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BT Announces Free Service To Screen Nuisance Callers (thestack.com)

Posted by timothy on from the personally-answered-by-john-cleese-too dept.

An anonymous reader writes: British telco BT is launching a free landline service for UK customers which promises to divert millions of unwanted calls. A dedicated team at BT will monitor calls made to UK numbers, across its network of over 10 million domestic landlines, to identify suspicious patterns, which could help to filter out nuisance callers. The flagged numbers will then be directed to a junk voicemail box. The company has estimated that the voicemail 'net' will catch up to 25 million cold calls every week. It explained that to achieve this success rate, it would be deploying enormous amounts of compute power to monitor and analyse large amounts of data in real-time.

15 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. BT by ledow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    30 years too late, could have been done at ANY point, but they are no longer making money from such calls so they promote a service AGAINST them to increase their product value.

    Fuck off.

    We got rid of landlines because of this shit.

    Mobiles all have caller blocking.

    Everything past that is your fucking responsibility anyway, to trace these "withheld numbers" and shut them down. But you have ZERO interest in doing so.

    Why is it even possible to fake Caller-ID anyway? You are charging a provider to make the call, you know exactly who it's come from. Even if I can't SEE the number, I should be able to block the fucker with one button. And should have always been able to. And you should spot the pattern in who gets blocked and chuck them off your service.

    You didn't care when it mattered. Now it doesn't matter. Nobody really "needs" a landline any more. Nobody even needs a mobile number. They certainly no longer need to have one they advertise. You can buy front-numbers that just forward to your phone for a pittance. And that's exactly the problem you introduced and refused to combat. And that's exactly why nobody gets my mobile phone number, or my landline.

    And yet, somehow, I still get occasional junk calls. There's only a few sources of such information. My providers and/or the numbering authorities. Who should be combating this shit all the time for me anyway.

    The day my phone rings with too much spam, I enable the "reject calls from unknown callers" options on my phone, or people will only get my WhatsApp or Skype and unless you're on my contact list, then fuck you.

    What stopped you doing this sort of thing even before CallerID existed? Nothing.

    1. Re:BT by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So how do you block 'number withheld' calls on your mobile?

      You don't answer them. If it's important, they'll leave a message.

      --
      Summation 2
    2. Re:BT by Richard_at_work · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The problem with the way the international telecommunications systems are set up is that no, you dont know where the call originates from, just that a network next to yours is handing it to you - its essentially one massive Tor network where the upstream routing information passed around cannot be trusted. You bill the person than handed it to you, they bill the person that handed it to them and so on.

      This is why Indian call centres can buy blocks of a million phone numbers, hit UK targets all week and not be penalised for it.

      BT cant solve this on their own, because that would require them to be able to force other telecoms companies to solve their own problems with the setup or simply reject 99% of all international calls made.

    3. Re:BT by stooo · · Score: 2

      NSA is launching a free landline service for worldwide Telco customers which promises to analyze millions of unwanted calls. A dedicated team at NSA will monitor calls made to all numbers, to identify suspicious patterns, which could help to filter out nuisance callers and terrorists....
      It explained that to achieve this success rate, it would be deploying enormous amounts of compute power to monitor and analyse large amounts of data in real-time.

      --
      aaaaaaa
    4. Re:BT by Richard_at_work · · Score: 2

      Not really, because all that happens then is Indian telecoms companies hand off to South Africa, who hands off to BT. No change then, another origin to deal with.

      Same issue with VOIP, they dont have to terminate in the UK, they can terminate anywhere in the world.

    5. Re:BT by ledow · · Score: 2

      And why can you not list with BT what your DID's can be, and what your internal numbers are? So when your DID is linked to crank calls, they can shut you down or notify you? In fact, the link is ALREADY there. BT know exactly what number you're claiming to be when you ring out, and which one you actually rang from.

      But why should I have to deal with people able to fake YOUR DID (and thus your company's reputation) or a random or invalid DID, without any traceability?

      Why should I only have that DID number as the ID I can block on? Why should someone be able to send me text from a number that doesn't exist? Or even, in some cases, from a NAME that doesn't exist (and which, thus, you cannot respond to or block), as I've seen on UK mobile phone networks?

      I run a school telephony network, I understand DID usage. What I don't get is why that's not restricted (i.e. CANNOT BE FAKED), so that only YOUR numbers can advertise your DID. Wouldn't this stop me making crank calls to your customers and claiming to come from your 0800 number? Because there is ZERO protection for that at the moment, and never has been.

      And that's all moot if you can't block that number. Number blocking has always been a pay-for service with BT historically, unless you wanted to block all numbers (then why have a phone?). It wasn't cheap either.

      And try and report a crank call. Unless it's criminal, BT will NOT go through their records and find the originating lines. They will ask to intercept your line and see if they can't capture a repeat call live, rather than look in their history. Only when the police are involved will they discover the ACTUAL source of messages or phone calls. The user is helpless here.

      (P.S. I once had a bank send 400 fax calls an hour to my parent's residential phone - that had no fax. We reported it to BT. There was no CallerID. Now they KNOW who sent those calls. They have records they could investigate, but they WILL NOT. Until you make a criminal complaint. What they did was - when we could finally get through to them - intercept the line for over an hour, meaning we were without service, and waited for the next fax - but by this time they'd died down.

