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How One Small Company Blocked 15.1 Million Robocalls Last Year
TechCurmudgeon sends this excerpt from an article at Wired:
Aaron Foss won a $25,000 cash prize from the Federal Trade Commission for figuring out how eliminate all those annoying robocalls that dial into your phone from a world of sleazy marketers. ... Using a little telephone hackery, Foss found a way of blocking spammers while still allowing the emergency alert service and other legitimate entities to call in bulk. Basically, he re-routed all calls through a service that would check them against a whitelist of legitimate operations and a blacklist of spammers, and this little trick was so effective, he soon parlayed it into a modest business. Last year, his service, called Nomorobo, blocked 15.1 million robocalls.
He stole my idea! Curse you AQUASCUM!!!!!!
Some regular guy got $25,000 from the government with one weird trick!
I sure hope his hack is free/open-source.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Any reason not to just do this on your phone? e.g: my phone doesn't ring unless the caller is in the address book / contact list.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
...because that's what I just thought.
Newsflash! Government pays entrepreneur USD 25 k for coming up with a technological solution for a legislative problem!
So, yet one more party that gets to peek at all your phone traffic?
Sure, filtering robocalls is useful, but I do have questions about the way it is implemented.
Wait until they answer. Pretend you are from a competing company. Tell them you have everything they sell. Tell them you are a Franciscan and have taken an oath of poverty. Try to sell them something. Say yo want to buy it until right at the end when they want credit card information then say "I'll have to ask my doctor, here at the psychiatric hospital they take away all your personal belongings".
Why do you need to route calls through a seperate business just to do some basic black/whitelisting? That's a basic feature of anything that can forward or route calls anyway.
bickerdyke
Very humurous (--- now medical students studying bones will find this page in their searches)
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
What's actually going on is that phone companies love robocalls because they make money on them and the FCC doesn't give a damn and/or is too "pro-business" to do anything for consumers.
Just stop lying and pretending that this is a hard problem. It's bad enough that this crap goes on in the first place. Pretending that nothing can be done is adding insult to injury. STFU and admit that it happens on purpose and nothing will change because you like the status quo. Stop lying to us!
Why is Snark Required?
And free cable too!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Why not 20 digit number where wrong numbers all answer and charge the caller? That would fix telemarketing forever.
You could also move to civilized world where robocalls are forbidden.
In the UK we can set preferences with the telephone preference service . But another is to set up a premium rate line and rake in the money - although it might be polite to set up another regular number for family and friends.
Root cause of the problem seems to be, some large corporations with large phone banks want to spoof their number. They don't care if that ability is misused by shady operators peddling junk. They are totally wrong, it is better to pay a few cents more per call to get an account with the privilege to spoof the originating number. If they reduce the number of junk calls, their potential customers might actually answer their calls. Right now the junk call menace is so high most people are refusing answer any unknown number.
Just charge 1 cent per call to spoof the originating number, the junk call volume will go down by orders of magnitude.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The FCC does give a damn and is currently seeking comments http://www.fcc.gov/document/cgb-seeks-comment-call-blocking-letter-attorneys-general on telcos blocking robo calls.
The telcos tried blaming it on their status as common carriers ... so the FTC jumped in http://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/advocacy_documents/ftc-staff-comment-federal-communications-commission-public-notice-da-14-1700-regarding-issues/150127fcccomment.pdf with their legal opinion that common carriers are allowed to block robo calls.
This plague is 100% on the telcos wanting the money and 0% on government.
In fact, if you read the original filings from the telecoms, they specifically claim that it is the network neutrality obligations which come with common carrier status that tie their hands from blocking robo calls. They don't miss a trick in the fight for the Internet.
Why won't carriers block robocalls? Well, they have no incentive to do so because it's still significant income to them.
We should repurpose the NSA's vast resources for a new mission of tracking down and blocking robo callers.
Perhaps the threat of waterboarding and drone strikes by the CIA will stop them?
Great Ad /.!
Funny thing is I actually got a Robocall FROM NoRobocalls telling me how great they are...
Of course in our modern world they have plausible deniability as they can claim it was not them. And why would you believe an anonymous internet poster anyway?
What ever happen to the raspberry pi banana phone guy? http://lifehacker.com/5981063/block-telemarketers-and-robocalls-for-good-with-the-raspberry-pi-powered-banana-phone
I was looking forward to seeing that. I even bought the parts for it but haven't had time to build my own.
I have to give the guy credit for coming up with a quick way to score $25k (probably $15k after taxes) from the government, but there's a problem with this American Dream story: How does his service generate revenue to continue operating? Are you sure he's not just running market analytics on *all* of your calls (you know, all of your calls that are forwarded to the free service) and selling the information to direct marketing advertisers? Next thing you know, you've been Scroogled by some guy in his basement in Long Island.
An old adage comes to mind: If you get something free from a company and they don't have tangible products, then *you* are the product.
A blacklist call app that downloads daily a new blacklist number list. If a marketing call get's through, I can manually blacklist and it reports back, if 10 or more of this same number comes in from users, it's added to the global blacklist.
