86.2 Million Phone Scam Calls Delivered Each Month In the US

An anonymous reader writes with a report from Help Net Security which assigns some numbers to the lucrative fraud-by-phone business in the U.S. -- and it's not just the most naive who are vulnerable. "Phone fraud continues to threaten enterprises across industries and borders, with the leading financial institutions' call centers exposed to more than $9 million to potential fraud each year," says the article. "Pindrop analyzed several million calls for threats, and found a 30 percent rise in enterprise attacks and more than 86.2 million attacks per month on U.S. consumers. Credit card issuers receive the highest rate of fraud attempts, with one in every 900 calls being fraudulent."

What's been your experience with fraudulent robocalls? I've been getting them on a near-daily basis -- fake credit card alerts, "computer support" malware-install attempts, and more -- for a few years now, which makes whitelisting seem attractive. ("Bridget from account services" has been robo-calling a lot lately, and each time she says it is my final notice.) My biggest worry is that the people behind these scams, like spammers, will hire copywriters who can fool many more people.

Comments

asterisk, if you are up for it.

[lophophore]

If you have the patience to set it up, and keep it running, Asterisk can help you.

I use it at home to throttle phone spam.

all toll-free go to an auto-attendant that is a robot-check.
all "number unavailable" goes to another robot-check.
obvious fake phone numbers go to the blacklist auto-attendant, an infinite loop, basically.
known phone spammers go to the blacklist auto-attendant
it's easy to add a number to the blacklist.

On a typical day, 3 to 5 calls get gobbled up by asterisk. The phone rings once, the caller id is read, and the caller is sent away. It is *wonderful*.

She who must be complied with does not want to go to what I consider the ultimate solution, the white list for immediate pass-through, and a robot check for all other calls.

The spam callers that do get through are verbally abused before their number is added to the blacklist.

Re:asterisk, if you are up for it.

[Anonymous Coward]

It borders on irresponsibility to recommend Asterisk to anyone who just wants to filter spam calls and be done with it. Asterisk is a dangerous weapon with which you can very easily shoot yourself in the foot. There are some rookie mistakes that allow anyone to use your VoIP account to call any number in the world, at horrendous costs to you. Unfortunately some of these rookie mistakes are perpetuated in Asterisk tutorials on the web, so even people who don't just blindly set it up with the sample configuration and tweak it from there are likely to end up with a many-digit phone bill eventually. At the very least only use accounts with Asterisk for which you can set a hard spending limit.

nomorobo.com

[zerofoo]

I'm going to keep posting this until everyone uses it. It's a free telephone filtering service. Just enable your simultaneous ring feature on your landline and nomorobo looks at every call that rings your phone. If the originating number is on their blocklist, they pickup the call.

It's a fantastic service.

Phone companies should embrace these filtering technologies. If it wasn't for nomorobo I would have gotten rid of my landline a long time ago.

nomorobo has worked great for me

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I use normorobo (https://www.nomorobo.com/). It's free for non-business use. I have my home phone (yes I still have a home phone - my current home security system requires it) going through it and I think it's great. It only works with VOIP or wireless phone numbers though, not true land lines. It works by having you activate a feature to ring a 2nd number when a call comes in. The 2nd number is No Mo Robo's phone number. Let your phone ring once and their database will pick up the call before the 2nd ring if they feel it's fraudulent. I'd say it stops more than 95% of the robo calls I get, which to me is fantastic. Maybe once or twice a month a robo call will get through, but that's all.

Just as a point of interest, I work with a guy whose ability to judge scams is broken beyond anything I've ever seen in a non-elderly person. His ability to differentiate between the bogus and the legit is just about non-existent. Remember in the past decade when a lot of us US people were getting cold calls from some company telling us we could buy an extended warranty for our cars that would pay for any and every repair we needed for years to come? He bought one. I realized that it's guys like him who keep the robo callers in business.