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FTC Gets 744 New Ideas On How To Hang Up On Robocallers
coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission today said the submission period for its Robocall Challenge had ended and it got 744 new ideas for ways to shut down the annoying automated callers. The FTC noted that the vast majority of telephone calls that deliver a prerecorded message trying to sell something to the recipient are illegal. The FTC regulates these calls under the Telemarketing Sales Rule and the Challenge was issued to developing technical or functional solutions and proofs of concepts that can block illegal robocalls which, despite the agency's best efforts, seem to be increasing."
Or maybe just actually investigate consumer complaints.
The problem is the law. There are so many loopholes in it you could drive a Mac truck through them. For example, the whole "if we did business with you before we can contact you again" part. There is no definition of "doing business" and it can include things like they sent you snail-mail spam. It also exempts the most annoying which are the political robocalls. In short, the law itself is contributing to the problem.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
There are so many loopholes in it you could drive a Mac truck through them.
Is Apple making wheeled vehicles now?
This works well for land lines. The calls stop. On my cell, it hasn't been much of a problem.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Somewhere along the line, it must be technically possible to identify that the number isn't coming from where it claims to be.
Most of the obvious fraudulent crap is all using fake caller IDs and they're calling another country.
If I could simply tell the phone company that I'm not willing to accept numbers which don't match their origin, that would kill off all of the crap I get. And I don't care about the legitimate ones, because by masking their real phone number they're no better than the scammers.
Unfortunately, these guys lobby hard enough that they make sure nobody could pass anything which cut into their business -- because they feel it's their legitimate right to call us.
It's gotten to the point where even the ones with legal exemptions like charities and political parties usually get an earful of profanity.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If there was a widely publicized shortcode you could text with a number to say has been spam calling you then people could do that, and set up an ENUM–style directory which has the RBL info for use by phone companies.
Also phone companies could text people with information about this shortcode the first time every month that a previously unknown number makes a call or sends a message (until they say STOP of course ;-))
Might work for mobile spam, at least.
The problem is the law. There are so many loopholes in it...
Actually, if you look in the summary, that's exactly not what the FTC found. All of the loopholes are legal ways for companies to call you that are still not desired by the recipient. But the majority of robocalls, it says, are illegal. Meaning they're not driving through loopholes, they're just ignoring the law.
I've arrived at the point where I hate my land line. I'd drop it in a second but my wife thinks it's important. None of our friends or family ever call the land line, it's always trolls. I dunno.
But I digress. I had a new one last night. My land line rings and I can't help myself, I need to see what asshole it is this time. I've been getting a lot of survey calls recently and I'm now openly hostile to them "get a real job, f-ck off". This time it's a robocall collecting names for a class action lawsuit against a medicine. "Have you ever taken whateveritscalled and experienced the following side effects? Blah Blah Blah. If so you are entitled to receive penies on the dollar while our bloodsucking ambulance chasers get rich"
So now we have lawsuit trolling to look forward to.
Why not get rid of robocalling altogether?
In what sense? Make it illegal entirely? As TFS says, they're focusing on people who are already robocalling illegally. Making it illegal probably won't stem that much.
Or are you suggesting somehow implementing a CAPTCHA in the telephone system?
Follow the money trail. Once you know what company is getting the money, find out who owns the company.
Once you find out who owns the company, you shoot them.
Problem solved.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I solve this problem by having asterisk prescreen all incoming calls. An IVR prompt requires you to press a combination of numbers before it actually rings any phones. A white and black list for caller ID data are used to bypass or simply play line disconnected tones and hang up.
It's the only reason I still have a POTS line. I never give out my cell.
The feds and ISP's are too busy busting kids for downloading movies in their dorm rooms.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Our submission is at: http://robocall.challenge.gov/submissions/13007-save-me-time
I found that most suggestions fell into the following buckets
*Things the Govt can do*
- FTC needs to ensure caller ID cant be spoofed
- FBI needs to hunt down the racketeers and bust them
- FTC needs to mandate (likely by fiat) that the telephone companies make the robocallers pay the full cost for the call
*Things you can do*
- Use an audio capcha system
- Provide a system to black list known and irritating callers
- A few people discussed how Google voice might solve the problem.