      It turned out to be a bank internal system on auto-send without retry-protection with a mistyped phone number. But it took DAYS to resolve. DAYS of the phone ringing uncontrollably throughout working hours all day long. You can say "You could have put a fax machine on it", but this was my parent's line, we had no fax machine, and this is BT's job to do something about. They couldn't because they do not access originator information, the CallerID was withheld, and they cannot block a number without it, unless there's a criminal complaint. And this wasn't last century.)

      DID spoofing is fine. My employer does it. But there's NOTHING to say who can or can't spoof, or what they can spoof, or anything protecting users from malicious spoofing.

      I should not be able to get a text message from "801" or "Insurance" (literally, not a contact name, but the originating name of the text), or a phone call from a number that I've blocked (even if they later try to call with number withheld, so employee at company who gets pissed off and wants to spam me can't just use the same line after dialling the number to withhold the CallerID), or a phone call from several thousand spoofed or unregistered numbers over extended periods of time (this should trigger so many alerts, that BT just shut the line down like an ISP would shut down an email spammer).

      None of what I'm suggesting stops your employer advertising their main switchboard number for all outgoing calls.

    6. Re:BT by Fieryphoenix · · Score: 2

      The reason it is possible to spoof caller id is so that you can receive return calls to an incoming number when the outgoing is not that same number. I use it in my case because I have a Google Voice number, which has been my number, originally a landline, since the late 90s. I never have to tell friends what my new number is each time I change phone companies. With spoofing, they see that Google Voice number as the source of the call, and correctly call back "my" number instead of the number du jour.

    7. Re:BT by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 2
      Wherever they terminate, the telco can be located and "advised" that they will be unplugged if they don't stop. BT IS the UK, and cutting off anyone will cause enough pain for them to pass the message back up the chain.

      I used to work for a company that terminated VoIP calls in several countries. If anyone used us for cold calling, they could have been unplugged in minutes. It would not have taken hours. It can definitely be done if the company wants to do it.

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    8. Re:BT by Richard_at_work · · Score: 2

      You don't seem to get that this is as much a game of "wack-a-mole" as is killing off The Pirate Bay. An Indian call centre doesn't give a toss that its causing third parties problems, so long as they have their leased line then they can gain access to the global telecoms network anywhere in the world - they can make millions of calls a week, so if it takes them a day to find a new route then they don't particularly give a damn in the mean time, its the cost of doing business to them. No one is going to take their leased line off them...

      Even BT doesn't vet companies that connect directly to its network, so its not going to be able to force anyone else to vet who connects to theirs - and the point I am raising is that most telecoms networks cannot vet who connects to them. One call centre can spread its call load out over dozens of intermediaries, all coming into the UK from different foreign telecoms networks. You simply cannot resolve that problem.

  2. But who was responsible in the first place? by Harold+Halloway · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well that's really big of you, BT, considering it was you that pretty much single-handedly enabled the whole spam/unwanted/nuisance calling industry.

  3. Side effects by tomalpha · · Score: 2

    "It explained that to achieve this success rate, it would be deploying enormous amounts of compute power to monitor and analyse large amounts of data in real-time."

    How is this different to what the NSA, GCHQ et al were (or are) doing? It's ostensibly for a different purpose, but presumably would have to work on a pretty similar dataset. That is to say: watching who's calling who, in realtime. And do they collect everyone's data for analysis, but only "use" it if you opt-in to the service, or do they only analyse your calling patterns if you opt-in?

  4. Too late and too stupid. by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    let people report a spam call number easily. once you get 15 different people reporting the same number block it system wide. Honestly it will take down the whole spam calling industry within 30 days.

    But knowing how telcos work, they will monetize it and sell to spammers a service to have their number forever whitelisted.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    1. Re:Too late and too stupid. by sumdumass · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's not exactly that simple. The caller ID can be programmed to send any number on the caller ID. It gets even more complicated with VoIP where the gateway to the telecom can be used by hundreds or more of different users . The number sent may be an active number for another user not associated with the spam calls.

    2. Re:Too late and too stupid. by sumdumass · · Score: 2

      The caller ID is typically only added by the phone companies on pots lines. Digital lines are programmed by the source. It's how you can have 50 lines behind a PBX display different phone numbers with the majority displaying the company main number. VoIP functions largely the same because the gateway uses the same principle except the VoIPmodem or computer transmits account id numbers as well.

      Yes, the phone companies know who to charge because the pri id number is associated with the calls but that is not passed on to the receiver. That also qualifies as your "paying enough money to be peering " comment except for large bundles of lines it is actually cheaper.

      Just because your mom got charged for all those 1-900 sex calls doesn't mean you know what you're talking about.

  5. Ok, what's the real agenda here? by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Because this is maybe the most stupid, most expensive and most error-prone way to set this up.

    You know what's easier, faster and cheaper? Give people the ability to complain. Since you're monitoring already anyway who calls whom and at what time (oops, hope I didn't give away a military secret here...), let people record the time they were called and report this. If enough people complain about some nuisance, block them.

    Unless said nuisance is, of course, not just some kid making phony calls but a company peddling shit, then you should give them the option to give you a cut of their profits to stay in business, making the whole shit moot.

    As usual.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.