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Robocalling Scourge May Not Be Unstoppable After All (arstechnica.com)
Dan Goodin, writing for Ars Technica: New data shows that the majority of robot-enabled scam phone calls came from fewer than 40 call centers, a finding that offers hope the growing menace of robocalls can be stopped. The calls use computers and the Internet to dial thousands of phone numbers every minute and promote fraudulent schemes that promise to lower credit card interest rates, offer loans, and sell home security products, to name just a few of the scams. Over the past decade, robocall complaints have mushroomed, with the Federal Trade Commission often receiving hundreds of thousands of complaints each month. In 2013, the consumer watchdog agency awarded $50,000 to three groups who devised blocking systems that had the potential to help end the scourge. Three years later, however, the robocall problem seems as intractable as ever. On Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, a researcher said that slightly more than half of more than 1 million robocalls tracked were sent by just 38 telephony infrastructures. The relatively small number of actors offers hope that the phenomenon can be rooted out, by either automatically blocking the call centers or finding ways for law enforcement groups to identify and prosecute the operators. "We know that the majority of robocalls only come from 38 different infrastructures," Aude Marzuoli, research scientist at a company called Pindrop Labs, told Ars. "It's not as if there are thousands of people out there doing this. If you can catch this small number of bad actors we can" stop the problem."
and let them know.
No, the government should not interfere in the telemarketing industry.
Free market theory tells us that bad actors will go out of business on their own because people will refuse to purchase the services they are selling.
So there is no need for the government to interfere. The problem will solve itself.
2) All the directors of the cold calling firm are imprisoned for 3 years and finned $1,000,000 each
3) All the directors of the origitaing company (ie those who instructed the cold calling company) are imprisoned for 5 years and finned $1,000,000 each
This stuff won't work. The beings who are doing all this stuff are humans, not sharks. Humans don't have any fins, so finning them doesn't even make sense. Finning a shark is indeed a horrible and painful way to kill it, but since humans don't have any fins, what you propose is completely nonsensical.
Disemboweling, however, does seem like an appropriate punishment for these people. I also like that one where they tie someone's limbs up to four horses and then make the horses pull them apart.