I did not expect to see that many people going through the submission process which tells me that the pain point is real.
However, I think people are mostly converging on how they intend to block the calls and the winner will get decided on how good your execution measures up to every one else.
What FTC finally does implement based on the contest is another matter.
Can't Congress just pass a law prohibiting this like they are doing with guns and murder?
Better yet, agree to the sale.
Then once they get you one the phone with the person who takes your credit card info, hang up. This will result in a cost to the call center and the agent who called you will get reprimanded for the failed conversion.
It also helps to never give out your cell # except to friends and family. I found that a lot of the businesses I was giving my phone number to were somehow passing it along to telemarketers (I could tell because sometimes I would vary my name slightly just to see).
I ditched my land line a few years ago, but even my cell number wasn't immune. I'd still get calls from "Rachel" and her friends, not to mention "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooo!!!! This is your captain speaking . . ."
Worse, by far were the debt collectors calling for people I'd never heard of -- or even not asking for anyone in particular, just wanting a return call to some number to "clear up a file on my desk". Then if I did call them back and tell them they had the wrong guy, sometimes they'd stop for a while -- at least till that junk debt collector resold the debt to another.
It wasn't all bad. One agency had a particularly entertaining tactic: each week or so a different person would leave a message. Since it was always the same voice actor, he had to use different names with appropriate accents for each persona. My favorite was fake Scotsman Alistair McTavish.
Curiously, it seems that while people who do owe money have certain rights when dealing with collections agencies, people who don't actually owe money don't seem to have quite the same level of protection from harassment. You'd think that harassing non-debtors would be a self-limiting thing, since you (presumably) couldn't collect anything from someone without an overdue debt, but they were oddly persistent.
I am not a crackpot.
I wouldn’t worry about the Apple Mac Truck being a death trap; after all they are all very well engineered devices.
It's the other things that worry me; such as add-ons like the "Standard fuel pump to iGas adapter", "sloped driveway parking adapter", and the fact that I could only get gas, wiper blades, air freshener and other iTruck items from the approved iTruckStore. But then again ... they really do make the best adapters; and the door is on the bottom!! *mind blown*
-- sent from my S3 --
what we need now is an overzealous federal prosecutor looking to make an name for themselves and perhaps perform some act of societal penance.
won't anybody help?
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Even better. Go along and get all the information for the company and make sure you tell them that you will only order by calling the rep back because of phishing attempts (after all, they called you). After you get all the info, report them to the Do Not Call list (donotcall.gov). It only takes 1 minute. I assure you that companies do get the $11,000 fines. I have seen two companies that I worked at get the fines. I implemented DNC checking at one of them after they got their first bill for $88,000 a couple months after the DNC list came out (after they ignored me when I told them about it originally).
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Better yet, agree to the sale.
Then once they get you one the phone with the person who takes your credit card info, hang up. This will result in a cost to the call center and the agent who called you will get reprimanded for the failed conversion.
I tried this. Unfortunately, the fact that I actually wanted to talk to somebody got me bumped to some sort of "possible target" list, where I get called probably 5 times as frequently now. Before starting your strategy, I got called maybe once every few weeks. It bumped up to once or twice a day after I actually talked to somebody. *sigh*
I find it interesting that there have been so many replies to this suggestion and all of them are ignoring it. Google Voice does indeed rock.
Why yes, I was so pleased when my ISP outsourced their email services and handed two years of archived email, and all future email, over to a company whose business is gathering and selling data about people. I will immediately switch my telephone service over to the same company, because perhaps there is something about me that they don't know yet.
You are too aggressive in getting identification from them. Just say "yes" and eventually they'll give you a way to contact them to pay (unless they put it on your phone bill). Give them a credit card and do a chargeback. Put it on your phone bill, but dispute it with your phone company (most will block 3rd party billing if you ask, not sure if they are required to). But get to that and you'll have as much information about them as they have on you. Then you can give it all to the FCC who claims to take this stuff seriously, and you'll never see anything else ever again. The FCC wants "someone" to do "something" about it, but doesn't want to actually do anything themselves, nor has the power to command anyone else to do anything useful.
