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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.
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
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.
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?
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?
We'd like to give you your money but failed to reach you on the phone to obtain your bankaccount details.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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?
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 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.
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.
It isn't effective because it isn't done in public. Back in the good old days you'd strap a crook to a rack and pull out his innards in the middle of a town square. Then you'd use a couple of horses and pull of his limbs, which you would display all around town. That scared the shit out of people. Nowadays all that you do is give a lad a couple of injections in front of maybe a dozen people. People can get "deterred" by reading the news of the event if they want. Waste of time if you ask me. If you want to deter crime, then the criminals-to-be need to hear the screaming.
*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();
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.
Speaking of spamming, why not just build something into the phone system for users to flag phone calls as robocalls. Whenever you get one, hang up, and dial *54 or some other code. That sends a message to the phone company that whoever called is a robocaller. After enough negative feedback against a particular source, that source is blocked. Sure systems can route their calls through other sources to make it look like they are coming from somewhere else, but that just puts some onus on whoever is providing these services to block robocalls on their own end. Provide them with the time and location of the call, and they should be able to track where it came from. Most robocalls probably come directly from the entity making the calls, or a contracted out to some other company who does the robocalls for them. Start blocking the calls, and they will stop doing it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Effective deterrent? That'll be why there are no more murders in US states with death penalty then. Wake up, deterrents don't work, people don't believe they will be caught.
Someone who would murder another human being (not talking about legitimate self-defense here) is either a cold-blooded killer or psychotic. There is something wrong with them that prevents them from considering things like the probability of getting caught, how wrong such an act would be, or that with modern forensics most murderers do in fact get caught. These are not people who think rationally and perform risk assessments prior to acting.
Compare to the sociopaths who tend to run corporations. They are all about their own self-interests. They do consider risk, in fact it's about the only thing that can alter their decision-making. A real law with teeth that poses a real threat to their income actually would make them think twice. Combine that with how unlikely it is that they would make a perfectly untracable phone call, plus the even lower likelihood of making a perfectly untracable financial transaction for whatever business they are doing, plus the number of complaints that would result from an automated system making tons of calls, and the likelihood of getting caught is very high.
Back on topic, I find not answering the phone works personally...
It's the same problem you find with spam. You and I may not talk to them and buy from them, but some moron out there will. Their costs are so low that they only need a very small rate of response to make money. Passing a law with teeth that targets a few centralized assholes is much easier than convincing every moron to put a little thought into how their actions affect others.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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!
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!
My favorite is a telemarketer tormenter on Asterisk....
http://leifmadsen.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/telemarketer-torture/
I based it off of their ideas... I transfer the call to an extension that is nothing but random clips of someone agreeing, saying "yeah", etc... but waits for a pause in audio to trigger the next random clip. Some telemarketers wasted an HOUR talking to my torture device.
I just wish I could do this with my cellphone.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Despite such an effective deterrent, it's funny how new criminals seemed to pop up anyway. The way you say it, it's almost like there was no crime back then.
It isn't effective because it isn't done in public. Back in the good old days you'd strap a crook to a rack and pull out his innards in the middle of a town square. Then you'd use a couple of horses and pull of his limbs, which you would display all around town. That scared the shit out of people. Nowadays all that you do is give a lad a couple of injections in front of maybe a dozen people. People can get "deterred" by reading the news of the event if they want. Waste of time if you ask me. If you want to deter crime, then the criminals-to-be need to hear the screaming.
One of the signature characteristics of criminals is that they're "special". Only Other People get caught. I'm too smart. So seeing Other People get executed in gross and painful ways does little to deter criminals, although it may make them think about using more extreme measures to avoid getting caught.
On the other hand, we're well aware of the desensitizing effects of repeated spectacles. When a Drawing and Quartering replaces Monster Truck Pulls as a place to take the kiddies, don't be surprised if the kiddies end up with rather brutish ideas of how to interact with other people.
While I would definitely enjoy seeing a few telemarketers being given an up close and personal exploration of their entrails, this kind of stuff isn't really about punishment, it's about revenge. Consider the quality of life in countries where revenge is the accepted means of dealing with injury. Even the so-called civilized ones. Where simply riding the bus can turn out to be an unexpected adventure.
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.
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();
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...
Isn't there already a national do-not-call list?
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.