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FTC Announces $50k In Prizes For Robocaller Trap Software
crazyhorse44 that the Federal Trade Commission announced this week that it is launching two new robocall contests challenging the public to develop a crowd-source honeypot and better analyze data from an existing honeypot. A honeypot is an information system that may be used by government, private and academic partners to lure and analyze robocalls. The challenges are part of the FTC's long-term multi-pronged effort to combat illegal robocallers and contestants of one of the challenges will compete for $25,000 in a top prize. As part of Robocalls: Humanity Strikes Back, the FTC is asking contestants to create a technical solution for consumers that will identify unwanted robocalls received on landlines or mobile phones, and block and forward those calls to a honeypot. A qualifying phase [launched Wednesday] and runs through June 15, 2015 at 10:00 p.m. ET; and a second and final phase concludes at DEF CON 23 on Aug. 9, 2015.
Picking winners and losers again.
Thanks Obama!
Have the phone companies implement a *666 system. After receiving a robocall the recipient hangs, then picks up and dials *666. The phone company keeps a count and reports numbers with some large number of *666 reports to drone death-squads.
That last bit might be a tad extreme...
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
The FTC's best solution is to investigate these robocalls with their own system of honeypots. order a product from the caller, set up a sting, and sentence a CEO and a few managers to some hard time in prison. but thats punishing success and in americas land of the fee and home of the paid, we're all about the invisible hand of the market.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Way ahead of you there. My spam call trap is called me. When I answer, suddenly I go from Wisconsin suburban turbo-white computer repair to solomente hablamos en espanol. Then when they apologize and transfer me to their spanish department, suddenly, I only speak english.
Something USEFUL!!!
(signed)
a grandmother...
The private caller feature is the biggest issue. Get rid of that and you can filter out spammer in a similar way Google filters spam. Once a number is detected, it goes on a global block list shared by all phones, similar to SpamHaus or something like that.
The problem with this is it can be easily abused. There needs to be a way to get off the list if incorrectly added.
I guess the do-not-call registry failed? I would guess because lack of enforcement.
My iPhone has been a honeypot for years.
the simplest solution is to just ban robocallers, telemarketing, and everything in that ilk.
but the ftc would rather waste money on a solution that will benefit exactly no one.
Ask unknown, non-whitelisted callers to press a random digit before their call will be allowed to ring through.
First off, fix Caller ID so people can't spoof their phone numbers. Even if people use the private number feature, the phone company knows who made the call. Secondly, monitor exchanges for both high outgoing volume and high incoming volume (and especially sequential dialing) to find potential robocallers and telemarketers. Problem solved.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
As you might guess:
By entering a Submission to this Contest, Contestant grants to the Sponsor, and any third parties acting on behalf of the Sponsor, a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free and worldwide license to use the Submission...
I hope your time and effort are worth the $25k first prize because that's about all you will *ever* get for it.
If your number is not in my contacts list, I don't even hear it. If it is not important enough to leave a voicemail of who you are and what number to call you back at, it is not important enough for me to care.
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
Robo-calls come from ever-changing numbers that eventually make it back into the pool. The result of a system like this will be that, like SPAM IP addresses, large swaths of numbers will forever be blacklisted even long after the robo-caller has moved on, forever useless to any other user.
Blacklisting in this way has been shown not to have any effect at all on SPAM / robo-callers, and only inconveniences everyone else.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The backbone providers of VoIP services that allow for CID spoofing, and more. Force an unchangable carrier identifier for every call, so when we report the robocallers, that carrier gets a tick for the FTC to investigate. Too many of these calls coming from Skype? Heavy fines or a termination of operating rights in the country until you deal with the problem. Too many coming from Level 3? Lose you voice/telecomms services until you put an end to this crap, or we can force you, at your expense, to hire people to actively hunt and terminate these accounts. Also, hefty fines since you are profiting off of this illegal activity and there's no way in hell that you're ignorant of it happening on your network.
Directly threaten the backbones, this shit will stop. Going after those committing the scams does nothing, they are far too numerous.
This already exists. It's called https://www.nomorobo.com
Why is it necessary to write software or invent something that already exists? It is caller ID. When we get any phone call from anyone, we look at the caller ID. In fact our phone ANNOUNCES the caller ID information. Anyone we do not recognize can only talk to the phone company’s computer, the one that runs voicemail. Most Robo callers do not leave any message and the few that do are easily erased. The legitimate calls that get routed to voicemail are then replied to in the appropriate manner.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
the FTC is asking contestants to create a technical solution for consumers that will identify unwanted robocalls
That's easy. All of them.
How do I collect my prize?
The penalty for making a billion illegal robocalls, according to the FTC's latest settlement offer is about $50k.
