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Canada and USA Feds Unite To Fight Spammers and Telemarketers
Reader Freshly Exhumed writes: Telemarketers in Canada and the USA have essentially been bypassing each nation's do-not-call registry by basing their efforts from the other or from off-shore locations, while cross border spam remains rampant. Now the CRTC, Canada's telecom and broadcast regulator, has announced it signed a partnership agreement with the Federal Trade Commission of the United States to fight against spam and calls from pesky telemarketers. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) consists of all unsolicited telecommunications, unsolicited commercial email (spam), and other "illegal electronic threats" that cover anti-spam laws in the United States and Canada.
they will just move to india and restart their BS.
It's all for the show, folks.
Google, Yahoo, none of them care. Spam/abuse reports go into a black hole. You can block international sources and be no worse off, like 163.com, etc. I know this is counter-intuitive, but I get actual responses from Microsoft, and occasionally, some from European ISPs.
Until you can get accounts shut off, and make it vastly tougher, it's a game of whack-a-mole.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Spam is largely a solved problem. I see little spam. However, I am receiving increasing numbers of telemarketing calls. These calls used spoofed caller-id so that the source appears to be very local. Because they are spoofing caller-id, they don't care about do-not-call lists.
What we need is for telecom companies to block spoofed caller-id.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The good ones are smart and know how to bounce off vulnerable network connections so they're not traceable. I've started seeing an increase in this in our area as of late. Even at work! How do you mitigate that.
I'm on the do not call registry, have been since it came out and keep entering my number. I get spam calls all the time.
If I don't know the number, I don't answer. The ultimate white list. So until the cancerous lesions can spoof th enumbers of the people I do recognize, this method works pretty good.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Why the h*ll wasn't this done around the turn of the century? It's not like the two phone systems have any large incompatibilities or that they're too far from each other to make cooperation possible.
Also, time to shut down services that allow you to spoof phone numbers - and cut off access from countries that don't comply.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I keep forgetting to troll these people.
Spamming is still legal in the US. Even if the FTC thinks this is something they should control, they don't actually have any authority over unsolicited advertisements. It would take a new Constitutional Amendment to overturn court cases that allow most kinds of commercial speech to fall under free speech.
The first one blown to shit and who ever is near them will end it for good.
Wasting my time and money enforcing shit that dont work is retarded when there is a solution.
A very large missile right up an asshole one and done.
I got important messages today about my credit card account being closed and a balance I owe on a purchase I didn't make. Who is going to repeatedly alert me to these things if the spammers are shut down?
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(X) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
They didn't include Indian government authorities in this agreement.
Do they get access to the Predator Drones?
Based on my experience and what I've read from others, it's highly doubtful that most phone spam originates from legitimate businesses, particularly when they're posing as "credit card services," "windows tech support," "emergency veterinary hospital," "FBI," and so on. As long as it is essentially trivial to automate phishing attacks with VOIP replete with spoofed callerID, the system is broken. Posting as AC because the attacks have been escalating and my handle is poorly compartmentalized.
I won't vote for anyone that spam calls me. Any politician that thinks that they should have special rights is no different than a bigot.
We live under 'Cartel Socialism' now - getting closer to fascism as time goes by - the Demopulicans go about dividing the people against each-other and giving themselves special rights - I suppose at some point they will have special rights for your daughters as well...
They talk real purtty, don't they? It's a shame that they won't actually do anything substantial; the telecom companies will rise up their lobbyists in holy wrath if anyone tries to actually do something like stop number spoofing or anything.
The FTC is pitifully hopeless for a job like this. If we have to put up with the downsides of living in a militant surveillance state, why can't we at least enjoy the benefits of putting the NSA on the job? With the world's largest telecommunications surveillance system, they certainly know much more about spammers and telemarketers than the FTC does; and are probably more comfortable than the FTC is with forwarding information to whoever is handling the executions and extraordinary renditions today.
On the bright side, there's a recognition that there is a problem.
However, both the FTC and the CRTC are government agencies which exist to protect an industry from consumers; neither seems to know what to do when asked to protect consumers.
Cypress is now where many of the telemarketers have moved their operation to.
Also India and Majorca and the Philippines and Lesotho and Egypt and Namibia and Tunisia...basically any place overseas. Because they know damn well that the FCC isn't gonna spend their time hunting down a telemarketer from Greece or the Sultanate of Oman or Romania or whatever.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Why are you outing yourself like that?
They still make a pile of exceptions to the do not call list. Surveys can call, politicians can call, charities can call. Yet most Canadians who put themselves on the DNC list don't want any calls with surveys probably being some of the worst offenders.
When I say I don't want calls I really really don't want calls.
So here is how I would like it to work. I would like to sign up for two DNC call lists. One would be the usual list, but the other would be part of a service. If someone calls me and I don't like it for any reason and it doesn't matter why, then I would mark the call as annoying, spam, scam, crank, sales, etc. When enough people (not that many, maybe 5-10, note number as bad then anyone who subscribed to that service would then never get a call from that number. But if the banned numbers had some kind of consistency such as originating from a single call company, or even a country, then the system would start imposing more and more bans such as entire country bans. For instance, I don't think that Canada would get that many legitimate calls from Bangladesh as compared to Britain. Thus it wouldn't take that many bad calls originating in Bangladesh to have all subscribers suddenly have all calls from Bangladesh cut off. The same with things like some of the voice services that seem to allow the scammers to use them. Boom cut off.
I suspect that once any mostly legitimate telco or voice service was cut off that they would up their screening and cut off the worst offenders.
This way the offenders don't need to be tracked down in long complicated enforcement actions, just a few people being annoyed would end their calls.
The beauty of the service that I am describing is that it doesn't really matter why people are calling. They would get feedback as to their being annoying when they find themselves with a ban, maybe temporary at first, of many of the people who have subscribed. This would of course mostly be aimed at scammers and whatnot, but even the car dealership that tried cold calling everyone who entered a contest to win a car would suddenly find that they had just cut themselves off for a few months. Or bill collectors, or schools with automated messaging systems for parents, or anyone else who wrongly thought that their calls would be welcomed.
People should be given mod points to rate the calls they receive. The rating would be maintained by the various telcos, and the caller's rating would appear in a way that your phone could filter/ignore calls below some threshold, say from -1 to 5.
People who wish to spoof caller ID, or place anonymous calls, would always have a rating of zero.
People who consistently give good calls could receive a boost for spreading good karma.
Tax them out the wazoo! Then use some of those funds to catch and prosecute the other offenders. I do get it -- companies need to sell. And I need to know what is out there. Yet, the spam and telemarketing tools are way too abused. Rather there be an opt-IN option, from a centralized ad repository (like Google?!). I NEVER respond to ads - targeted or otherwise. Nor do I accept unsolicited calls. I ALWAYS search for what I need. I am going to start a site for folks to go see what they don't know what they need. Now, ALL ads and telemarketing can go away! Yeah, me!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
A recent change: When I empty the spam filter in my Yahoo email, it first shows a message, informing me that my spam box is empty. It then starts to display ads...
You know, kinda like spam!
No wonder Yahoo is in the shits.