyance of a robocall put a burden on other positive or not-harmful activities.
Its like saying "This restaurant served undercooked roadkill so now we have to make the free soup kitchen across the street buy a license".
I have some time and inclination to help bring Card Services in contact with the legal system. I also know a lawyer who sues robocallers on contingency.
At all. Ever. No surveys, no non-profits, no political ads, no nothing.
Simplify the regulations so that there isn't anywhere even a whiff of a loophole, and suddenly enforcement will become easier as well.
> an innovative way to block illegal commercial robocall
But, the commercial ones aren't the ones I really want to block.
I mean, sure, you can go ahead and block them _also_. I'm not going to complain about that or anything.
The ones I really want blocked, though, are the political robocalls. In fact, I believe I would be willing to give portions of my personal anatomy to have those reliably blocked. Interesting portions.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> If people want to make confidential calls using the PSTN there are pay phones.
Have you looked for one lately? They're becoming rare....
Aunt Mildred already paid her carrier to allow her to place calls. All of the double dipping and pay backs and such are there mostly to make things too complex and expensive for small players to enter the market and screw up their tacit collusion.
I don't think that is the same thing at all. Setting Caller ID to a number that you have authorization to use is not obfuscation. In fact, in VOIP, that's the only way that you can do it period. Unless you want SIP registration on a per DID basis, or different hosts per DID.
It's not like every business now has a couple of T1 lines coming into the back and splitting off into 25,50,100, etc different distinct lines being plugged into a PBX.
VOIP does not work that way.
Prohibit any person or entity for transmitting misleading or inaccurate caller ID information with the intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain anything of value.
That's in the federal law. AFAIK, Mississippi is the only state with anti-spoofing laws, and even theirs, does not restrict Caller ID changes that are not misleading or inaccurate.
I would not worry about it. Any law that is going to survive constitutional challenges is going to be federal in nature. So far nothing in any proposed legislation I have seen would stop you from setting Caller ID to a number you have authorization to do so.
As long as you are not trying to be anonymous (blank Caller ID), or putting in deliberately fake phone numbers, you should be fine.
The double dipping can just make the costs 1/2 as much. I don't see any reason carriers should be required to perform a service i.e. connect an incoming call without being compensated. And the PSTN system of charges agrees with that. VOIP if it wants to use PSTN should play by PSTN rules.
As for small players. Anyone can buy SIP services and pay PSTN fees. Those fees are set by the FCC and regulated. Not anyone can build lines, that's a public utility, and that's why the line carriers, i.e. the people collecting those fees get them.
I'm not sure how your system even works out financially. If I can use a small carrier for all my outgoing calls and there is no charge for incoming calls, then why not just VOIP out PSTN in and get lines for free?
http://www.payphone-directory.org/
Where's the nearest pay phone? Haven't seen one in a decade.
You sure about that?
I have only been around this country for about 45 years. In that time though I have noticed something.
Laws that get passed SUCK! They are ineffective at doing what is on the title at best and almost always restrict the freedoms and abilities of those who are doing nothing wrong.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Connecting an incoming call IS compensated by the person the call is connecting to. They get billed every month for the service. If you can find an ILEC that will let you have incoming calls without paying for service, more power to you, but you'll be looking for a very long time.
I'll try to be clearer. The domestic US market is pretty clear, secure and sensible. It's the international one where the complexity arises. In the international market there are many reasons why there may be no A number. In fact, the original analogue telephone market, which still exists in many remote areas, simply did not support A numbers (A="calling party"; B="called party"). There's no reasonable way to exclude calls which lack the A number since that would cut off large parts of the phone network. Once you allow any calls without A numbers, any other call which can pretend to be one of those. This can be used as a bypass to almost any form of security.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
That's as easy as this OUTLAW THEM! Then the calls have to be made by a real person. Solve two issues, kill the calls and generate jobs. If robo callers are outlawed then collection and sales company's cant use them and more jobs are created. Maybe if the politicians had to hire and pay real people real money they wouldn't have so much to run negative ads.
Fairly sure.
I was very surprised myself. When I head, that Mississippi, of all places, passed a technology law I too was expecting a train wreck that would cripple businesses.
