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FCC Calls On Phone Companies To Offer Free Robocall Blocking (fastcompany.com)
The FCC chairman on Friday pressed major U.S. phone companies to take immediate steps to develop technology that blocks unwanted automated calls available to consumers at no charge. Chairman Tom Wheeler, in letters to CEOs of Verizon Communications, AT&T, Sprint, US Cellular, Level 3 Communications, Frontier Communications, Bandwidth.com, and T-Mobile, said that so-called robocalls, automated pre-recorded telephone calls often from telemarketers or scam artists continue because the industry isn't taking any action. Wheeler demands answers with "concrete, actionable solutions to address these issues" within 30 days. A report on FastCompany adds: Wheeler also urged carriers to create a list of institutions like government agencies and banks that are commonly impersonated by scammers and filter out overseas callers impersonating them through falsified caller ID data
Just a non-fucking-spoofable caller ID would go a long way to fixing this, the assholes couldn't hide behind spoofed numbers and would be thus made easily reportable to authorities.
As soon as I heard that caller ID was FUCKING USER MODIFIABLE, I realized it was an absolutely worthless "feature".
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
There's already a free solution for land lines: nomorobo.com. Been using it for about 6 months. Works great!!!
And they still profit. Why? Because robocalls like this help push people into deciding they need unlimited calling in the first place, thereby spurring them to spend more. And because not everybody has unlimited calling, and a large portion of their userbase has their minutes eaten up by this. Whether you personally spend more because of it changes that not one lick.
Nomorobo actually works pretty well and it is already free on land lines. It has totally stopped Cardholder Services from call me. That spammer was driving me crazy having called me over 300 times. After about a hundred calls I started answering some of them and telling the operators what a disgusting company they work working for. Or I'd hit '1' and set the phone next to my radio. I heard that other people give them made up credit card info just to make them waste time. Even after paying a $1M FCC fine Cardholder Services is still calling my land line. https://www.nomorobo.com/
Of now they have started calling my cell phone four or five times a week. And there is no free blocking.
Apparently Nomorobo works by using the billing information in the call to block the call. The billing information can't be spoofed like the caller ID can be. End phones can't access the billing info so the call have to be blocked inside the network.
It does earn AT&T money because they charge the originating telecoms network a termination fee for handling the call, regardless of your inbound minutes limit (which is a terrible US thing, we dont have that here in the UK, its outbound charges only for us).
Reporting the calls to the FCC is a complete waste of time. I've done it myself at least five or six times, and it's a long and tedious process which is followed by precisely zero action whatsoever.
There is a web page at the FTC dedicated to dealing with them -- What’s the deal with “Rachel from Card Services”? Your top 3 questions answered.
I can confirm this.
About 10 years ago when I switched phone carriers (didn't port my number, not sure if that was even a thing yet), I got assigned a phone number that had previously belonged to someone who may have had debt. I was getting calls morning noon and night from a collection agency named Luebke Baker, looking for the guy who had the number before me. No amount of "you've got the wrong fucking number" made any difference, they kept on calling, always spoofing different numbers from different area codes, sometimes a dozen calls a day.
I got fed up and went through the FCC complaint process. I don't know how it works now, but at the time, they had a web form that required an intense level of detail and took a long time to fill out. I submitted it. About a month later, I got an envelope in the mail from the FCC. It contained a printed copy of my complaint form, about 15 sheets of paper worth, with a letter saying they found no violation of anything and I was welcome to submit another complaint if I wanted.
Thanks and no thanks, I had Sprint change my phone number. Luebke Baker eventually got fined by the FTC instead of the FCC, I guess I should have sent my complaint there instead.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Almost all spam calls, robocalls, and illegal calls to cell phones that I receive are traced to VoIP services offered by Level 3 subsidiaries or Level 3 themselves. They do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to fix any of this.
Shut down Level 3 and ban the easy scam-hiding that is VoIP telephony, I can guarantee you the majority of this bullshit will stop immediately.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.