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."

Comments

Re:Would love to see something done

[lawaetf1]

Several calls a week? I'm envious. I get a minimum of several a day.
 
You know, murder is a crime because you rob someone of the remaining time they might have had on this planet. Robo callers steal the equivalent of lifetimes every single day and our useless FTC seems utterly incapable of doing a damned thing about it.

Re:Would love to see something done

[Albanach]

I still believe that regulators should require that, if a caller ID is to be presented, it should be traceable to an individual in the originating country (with the carrier responsible if it's not). A carrier should be able to warrant this to its interconnects - if it can't, that carrier's calls will all be presented with no caller ID.

Customers can then reject calls without caller ID or from other countries if necessary.,Where caller ID is presented it is then traceable to a person, enabling existing state rules about such calls to be enforced.

There is no good reason that I should be able to buy a VOIP account for a couple of dollars a month and spoof any caller ID.