There is nothing at the federal or state level right now that would seem to preclude setting a Caller ID to a number that you own, or contractually represent.
People use phones to report drug dealers to the police; do you want this done to you when it turns out that the policeman is working for the cartel?
This argument seems bogus. If you hide the number, the police can't see it directly on their display, but I'm sure they could get it if they wanted to, by talking to the carriers, etc. It's just a bad idea to rely on a hidden number for anonymity in any case.
That wasn't my argument; I was simply replying to the statement from the original post that "I can't think of a single legitimate reason why a call should be anonymous." and arguing that there are situations where anonymity would be a good idea if it were possible.
You are completely right that, whilst the Indian call centre doing the bogus anti-virus aciton can't be traced, the policeman probably can track an informant back to whichever phone you used. For this reason I would not use a phone which could be connected to me to call to report about a Mexican drugs cartel. There are other safer ways.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
If they pass a law I am fairly sure they will fuck it up.
It will either be useless for the supposedly "Intended Purpose".
Or
It will fuck us over.
Of course....
It could do both. In fact most laws do.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
What you want already exists and may even be available to you
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
In that I understood that he wanted to impose number visibility on all business numbers. That doesn't work, however, because the business can just pretend to be a private subscriber in India in which case he doesn't have to show his number. You can't tell who he is so you can't do anything to punish him for going around the law. Unfortunately the business will be able to find someone in India willing to connect him to the phone network without verifying whether the registration is for private person or not.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
In the US, you can dial *57 right after receiving a harassing or threatening phone call. Do it three times, and THEN you can file a complaint with the phone company. I think they may charge $1 for each Call Trace, to prevent [anti-abuse-]abuse, so it costs the consumer $3 to even *start* to file a complaint. Of course, if there is no number, or just "OUT OF AREA", it doesn't help you identify any CID-spoofing company.
This sounds almost like how tor works.
Just make the location and personal information of the individuals responsible for the calls PUBLIC, and let the people take care of the problem...Simple, cheap and very effective.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I was thinking of something like your situation. There's multiple reasons why it would make sense, or downright be required that the caller-ID showing up on someone's phone is different than that of the caller itself. Hell, my job for example, when we call a trucking company or something, the main office line shows up on their caller ID, not my particular phone's individual number. The last thing I need is a pile of idiotic truck drivers latching onto my personal number because I helped them once, while the rest of the people here nap at their desks because they're not getting calls.
But on top of that, if you make it illegal to change your caller-ID, then only the criminals will change their caller-ID (to something that looks legitimate, instead of the usual 'unknown name, unknown number it usually shows now). Robocall spam will still exist, because THEY DON'T FOLLOW THE RULES! They don't CARE about the rules. THAT'S the problem. If you want this corrected, it absolutely HAS to be done such that the person making or receiving the call has absolutely zero say in it, otherwise the illegal calls will just... keep being illegal and going through any loophole whatsoever anyway.
Why not have it like a pseudo-whitelist. There's my initial whitelist of calls that can come through (anyone in my address book for example), and if you're not on the whitelist, it goes to a captcha-like system. Say... it asks 'what is the last digit of the number you called', or 'what's four plus three' or in a pseudo-garbled voice says a number and you have to punch it in on the phone. THEN, it gives you a 5 second window to say who you are, and why you're calling, then lets me listen to it. I can press 1 to accept your call, 2 to reject it, 3 to reject it and block all future calls from it, 4 to add to whitelist, and whatever else.
There. If you want to cold-call me, you've gotta go through some annoying shit, and then most likely not even get through. If you're a friend with a new number, well, it's 15 seconds of annoyance, once ever for the life of your phone number. Any robocall that doesn't use an actual human won't even get past the captcha (until of course they break the captcha... but perhaps allow everyone to design their own, so someone would have to specifically taylor-make their robocaller to get past your personal captcha).
The single only weak point I can see is robocalls that are spoofing the caller-ID of someone on your whitelist. So therefore, the whitelist has to be saved in your house, not at the cable company since that's just asking for someone to steal everyone's whitelists all at once. At least if everyone has their own in their own place, someone would have to be absolutely determined to robo-call you to get through all the checkpoints. And at that point, it's probably just easier to send a letter to your mailbox... which costs money, physical supplies, and time, which means absolutely no mass spammer will go that route.
