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

Know who to blame?

[gstoddart]

Want to know who to blame for this crap? The corporations who pushed to be able to spoof their caller ID -- so they could call us from foreign call centers.

I'm sure the technology exists or could be added to the phone system to basically say "if your caller ID is faked, we're not even accepting this".

I've started seeing the fake caller ID get to the point that it has the same area code and exchange as my own number ... once I apparently even called myself.

Essentially incoming calls have to all be treated as fraudulent, because they've been just created by a computer to conceal where it's actually coming from.

It has gotten to the point where if I don't know the number by sight, and then the persons voice, I pretty much tell all callers to piss off and go away.

Sometimes the legitimate callers get all butt hurt, but I simply don't care ... because 95% or more of incoming calls on my phone are 100% fraudulent, and involve some clown in an overseas call center trying to scam me.

And the problem is that it is probably the same exact call center that legitimate companies use, or one which has decided scamming is more lucrative than tech support.

But between the Microsoft Service Provider, the people who want to clean my ducts, the automated call telling me I've won a free cruise, the automated call telling me I need to respond about lowering my credit card rate ... incoming callers find a hostile person who assumes they're lying to me.

Sometimes I yell at them, sometimes I mess with them, but most of the time I just hang up immediately or leave it to the answering machine.

It's literally not possible to trust incoming phone calls. So why bother even answering them?

Re:Know who to blame?

[swb]

Dude, you are clueless on multiple levels. First, "spoofing" caller ID is normal - the ability to tell the phone company (this is a *high* level overview) what your number is when making outbound calls when using a non-POTS line. Due to the way the phone network works this can't easily be changed. And companies have done this for decades, it's not something new. Big multi-line companies typically want outbound calls to come from a single switchboard number.

I think there's two kinds of "spoofing" -- legitimate spoofing, where you own the DID number that you send out outbound trunks (eg, main phone number, etc) and bullshit spoofing, where at best you're obfuscating the source of your calls (eg, some hired call center that sends their client's DID info as caller ID) or worse, deliberately sending false or nonsense caller ID information to hide and obscure your call origin.

Telecoms providers could filter client outbound trunks and drop calls with bogus calling party information, where bogus is defined as something like "you don't control that DID and have no written permission to use it". The FCC could require telecoms providers to do this very thing.

I'm sure it would be messy and complicated to get setup, but so many calls are handled by the major carriers (ATT, Verizon, CenturyLink, etc) that you have a natural choke point that limits the ability of rogue providers to hand off calls.

Re:Ring ring

[BenJeremy]

First psot

Wow, talk about missing an opportunity...

You should have used:

First POTS

My experience with robocalls

[jeffmflanagan]

I never receive them, because if you're not in my address book, I'm not picking up the phone.