Learn to love Alaska
For telemarketers, I make it a game of 'first person to hang up loses'. I try to keep them on the phone for as long as possible, never really committing to anything, asking for more information. Sometimes I ask for the exact information they know about me, such as my address, phone number, etc. Then I ask for that same information from them to "level the playing field". I often get a phone number from them, which I'll immediately call with my cell phone, to find out that it's a fake number. So, I call them out on it. It's all quite a lot of fun.
But I tell ya, now that it's a game and I'm winning, I actually look forward to telemarketer calls.
Robocalls, on the otherhand; I just hang up, there's no fun in that.
Never ever EVER give them a yes answer. That puts your phone number on a list they sell of valid targets. Made that mistake with "Rachel", trying to get real info from them for the FTC. I am still paying for it, even after they shut her down.
See, the mere fact that you answered the phone and pressed 1 makes your phone number itself valuable, at least in bulk with all the others. You can bet that "Rachel" has probably made more money selling lists of answered numbers than on the services being marketed.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Excellent. That means they are too busy to call me.
Everybody else do it too. You won't regret it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They would just claim it is a square with rounded corners.
The robocallers costs have already been driven down. That is why the issue exists. It isn't going to drive down their cost more since they are already using it.
And yes, you can block calls to your IP based phone just fine depending on the service you have.
http://www.google.com/googlevoice/whatsnew.html
http://www.youtube.com/googlevoice
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
It isn't going to drive down their cost more since they are already using it.
Yes it is going to drive down costs more.
There is no way for IP based call to my POTS home landline to avoid paying something somewhere to somebody.
POTS lines are not callable by VOIP or SIP phones without a gateway to POTS somewhere. That gateway needs a traceable origin. Nobody provides these for free, and even if they did, they are traceable, and the telephone company through which they first connect knows explicitly who they bill for these trunks.
Most people do not have IP based phones, and those that do receive a lot of junk calls. We have them at work, and the amount of crap we get on them is astounding.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yes, and I have turned that name & number in to the DNC web site until my fingers are bleeding, fat damned lot of good its done. Now the wife is answering them playing like she is hard of hearing and going into hillbilly vernacular as soon as a human comes on the line. They hang up quickly but they keep calling backIt just encourages the bastards.
We have one of those call centers here. They made the mistake of doing a local call campaign, so I wrote it all down, and had smoke coming out of both ears when I walked into the office. Some red headed bitchj came to the counter & claimed it wasn't them, so I quoted the callerid I had written down, then quoted the number in the phone book for them. She reached under the counter as if to retrieve a weapon but found herself looking at my carry piece faster. I said, slowly and quietly, once, that if that number ever showed up on my callerid again, that I did know where there was about 50 sticks of very old Nobels, and that I knew how to use it. She took me serious. Took my phone number and purged it from the database.
That was nearly 20 years ago.
I was serious in case anybody cares.
Anything that raises their CODB gets my approval. Point is, its my telephone, and I pay the bill for it, so I should have control over what its used for. That part simply is not open for discussion. But I think Card services has changed their name, we are now being harassed at least daily by an outfit called SERVERS TDM, at 1-213-344-4839. Make of that what you will. What we really need is the home address of the owner of the scam.
There's a large ecosystem that provides most of the pieces - call centers that accept calls, equipment and service providers for making calls, workers willing to listen to abuse for low pay, credit card companies that will pay merchants. Long distance telephone calls cost next to nothing even before VOIP made them cheaper, and the Caller ID system wasn't designed to prevent spoofing (in fact, spoofing is a feature, because it lets your office PBX output your phone number instead of the main number for the office, etc.) You can pretty much outsource the whole scam, and do the potentially-getting-arrested parts from outside the US.
And since "Cardholder Services" isn't already a fake scam business, there's no reason that another scammer can't take advantage of Rachel's reputation and run their own scam.
On their last few calls, I've been offering "Rachel"'s minions opportunity to make $50,000 for ratting out their boss to the FTC. I've gotten some really amusing profanity in return.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I did the same thing with a home alarm service company. I arranged for an install at the address of my local police department. They didn't call me back.