Bah, really wish I could log in at work for the length of this post, since it'll likely just fall unread to the bottom of the page at 0 rating. Username Kabuthunk for what it's worth.
FTC talk to the DHS, FBI, NSA, IRS CIA, and TSA. Problem solved. Tax them. It works for the 99%.
So you want to eliminate the phone companies' common carrier status and establish a precedent that they're responsible for monitoring the content of communications transmitted over their network, determining whether they're legal or not, and blocking any communications which might be illegal?
Oh yeah, that couldn't possibly come back to bite consumers in the ass.
If the Department of Homeland Security can analyze single spoken "red flag" words in a call, then why the hell cant the carriers do some sort of checksum of the call data coming through their pipes? I'm not saying to "listen in" like a wiretap, just sample bits here and there to build a, "audio-spam" profile that could be matched against other calls since robocalls should have essentially identical voice pattern signatures. Now sure, just like spammers always keep trying to evolve to get around the filters, I'm sure determined robocallers would try tricks like pitch shifting the voice, altering silence durations between sentences, etc... but that seems like it cause them more work to alter the calls (as opposed to dial & press play) than it would to make new match patterns to filter the evasion tactics. Plus the more contorted the messages become, the less effective they would be to any receptive audience... again, think of it like spam - a small % of people might respond to an email offer to buy Viagra, but most of those same people are going to ignore an email offering V1.4g.r.A! because the contortions make the message so much less trustworthy...
;)
Also, as far as dealing with the robocallers who are caught, there should be massive fines AND jailtime just like email spammers. Give a large portion of the fines to the people who got called (to compensate them and promote reporting of robocalls) and also give the telecoms who gathered the data to make a prosecution a slice, so they have a real financial incentive to stop as many robocalls as possible and recoup some of the money lost on their audio-spam profiling operations.
And if the robocaller happens to be outside our jurisdiction, call in a drone strike and label them an enemy combatant
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
Step 1: Invent a time machine.
Step 2: Reprogram Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Step 3: Terminate the man or woman who invented robcalls.
If the call is going through, the phone company is billing it! That means there's a record.
Yes, but the record just says "call came in from India and lasted 10 minutes" They bill the Indian provider. The Indian provider just has a record which says "call came in from North Korea, lasted 10 minutes". North Korea doesn't give a damn.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Why not give the control to the people? Here's a list of rules I came up with:
1. Allowing spoofing of caller id/number doesn't seem like a good idea ever, but there was a point made above about needing it for all his cabbies numbers to go through a single outbound number, and that makes sense. Require registering that single number with the telecom company as one that allows masquerading, and then allow the registrant the ability to easily maintain a list of numbers that are allowed to place calls as the registered number. That means that there's a way to track that process and what legitimate numbers were piped through.
2. Is there a reason I'm not able to black list numbers from my mobile device? If I can buy a phone for my child that only allows outgoing and incoming calls from a white list, why can't I block a number on my expensive smart phone to never ring through and/or always go straight to voice mail?
3. Allow reporting of robocalls easily. Either by entering a code, or by pressing a button that does something similar.
The first thing that comes to my mind is fundamental changes in how ANI (routed caller data, basically) is handled -- making this information more available to end-users and making it more difficult to forge, hide or conceal. Lots of work there, perhaps a re-design of it all. Then, allowing consumers to effectively block incoming calls (analogous to a firewall) from offensive space, and make rules so that the telcos can't charge for that feature (oy!). How that would all be accomplished, I have no idea :-)
I run the phone system for a taxi company.
I need the ability to control the number that shows up on a caller ID system.
I do not want 1 of 165 numbers I have showing up on a customers phone when a calltaker calls them back of the callout system tells them their cab is at the location.
Our recognizable 800 is what I want to show up. So that people know who is calling. Not giving me control causes confusion of who is calling.
Taking away the power of responsible businesses is not the way to fix a problem with fuckwads.