It would decimate the scumbag telemarketing industry within a year.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So I just don't answer the home phone any more unless I recognize the number.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
if someone goes out of their way to block robocallers, then they are likely not to be taken in by their schemes in the first place. now that the robocallers are becoming hidden from the skeptical, they can continue to harass the easy targets without as much notice.
PlanetVulkan.com
Simply require the carriers include incoming ANI info for all calls on the customers bill. They can change the CLID as much as they want but changing their ANI is quite a bit more complicated.
https://www.fsf.org/associate/support_freedom
How is this different than how Grand Central, now Google Voice, handles spam calls?
Where I live, the robocallers have started spoofing other legitimate numbers from the area. In a rural setting like mine, you start getting robocalls from your neighbors, and I've even seen them come in spoofed from my own number. Blacklists are useless as they are already poisoning the well.
Jump on your favorite search engine and find the list of invalid-but-pass-validation credit card numbers from darkcoding, make up some fake identities, and start keeping these people on the line as long as you possibly can. If each call takes them 5 minutes instead of most being immediately dumped, the profits will shrink.
I do? Can you call me back on my home phone, I'm on the car phone right now. My number is (gives number to ?)
Maybe YOU never will pick up when the caller is yourself," but some people are still naive enough to be fooled and pick it up. Of course after finding it to be some idiot scammer, and after the huge lecture she got from me, she'll never do it again. That leaves only how many million more folks to learn that lesson the hard way?
On a side note, I used to call myself fairly often, back when I had POTS, to get other people's attention in the house (poor man's intercom). I'd just call my own number, then hang up right away and the phone would ring. Of course at the time I don't think there was even such a thing as caller ID, or if there was it was new and cost extra.
I'd heard of Nomorobo multiple times, but after looking at the web site with it's yellow colors and what looked like a "but wait their's more" dude pushing it in a video I figured it was either an overpriced service or some kind of scam itself, and ignored it. Only when I heard positive results from a "real" person did I go look into it further and find that i twas both legitimate and free, and that my VoIP provider does offer simultaneous ring so setting it up was trivial. Since then (which was back in the election robocall season, which is the WORST) I've gotten maybe 3 calls that made it through, and I reported each of those callers and never got another call from those.
Before that I tried to use my service's built-in personal blacklist, but it was too limited and couldn't block enough numbers so it ended up being high-maintenance, then I tried screening via Google Voice, which wasn't quite as high maintenance, but more fragile and quirky. So far Nomorobo has been a huge improvement as the blacklist is shared. I've gotten legitimate calls from the school, or doctor's office reminders, or trash pick up delay notifications, etc, just fine, but when the idiot telemarketers, scammers, "surveys," recordings of pushy politicians, and pseudo-charities that try to guilt trip you into donating so they can use your donation to hire more professional telemarketers to harass even more people, my phone only rings about half and ring and then Nomorobo picks it up and tells them to shove off. I couldn't be happier, considering the price.
In USA, your 2) will be a fraud attempt.
I don't suppose the list is available?
call origin. Period. All calls should be identifiable and if you don't want to be identified AT LEAST by your calling phone number, DON'T MAKE A CALL.
The end.
But but, whisleblowers and people with abusive ex-boyfriends and stalkers... No, don't call them, you moron! And in the case of whistleblowers, you're screwed anyway. Given enough motivation and influence those calls CAN be traced regardless. They might trace to the number of a disposable mobile phone that was in a particular area at a particular time and through which particular vehicle license plates or particular people's faces passed around that time, but attempting not to send the correct number of origin doesn't protect anyone in such a case regardless and would only offer a false sense of security.
Apparently he has some business customers willing to pay for the service, and also certain (smaller) service providers apparently now pay him to offer the service to their customers.
"Consumers can use the service for free but businesses have to pay. For consumers, robocalls are just an annoyance. But for businesses, robocalls cost them a significant amount of resources (salaries, benefits, etc.). They are more than happy to pay for a service that reduces their costs."
Reference
I have looked at the Nomorobo website to see how it works, but what is not clear is what happens with all the call history? I understand that the "bad" calls get logged to improve the ability to block calls but the Nomorobo "Privacy Policy" is silent about what happens to all the data logged for the call attempts etc. Seems to me that this solution is another "Free" service to fix a problem that should not exist to begin with, and oh, by the way now there is yet another point of data collection on calls. Maybe no call "content", but the details of how many calls and from whom are now collected. And of course it's "Free" (wink).
Freedom is quite definitely NOT what makes a civilized society.
Civilization is completely dependent on cooperative, voluntary, curtailment of many freedoms in order to function.
People stop at red lights, don't operate unlicensed megawatt transceivers, can't hang a shingle out declaring themselves a physician without the proper credentials.
Do please reflect on how stupid it is to claim that freedom is what makes a civilized society, and/or start to question the source from which you are parroting that idea.
Your caller gets a message "dial 75 (random number) if you are not a robot, and you will be connected." It would get rid of most of them.