The way you stop robocalls is follow the money, arrest, seize assets and extend the criminality to the telecommunication providers who KNOW someone is making billions of phone calls and KNOW that you that some jack shit company nobody has ever heard from is legally making billions of phone calls.
The way you don't stop robocalls is letting telemarketers get away with it for years with impunity.
Throw the employees handling the answered calls in jail too. I've talked with some of them, they know what their are doing is illegal and don't care because the US government obviously doesn't care either.
And why does the phone company do this? Because the spammers pay them decent money, and most people don't realize that the phone company's involved, so they get mad at the spammers and not AT&T or Verizon.
So, the solution is to send a burly man with a wrench to the CEO's office and ask him politely to stop letting companies specify different caller ID numbers, if he would like his kneecaps to remain intact.
Big problem, easy solution: they make those calls because there is money to be made. Remove that incentive: make a law that all contracts due to robocalls do not require payment, the customer does not have to pay. The other side has to keep delivering for free as long as the contract.
Puhleeze.... With all the money they government takes in in legal settlements for violation of the do-not-call list, they can surely afford a few million dollars.
it's 2015 and we have no way of who is calling? what the fuck.
Very simple fix - when a call is placed, the phone co compares actual source number and displayed source number. If they don't match, the call doesn't go through. Since this hasn't been implemented, obviously the phone companies have no interest in stopping this illegal activity, and should be charged as accomplices when the call results in fraud, wire theft, or whatever else Rachel from Card Services cons some gullible senior citizen into.
genius. The FTC, nor any part of the US Government has any jurisdiction, and many of the countries they originate from are uncooperative at best, hostile at worst. There are "net neutrality" type rules imposed on phone companies that make it technically illegal for them to discriminate or block based on call origin. So, change the laws (or establish prescient that blocking robocalls does not violate such laws).
Until then, the best I've found is still Nomorobo. I've tried screening with Google Talk, blocking specific numbers (until I filled up the list my provider allows), etc, and I almost ignored Nomorobo because of what their web site looks like, but after further research I activated it on my home line (it's free) and a total of maybe 2-3 unwanted calls have gotten through since; a HUGE reduction. I also reported the non-blocked callers to them so neither I nor other users of the service should get those calls in the future.
This is the downfall of the phone company equivalent of "net neutrality" regulations. By their reading of the law they cannot legally block spam calls and have to treat all call the same way. If that's not the intent of the laws they need to be clarified, if it is, they need to change.
That might work for US-dialed POTS calls. Guess how many of the worst scammers and shady companies use that? Probably close to 0%.
International VoIP calls are the norm, sometimes relayed further. There is not necessarily integration of that level between the phone systems of many countries those in the US. The US systems may just have to take the other system's word for it on the call origin. In addition, even a US-based scammer could sign up for numerous VoIP services using faked information and up-front payments, use public Wi-Fi, buy pre-paid phones with cash, use stolen phones, hack into the systems of various "easy-target" companies and piggyback on their services, etc, etc.
Not to mention, doing what is suggested above would break most legitimate companies who want customer service calls to originate from their customer service number with their company name and not from the individual employees desk number and name.
Admittedly, I've argued for the same thing. Someone, somewhere is paying for a service, and if it's in the US and not using the shady (and likely not very well scaling) methods above, tracking them down should be fairly trivial. That would definitely help, but absolutely would NOT "fix" the problem completely. Not even close. You can't just "charge Nigeria Telecom (or whoever it may be) as an accomplice" unless you're planning to enforce it with drone strikes or something.
This isn't a completely proper solution, but it could be useful: An audio captcha could be handy here as part of a phone answering machine/program/filter app. "Six plus five equals what?" Don't press the right answer number on the telephone dial-pad, call hangs up or goes directly to voice mail. Or make them press a certain number sequence...just randomize the captcha questions and corresponding answer. Not only that, if a call comes through as "unknown caller" via caller ID, then it automatically gets dropped or goes directly to VM but make sure the auto answer message they get says something so these unknown callers get the message "Your call has been filtered since you're blocking caller ID - GOODBYE" click. These things are fairly trivial to program...some inexpensive Arduino type kit (or less powerful and less expensive) could be programmed to do this type of thing fairly easily.
Seriously.
$25k sounds like a lot of money to the young and indebted students. But it's not going to entice 98% of the people truly capable of solving this problem, and even fewer of the most capable. No one is going to put their career on hold for 3 months for a chance to win 3 months of their salary, and anyone who thinks that they can solve this in less than 3 months is probably not as good a software engineer as they think.
I think that this competition is less about fixing the problem than it is about appearing to be trying to fix the problem to those without the brain cells to see it.
Until they make it impossible (not illegal, I said IMPOSSIBLE) to spoof Caller ID, there is nothing that will make this work.