Having a law that requires you to set your outbound CID so that it accurately conveys to the recipient who is calling does not conflict with what your needs in the slightest. Under such a law, setting your outbound CID to your recognizable 800 number is perfect. This would be a good thing, and would not harm or even inconvenience responsible businesses at all.
Who cares? Cell phones make this trivial for end-users to manage.
If they block their info, I block their call - 99% done-in-one.
For the rest, my phone only lets me know I have a call for numbers in my contacts list. If someone else legitimate wants to get in touch with me, they can leave a message.
Yes, Virginia, we've reached the point of whitelisting all of our means of contact. If I don't know you, I don't talk to you, period... Except, because my cell carrier makes a shitton for text messages (I don't pay, but someone does), I have no way whatsoever to block text messages. I can default the "ring" to totally silent, and override it on my contacts, but I can't outright block the damned things.
Best idea I've seen yet!
There are far too many inherent issues with the existing system that would prevent a technical solution. CID can be spoofed (and needs to be technically possible for multiple lines, ported numbers, 800 numbers, etc), and ANI is only known between immediate neighbor hops. One can dig back through and figure it out with the right level of access (eg. feds), so just make reporting the violations easier, and then target big offenders.
On a side note, I think we should throw in debt collectors. If they can't provide proof and contact information for both their company and the parent company, they should be investigated and either forced to comply or shut down. FWIW, there are some legitimate debt collections, but I believe the previous sentence will allow them to continue operating... and I think those rules are already in place. There should be an easier way to report those based only on the call.
rtfa-troll points out below that anonymous calls are vital for tipsters and whistleblowers.
Who would simply use a payphone. Err, sorry, my brain flashed back to 1990. They'd simply use a PAYG mobile phone. Either way, legitimate number, legitimate caller ID. Robocallers can't do that, because they're too hard to do in volume.
As for enforcement, that would be required of the phone companies. The phone company would be required not to put through any call that cannot be traced back to the source. Fake CID, falsified routing = fast busy, no ring. Easy peasy.
The problem is that most of the real difficult companies are hiding their numbers and identities.
At some point, these companies need to get the money. It should be possible to track them through the money. If I were to transfer my credit card account through them, then the credit card company would need some record of who they are. If they make an unauthorized charge to my credit card, somebody has to get the money.
It might be difficult to track down one fraudulent transaction, but in order for them to make any money out of it, they need hundreds or thousands of fraudulent transactions.
But what government are you thinking of that would pass a law that was clear and effective?
Because it is not a government I am familiar with.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Simply track down and summarily execute the owners of a couple of these "businesses". It won't be long before the rest decide there are better ways to fleece the public. During the French Revolution this tactic was called "pour encourager les autres" - to encourage the others... :-)
Actually, in most places, there aren't any more pay phones. Once ma bell was broken up, tiny start-ups began snatching up pay phone spots, charging ridiculous amounts for local calls, and then removing them once they were no longer profitable.
I understand that. But monthly service doesn't cover the cost of a constant connection. The more calls I get the more it is costing the LEC. There is no reason low call volume people should be subsidizing high call volume people.
Someone has to pay for connection costs. You are treating this like it is free.
That you, that is clear.
I think this doesn't present a problem .
Lets assume we have the carrier Y internationally originating calls from country X. Lets assume that Y's internal system has no ability to get calls. Lets assume that Y passes off to Z who passes off to Verizon USA, who passes it off to Verizon LEC who delivers via. PSTN. Verizon's knows they got the call from Z. They charge a fee. Say $.03 / to connect plus $.01 / min to Z. They don't accept the handoff from Z without having a way to get that fee. They also know a lot about where's Z's calls are coming from. Moreover they only accept calls from Y via. Z.
I'm not sure of the problem. Z needs to authenticate with Y, because otherwise they are going to owe Verizon a lot of money. Z ends up doing the enforcement on Y and in particular won't let anyone spoof Y.
http://www.payphone-directory.org/
Rocket-propelled grenades. Where's my money?
You're still adding a cost for someone to do something that is generally considered to be a good action.
How is that any different from what they'd do today? How do you think you'd make an "anonymous" call to, say, the FBI, if you had to do it right now?
