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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.
The cost of setting up a line and the equipment is extremely low now. I think that more will mushroom up when others are culled. Hail hydra.
Silence is a state of mime.
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.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
Freeze their assets until they release the billing information to the state AGs. That'll untie their hands really quick.
Our main "Home Phone Number" is a Google Voice line. One of the nice features they have is "spam filtering" for phone calls. If a person calls us and it's a robocall/scammer, we can block the number. Then, when they call again, they get a "this number has been disconnected" message. If enough people do this, calls from that number automatically are blocked. Often, Google Voice will alert us that we missed a call when our phones didn't ring. When we look into the number, it's invariably a scammer trying to get through.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
Anything can be stopped with enough effort. This includes online piracy, pornography, etc as well. With enough will, there are technological solutions. People think that the Internet and voip will stay the way it is now. It won't: eventually there will be full control over what you can transmit and receive over the Internet. People will scoff and say "this will never happen", but they are shortsighted. It will. There is enough money at stake.
The fact that the Internet was the "Wild West" is just because the Internet was ignored for a long time by the powers-that-be. My feeling is eventually you won't be able to connect to the Internet without an "approved" network connection device/router and that device will be monitored and encrypted traffic will be either disallowed or the router will do MITM to allow the monitoring to take place. This is all technologically possible today. Secure boot, locked down devices are just the start.
"Surely you can't be serious!", Slashdotters will say! Well I say "Stop calling me Shirley!"
It comes and goes in cycles. For awhile I was getting several a day from the same company shilling security systems. I finally got them to stop when I worked my way through their system getting farther and farther along each call until I managed to get a tech dispatched to an abandoned house not far from me. They stopped calling at that point.
Depending on what I was doing at the time, I also enjoyed just letting them ramble on for awhile about their spiel, then give them an address in Canada or Australia or something. Really pissed them off.
Nowadays they're almost all initially handled by an automated speech thing (albeit some are scary good) so it's harder to have fun with them.
The FCC and FTC need to be going after the telecoms selling the phone numbers and trunks to them instead. I know CenturyLink is infamous for that, leasing numbers and trunks to them up in Portland with little or no regard for national security or respect for the law. Only then being an accessory to the crime by shielding their identity information from the law.
Yeah, the ILEC's and CLEC's need to be held accountable for that.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Of course it is stoppable. I mean, how are these companies getting their phone numbers from which they operate? Why are companies like AT&T selling blocks of phone numbers to people for next to nothing? The phone companies are responsible for this mess and nobody is taking them to task for it.
Proverbs 21:19
The NSA can tap every phone in the country, but they can't find Rachel from cardholder services. The sad truth is these creatures prey on the elderly, and people who may not have the sophistication to deal with these solicitors. So it is far from harmless or victimless, and sometimes with little recourse. Now that may sound like small potatoes. But thousands of calls are placed, and they only have to be right a small percentage of this to make money and to ruin lives. The common carriers like them because of the revenue stream. I'm sure they have the capability to stop them, but that is not in there best interest to do so as they are making money as well. The FTC provides lip service they are out to get them, but I'm sure the lobbying efforts keep them from doing anything. So you can bet the carriers and the telemarketing industry are lobbying hard to keep the status quo. I think to myself that I'm to smart to fall for these scams, but now that I'm older I keep thinking someday I might not have as good of faculties and fall for something that could wipe me out financially. It does happen.
This is a solvable problem. They are monetizing these calls. Money is traceable. Follow the money and put them in jail.
The robocall problem will never be addressed until there is bulletproof traceback for all calls. Anyone with the know-how can falsify caller-id and even ANI. Even phone carriers can't identify the actual source of many robocalls coming into their network; all they know is the upstream hop. The national phone system trust system is broken and it is going to have to be updated so the carriers can ID the source of any call they carry. Then, and only then, you can blackhole them.
It's amazing the terrorists haven't adopted some of the tricks the telemarketers use to mask the source of their calls.
I say we dust off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
You can do this too with https://www.nomorobo.com/
Try this...it works for me: https://www.nomorobo.com/
I don't work for them, so I don't know how trustworthy they are.
This does not work for me. My main number is ex-google voice, now Project Fi. I get several a week. Almost every one is from the same are code and exchange as me, just a different last 4. A couple of times it was even my own number. This tells me that they are spoofing the caller ID info, and since it is sufficiently random, I cannot block it from the carrier
Silence is a state of mime.
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Currently, we cannot find the robo-callers because we allow them to hide. Why is that so? Why do we make it easy for them to hide?
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.
This is a key part of the problem, the ability to spoof the caller ID. There are only a very few legitimate reasons for doing this (eg call back from Samaritans, sexual disease clinic, ...) most others should be banned. I will accept caller ID of a home worker being set to his company head office - but it will have to be registered as who he works for. Maybe also a legit call center that operates of behalf of customers - but again needing registration.
Yes: many of these spam calls originate from overseas; this is the sort of thing that should be in a TTIP/TPP treaty; but since it only benefits individuals and not corporations it will never find its way there.
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.
Are you suggesting that people with old cars should buy new ones to stop criminals from taking a hammer to the windshield? The problem is not the victim's phone. The problem is the phone company's refusal to address the problem.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
I very much enjoy messing with the scamers I got a call from the supposed IRS and I asked the guy if he could do the Microsoft tech support call instead because I found it really funny. After describing some of my favorite calls he said his boss was looking at him funny because he should have hung by now since I already knew. I haven't received any for a while.
I can guarantee you that 90% of those fewer than 40 call centers are owned by Level 3 or a subsidiary of Level 3. Every number I've traced (I love the ones that start with my area code then the first digit is a 1) has come from Level 3 or a Level 3 subsidiary. I've notified them multiple times of this shit, and they refuse to do nothing.
Shut Level 3 down and hit them with criminal charges, and I guarantee you most of this 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.