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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.
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.
telling my mom that he needed to use logmein to help her, and if she hung up, disconnected or closed the computer that the Russian hackers were already in there and would destroy her computer.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
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.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
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?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
A large number of the people manning the phones for these boiler rooms have criminal records...most have done jail time. I've found that this provides me with no small amount of entertainment whenever these people come calling. Think of it as a combination of Jedi mind tricks and suddenly seeming to know more about them than they know about you. Sometimes it flops, but a lot of the time you can almost hear their eyes go wide on the other end of the line. Priceless. Even better, since the drones making the calls have no real ability to take people out of their database, you may end up recognizing the same people by their voice on subsequent calls...and this allows you to keep building on your past "conversations." Imagine a telemarketer dreading calling you :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I've advocated (including to my senator, Warner (D) of Virginia, a former telecom executive) that the FCC should require changes to make CallerID Verified. By this I mean that the Telco/switch has to verify the CallerID (e.g. using payment data?), and mark the CallerID information as either verified or suspect. This would not solve the problem, but would, I believe, help both consumers and Law Enforcement.
As long as spammers can forge CallerID, we won't be able to depend on CallerID to screen calls, and DoNotCall registry violations will be much harder to enforce. "Brigitte from Credit Card Services" calls usually have a City/State CallerID value, rather than the name of an individual or organization. But I get some legitimate calls (e.g. my dog's oncologist) that also show up as City/State. (I know to answer calls from Vienna, VA - at least until the Spammers start forging local CallerID values...) My former employer removed its telephone number from the CallerID information, I know if I get a call from "732" (New Jersey area code) that it's most likely one of my former co-workers.
But recently I've been getting Spam calls on my cell, usually (but not always) the CallerID says "unknown". Until this month, such calls were limited to the Land Line (and this is the single strongest argument for ditching the land line.)
I have a simple but very effective screener for robo calls, built around the ObiHai 110. I connect the device between my incoming telephone line and my telephone. I then re-program it to send incoming calls to the Automatic Attendant, which I program to challenge the caller to press a key on his telephone keypad. If he doesn't he is a robo caller and doesn't get through. My phone doesn't even ring for robo calls.
Someday the robo callers will become intelligent enough to press a key when challenged, but until then my defense is adequate.
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.
My biggest worry is that the people behind these scams, like spammers, will hire copywriters who can fool many more people.
Nope. Same as with spam. They need gullible idiots. If the initial pitch is more believable, they'l just waste more time with people of normal intelligence, who might get through a few minutes' of a pitch, but will ultimately balk at giving out all their personal info to a cold caller about their supposed account, or at rushing out to buy a Green Dot card to pay the IRS right now, etc.
First psot
Wow, talk about missing an opportunity...
You should have used:
First POTS
I've received the "Your computer is reporting problems indicating that it is at risk" phone call once, but I was in line at a register, and couldn't try to have any fun with the guy. Years ago I received several of the "Our records indicate your vehicle's warranty has expired" calls. Which technically was true... since my car was over 10 years old and I was the 3rd owner of the car. On the 1st call, I asked how they got my number and they hung up. On the second call, I asked to be removed from their call list, and they hung up. On the 3rd call, I said I was going to report them to the FCC, and they hung up. I've received several calls from people "with google" trying to help us increase our presence online. They seem shocked that I don't want to do that. I've also received several of the toner cartridge scam calls for printers. I don't understand how they think it will work when they call acting like they know you, '"remind you" of a phone conversation you had a year ago, and then try to sell you Ink cartridges for a laser printer for a brand you don't even own. (at 1st I thought he was trying to sell me a printer). Honestly I think 90% of the sales calls you receive at a business are some type of fraud.
The fact is that if they were aggressively and rigorously prosecuted, this wouldn't be an attractive business. As it is, they're assuming that they'll get away with it.
Personally, I invite anyone looking for a vigilante-cause to hunt down and kill some people, this would be a great subject. It doesn't have to be the LAW that punished these guys, to de-incentivize the whole industry.
I mean hell, by RIAA-caliber math, aside from their actual fraudulent scams, 86 million scam calls x 12 months x say 3 minutes per call average (to count the time it takes to get up out of my chair) = nearly 6000 person-years consumed annually just in time wasted. Assuming a median income of 26k per capita, this is nearly $160 million annually wasted.
-Styopa
Use lots and lots of keywords.
When the scammer calls, no matter what the person says at the other end of the line, you say "What did you say? You want to blow up an airliner and kill the president? You're a member of Al-Qeda and ISIS?"
I guarantee that call will go dead and they won't ever call you again.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I never receive them, because if you're not in my address book, I'm not picking up the phone.
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.
The plain old telephone system evolved in an earlier era, security by obscurity was the norm. There were using simple whistling tones added/removed to regular conversation for data communication between exchanges. All analog. Blind phone phreaks were stealing just long distance minutes from the phone companies. But now the phone companies feel they have no liability to detect spoofed caller id. If some courts hold the phone companies liable for transmitting false phone numbers, using some lawyerly language like "aiding and abetting" "knowingly providing false information" "negligent" etc, then there could be some relief.
Phone companies most definitely know which of their resources are being employed to make calls with. They BILL for those resources and each and every call gets logged. Those logs are also required to be available for (allegedly) authorized law enforcement agencies and they're one reason why the old movie trope of "keep them on the line while we trace this call" is bogus. If the connection was made at all, no matter how briefly, there's a record constructed by automated equipment.
Naturally, if the true origin of the call is coming in from some other source, the phone company can only trust whatever ID came in from that source, but they definitely know where the call itself came from and that means that law enforcement can then track back until such point where they cannot gain any sort of co-operation. Even spoofing via Internet phone can be tracked if you're determined enough.
"I was just following orders" rarely works as a defense.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.