Give that control to the phone company. Let them determine that phone-number X displays caller-ID Y. You should most certainly NOT have that highly-abuseable power. The system should be set up to work with legit customers with that issue.
our last pay phone was removed years ago.
No, I am explicitly NOT treating it as free, I am treating it as paid for.
Where do you expect the originating carrier gets the money? It comes from the caller's monthly fee.
The monthly fees cover the average cost of connections over the month with a margin to spare, otherwise they'd go broke.
Please God!
Look at my sig.
Depending on the phone company to do as little as possible is the key to success.
I need this.
Our depts change. Phones change depending because on a Friday night all desks are taken by calltakers. 800 number displayed.
The rest of the time some of those desks are used by Me, operations managers and account managers. Operations manager show the main local number.
Account manager show a direct dialing number that ring their phone.
I show a direct dialing number as well.
You really need to run a dynamic phone system to understand why you could never let the phone company handle this.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
ok, so we make it so that ifwe find out that company XX is breaking the law, to hid the money from company YY, than we rape company YY in the ass with a hot poker
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Throw acid in their faces and then cut off their penises. These operations must be run by men!
That does seem to be standard procedure. Look up anti-terror laws, for example.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
So, the solution is easy. Mandate a number to dial *666 maybe, after getting a call you didn't want. Mandate by law, that the telco then is obligated to give you $5 for the call. Done. This aligns the phone company with your interests and allows the free market to invent any solution that is necessary to solve the problem. My recommendation for the telco is for them to, 1, not allow unauthentiated calls to your number, 2, put in recip billing agreements with all parties they allow inbound connections from to push these charges onto the caller, 3, when someone racks up $10,000 in charges in a single day, suspend their service until they give you cold hard cash. If we worry about fraud and abuse, maybe we run the system virtually with play money for a month or two to work out the kinks. Maybe we allow each us citizen that has a phone in their name to rack up 5 calls a day with no charge. Marketers will learn over time, which numbers they can call, and which prefer not to get calls. We don't need laws, complexity, enforcement, courts, lists or hope; save for the call back number, and the $5. Want to call 1,000,000 people this month, go ahead, we don't mind, call.
This is exactly what does happen. Unfortunately it doesn't solve the problem because the fraud callers are willing to pay their VOIP provider (W) $.07 to put in a call without A number. They pay an intermediate provider who, for some reason, such as being from a neighbour country, has an agreement with Y to forward to Y. Y forwards the call without a number and/or with a fake number. Verizon get's it's cash. Verizon doesn't care (much).
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The Swiss government. Because their people can have specific referendums on almost any issue, they are always afraid of waking them up by doing something stupid.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
I don't understand why there's all this focus on finding the caller via technical means. Just listen to the calls and fine whoever is being advertised.
Scenario 1: Slashdotter:
RoboCaller: Hello, I would like to tell you about the fantastic new insurance policy from RiskAway Inc!
Listener: Dammit! Another robocaller. We need to have a carrier-administered party authentication system regulated by the FCC to ensure that all calls can be traced back to their origin.
Scenario 1: Regular guy:
RoboCaller: Hello, I would like to tell you about the fantastic new insurance policy from RiskAway Inc!
Listener: *Looks up RiskAway Inc in the whitepages*
I hate printers.
Follow the money is definitely part of the way to go. There's still a problem in that, being criminals, the fraud callers probably have no problem using someone else's bank account to transfer through. Either captured ones or stooges hired through those "make $1000 a day from home" spam adverts. Having policemen capable of signing up for those jobs and running honey pots with honeypot bank account details would also help.
All of this requires real effort and computer expertise on a per case basis. Right now it seems much easier to just demand "we need to be able to monitor everything". The fact that they did catch people related to the the recent Indian call centre scam shows that that is beginning to happen. I think it will take a generation for the police to catch up and of course they will never catch up fully.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Oh OK good. Then what I was suggesting is just raise that initial connection fee while dropping the per minute fee. I'm assuming most robocalls aren't worth much money.
In any case Z, the neighboring country which is at least semi-legitimate, can handle the enforcement and tell Y to drop W.
