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How One Small Company Blocked 15.1 Million Robocalls Last Year

Posted by Soulskill on from the napalm-solves-many-problems dept.

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.

13 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Click here! by Aboroth · · Score: 5, Funny

    Some regular guy got $25,000 from the government with one weird trick!

    1. Re:Click here! by Lord_Breetai · · Score: 5, Funny

      Some regular guy got $25,000 from the government with one weird trick!

      Robocallers hate him.

      --
      "You are only young once, but you can be immature forever." -www.animemusicvideos.org
  2. With a name like his by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Funny

    I sure hope his hack is free/open-source.

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:With a name like his by TrollstonButterbeans · · Score: 3, Informative

      His last name is "Foss" ("free and open source").

      Pretty great joke, I never would have noticed the name.

      --
      Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
    2. Re:With a name like his by stephanruby · · Score: 3, Informative

      I sure hope his hack is free/open-source.

      He's using Twilio. Twilio is not free for him (with the amount of phone traffic he's generating). Somebody has to pay for the service, whether the customer ultimately ends up paying for it, or the service is being monetized by advertisements, or a phone company decides to pay for the service as a value-added service that they pass to their own customers. The source code itself is nothing special. The idea itself isn't even new. This guy just happened to have entered a contest/hackathon sponsored by the FTC.

      For white listing phone calls, google voice (integrated with Sprint) is actually pretty good. If you're looking to combine both white listing and shared black listing at the same time, there are many other startups that are offering that kind of service as well. With cloud services like Twilio or Voxeo, it's fairly easy for just one developer, or a small startup, to get into the telephony business.

  3. Implement locally? by Alrescha · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Implement locally? by ThatsMyNick · · Score: 5, Insightful

      1) A close family member's cell phone battery dies, they try to call you from a pay phone or a friend's (or stranger's) cell phone.
      2) A friend (old friend if you wish) has changed their number, and wants to reach you.
      3) Someone who has you as their Emergency contact number had a mishap, and the emergency service wants to reach you..

    2. Re:Implement locally? by wvmarle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Who's ever going to listen to voice mail, knowing that the ten voice mail messages the system has waiting for you are recordings of a robocall, because thanks to the white list all robocalls are automatically sent to voicemail?

  4. Let's get this straight by Required+Snark · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The NSA has metadata (and most likely recordings) of most of the phone calls in the entire world. The FBI (and a bunch of other unnamed government agencies) can and do tap phones without court orders. Cell phones can be used to track individuals 24/7. And yet somehow between the FCC and all the phone companies no one can figure out who is making robocalls. Really?

    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?
    1. Re:Let's get this straight by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 4, Insightful

      NSA et.al. work in secret, outside the law. Formally they're covered by the law, but the problem is that this includes many secret laws giving them lots of leeway,

      I disagree. No U.S. law can supersedes the Constitution. Much of what they've done violates the fourth and eighth Amendments. The problem isn't simply secret laws, it's a lawless executive branch, a pandering legislative branch, and a cowardly judicial branch.

  5. Re:I don't get this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    As usual, the service is the maintenance of the black-/whitelists. You can DIY, but then you lack the economies of scale and it's not worth it.

  6. Block spoofing. Or charge for that privilege by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The telcos are dragging their feet and they are squarely to blame for the situation with robocalls and other unsolicited messages. They don't have to support the ability of the user to spoof. At the time the call comes into their POTS network, erase whatever spoofed header the call originator is supplying and replace it with the point-of-presence number. Once spoofing is stopped many other tools can be brought to bear to handle the situation.

    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
  7. FCC currently seeking comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.