Person A does 3000 min / mo
Person B does 100 min / mo
If it is just initial fees they paid the same. Which means B is highly profitable and is subsidizing the losses on A.
A partial solution for VOIP service could be a spam like opt-in filter that blocks false area codes and prefixes - the phony first six digits. About half the calls I report have completely false numbers showing as CallerID. That seems pretty simple. And there are other standard ones like BizPromote and CardHolder Services that display and could be blocked. I recently installed Ooma and discontinued AT&T. Ooma premium has a community black list and the individual ability to black list, costs an extra $10 a month. I liked the free sample, will not consider expenses beyond basic until I've accumulated savings ($25/month) to recover the initial outlay.
Or the connections don't actually cost that much. A is profitable and B is even moreso. Keep in mind too that in spite of what accountants seem to think, accounting is expensive too. Actually counting the minutes A and B use and tracking it in the billing would cost more than their connection time did.
Meanwhile, A and B DO both pay a flat rate now even if you don't think it's fair and it still seems to more than cover the costs.
No legitimate reason... I return a call to a customer from my private phone, because i am not in the office. I do not want customers to have my private phone number to avoid being called outside office hours.
Just one example of a legitimate reason to hide my phone number.
Which can easily solved by the phone company by limiting the usage of caller id's to numbers that you actually own.
Mandate a phone feature that all carriers provide a dial code, say '**99', that a call recipient can dial during a robocall, that will forward the call immediately to an agent that can then track the call realtime, affording the agency a shot at catching the source. Then levy that very large fine mentioned earlier in these posts.
Find those responsible for making said robocalls and slaughter their children while they watch. That'll learn 'em.
Those costs are known. It is about $.007 / min lock stock and barrel to run a phone call, that includes things like line maintenance and excludes the 4-6% of the country that has the lowest population density, where fully loaded cost can be $.03 on up. That number is going up as the volumes of POTS calls are going down.
Accounting is more or less free, though variable billing and collections might not be.
But none of that justifies the double dipping in any way. Meanwhile, even the $0.007/min is deceptive exactly because it will go down as talk time goes up. The costs are divided between the static monthly costs to maintain the lines and the costs driven by actually making a phone call.
Since the copper isn't eroded by carrying a signal and the switches are all solid state, we can presume that the cost of actually connecting and maintaining a VC in the system is considerably less than $0.007/minute.
... there are pay phones. That system has worked fine for almost a century.
What's a pay phone?
For a LEC the cost of the actual phone call is the peak cost of the port connection (unless they are far away in which case line is the dominant cost) from their carrier. That's tens of thousands per month or more but it is inclusive of everything they sell.
For the carrier it is mostly the cost of calls, though again peak port is their main cost.
But you keep switching perspectives here. There are 4 entities:
a) The originator's LEC
b) The originator's carrier
c) The recipient's carrier
d) The recipient's LEC.
The recipient's LEC is charging the recipient's carrier for the call, What you are saying is that because the originator's LEC's gets fixed monthly bill the carrier's shouldn't worry about fees they are paying the recipient's LEC.
The recipient's LEC shouldn't be charging a termination fee, it got paid by the recipient. If it does not complete the call it is failing to provide the service it was already paid for. The LD carriers are completely irrelevant here, they get paid by the caller.
Well first off that's not the system we have. And I'm not talking just LD here, any LEC to LEC call works that way. So more or less outside your county will run into that setup. The carrier's cost are associated for port, that is volume of peak calling (or other high quality data) from or to most LEC. That's their cost. For a small percentage, low volume high distance LECs line is the big expense.
The carriers could care less how many subscribers they LEC has, they care how much data the LEC is asking them to push.
I know LEC to LEC has the same setup, you're the one muddying the waters with LD. That's why I said the carriers are irrelevant to the termination charges.
I am aware of where the costs are. Absolutely none of that makes the termination charge anything like proper.
I have tbebest solution but will not post here as I need the reward.
I run the phone system for a taxi company. I need the ability to control the number that shows up on a caller ID system. I do not want 1 of 165 numbers I have showing up on a customers phone when a calltaker calls them back of the callout system tells them their cab is at the location.
What bad does that do? Not trying to be snarky here, I just don't know what is compromised if your real number shows up
Our recognizable 800 is what I want to show up. So that people know who is calling. Not giving me control causes confusion of who is calling.
And if I get a call from an 800 number, it gets blocked, never to be seen again. If you can't take the trouble to identify yourself, I will not be troubled to communicate with you.
Taking away the power of responsible businesses is not the way to fix a problem with fuckwads.
Perhaps. But more and more people such as myself do not take calls from unidentified numbers. Right now I block 800 numbers with a couple keypresses. I'm going ot agitate for my provider to have a menu item that simply doesn't allow 800 numbers to reach me. Or at least a block forever button on the phone.
So you might have whatever advantage an 800 number has over your name showing up. You might also have the not so good problem of people not seeing your phone calls in the first place.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Because when my daughter's car breaks down and she has to borrow a phone she won't be able to get through to me.
Won't sombody PLEEEEEEEZE think of the children?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Trace back the callers and shoot the sumbitches. It'll only take a couple times for people to get the message.
"Probably the only solution is some kind of IVR [wikipedia.org] administering an audio CAPTCHA [wikipedia.org] before allowing a phone to ring."
That solution would work with a few tweaks.
So how do you give number displayed control to the phone company and the PBX at the same time?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
What part of
Our recognizable 800 is what I want to show up.
do you not understand?
Once you learn how a big boy phone system works post back with something that does not make you look stupid to others while making yourself feel smart.
Phone systems are designed to have control over displayed caller ID info because they must to reduce confusion.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
How about this one: every time you get a robocall, call your phone company, the FTC, and your senator to complain.
(How about this one: do whatever it is you're doing to block these calls from cellphones. I haven't got one on my cell in a couple of years.
How about this one: tell your phone company they need to block them or you'll switch. (Then do it.)
How about this one: "Can you call me back on my other phone?" Give them an FBI number.)
What part of
Our recognizable 800 is what I want to show up.
do you not understand?
I understand this. If an 800 number shows up on my caller ID, it does not get answered, it gets blocked . That somehow makes me stupid? It makes my evenings go a lot more smoothly.
Once you learn how a big boy phone system works post back with something that does not make you look stupid to others while making yourself feel smart.
Phone systems are designed to have control over displayed caller ID info because they must to reduce confusion.
I am perhaps stupid. But your 800 number that shows up on caller ID is competing with callers who try to tell me that my mortgage is in default, with awesome credit card deals, and with other scams. Maybe you are legitimate, but 800 series numbers are the scammers tool. If your taxi company cannot show their name on the caller ID, I can't be bothered to answer the phone. And if your only choice is an 800 number or the actual number, it isn't all that big boy of a system.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The U.S. government themselves have to threaten AND ENFORCE seriously hefty fines. Instead, currently, the donotcall.gov policy is: "DO NOT CALL complaints will be entered into a secure online database available to civil and criminal law enforcement agencies. While the FTC does not resolve individual consumer problems, your complaint will help the agency investigate the company, and could lead to law enforcement action."
My very recognizable 800 number calls people to inform them of the fact that a service they had called us for has arrived.
It does not get blocked.
But if you feel that ignoring an 800 number of the place you just called for service is cool, then by all means. Sit on your ass and be late for your flight.
I could care less.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
FWIW, I don't know what the GP meant by blocking, but I myself have an Asterisk rule that rejects incoming 800 numbers sending them to voicemail. A driver saying "I'm here" is going to get the message across just fine, especially as an actual message from a rejected number is relatively rare.
I agree you're doing the right thing, sending the recognizable number (and actually I'd myself likely to ignore an income call from a random number in my area code anyway); the problem we have is that too many telemarketers are of the opinion its OK to telemarket if you send a valid callback number, and send an 800 number as a result. So I block 'em. Actually, I'm pretty close right now to just implementing a whitelist with every unrecognized number going to voicemail.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Seems to me that Verizon already has the solution. You can't use a DNIS other than your BTN. If we know your BTN from caller ID you're done.
Shit, I meant ANI.