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FTC Dismantles Two Huge Robocall Organizations (onthewire.io)
Billions of robocalls came from two groups selling extended auto warranties, SEO services, and home security systems over the last seven years -- many to numbers on the "Do Not Call" list -- but this week the Federal Trade Commission took action. Trailrunner7 shares this report from OnTheWire:
Continuing its campaign against phone fraud operations, the FTC has dismantled two major robocall organizations... They and many of their co-defendants have agreed to court-ordered bans on robocall activities and financial settlements... The FTC and the FCC both have been cracking down on illegal robocall operations recently. The FCC has formed a robocall strike force with the help of carriers and also has signed an agreement to cooperate with Canadian authorities to address the problem.
"The law is clear about robocalls," says one FTC executive. "If a telemarketer doesn't have consumers' written permission, it's illegal to make these calls."
"The law is clear about robocalls," says one FTC executive. "If a telemarketer doesn't have consumers' written permission, it's illegal to make these calls."
I've been getting a lot of "silent" calls recently from numbers that appear to be in the region. Of course, the callerID means nothing.
I'm guessing these are robocallers that record the voices of people for some kind of identity theft.
it's the Matrix, i tell ya.
tell me when they start putting people in prison for this shit and I'll believe it may actually slow down.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It took FTC 7 years to shut down 2 robot callers, it took them far less to take action against the "pirate" sites. In former case vast majority of Americans were affected and in the latter a few corporations were affected. Shows the priorities involved.
And the criminals' punishment is that they had to agree omitting their crimes. And they did agree. And they are such honorable and decent people that they will agree to stop doing it the next time that they are caught too.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
"The law is clear about robocalls," says one FTC executive. "If a telemarketer doesn't have consumers' written permission, it's illegal to make these calls."
I'll believe you when you cut out the exemptions for politicians, banks, carriers, and charities. It's right there in your list of exemptions.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
All the stories are about the US, but when one mentions Canada, it's weird?
That'd be great!
But the local pizzahut doesn't allow you to pay online or over the phone.
They don't deliver either.
You can order online or over the phone but you have to pay in store.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
In the meantime for those of us using cell phones as our primary phone, there are a wealth of apps that block unwanted calls. I use "Hiya" and it's blocked carpet cleaners, credit monitors, and all manner of robocall scams I used to get.
A slap on the wrist and fines that probably are less than a week's profit for the callers are not going to stop the robo-calls. A few years to ponder one's fate while sitting in a prison cell might be the deterrent the robo-callers require.
robo-callers are on to you, many now chose a new randomized call display number appearing to be in your area with each call. A reverse lookup will just show the legitimate person who owns that number. There's no way to filter these without going to a strict whitelist (and even that has some chance of a collision error) and unfortunately whitelists aren't suitable for all people.
It's nice that they got the cooperation of Canadian authorities, that will help them stop 0.0000001% of the calls... How about cooperation with all the third world countries that actually place these calls!
I still haven't figured out why this hasn't been stopped years ago through technological means. Stop allowing someone from overseas to spoof a local number that they don't own! I understand the need for caller id spoofing (the ability for a large company to make all outgoing calls appear to come from their main number) But I don't understand why that is done at the company's discretion instead of the carrier's, it should be tied to numbers you own, and only changeable by making another call to your phone carrier. There is never any legitimate reason to be able to spoof a number you don't own, or to be able to change your outgoing caller id on the fly. If this was fixed, blacklisting robocallers would be a piece of cake, but as it is they just change their caller id for every single call.
proving they called people without their permission is a lot easier than proving that they defrauded people, especially being that those who have been defrauded are often too embarrassed to come forward, and that there's practically no way to figure out which call centre they were talking to at the time they were defrauded.
Nope. It just makes room for the next asshat to take over the operation.
You won't have to worry about that soon. India is a shithole with enough people without even an outdoor toilet that they could stand in line from here to the moon, and there is no way to get from that to everyone having indoor plumbing, because there are just not enough consumers (individual and business) outside the country to fully address the problem. So the "solution" will be war with Pakistan, probably with nukes at some point. Most countries with cultures that keep much of the population in permanent poverty end up doing so.
Even the general population treats much of the country as one large shit hole - the majority go out early in the morning to look for a place where they won't be seen and take a dump.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I wouldn't mind if, after some time in jail, they are given supervised release during which their phone numbers are published so that the rest of the country can call them during dinner.
I get calls daily from shitbags promising "0 percent interest rates" and would love to hunt them down and administer a fatal ass-kicking.
First they want to know what kind of card, then the expiration date, and then they want the whole card number to "verify" my credit history.
Usually I fuck with them and waste their time, but what I'd really like to do is mount one or more of their heads on a spike outside my home.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
And she was like "duh", and he was like "no way" and I was like "what ev".
Good for you. You saw through his little scheme.
Robocallers know that many people block all no-ID numbers, so they now fake a local number to get through. I would like to see the Caller ID information for each phone frozen at the time of provisioning. The only reason it isn't is pressure from large companies that want to be able to assign their own Caller IDs to in-house phones. Is the current populist wave strong enough to overcome this lobby?
... It just makes room for the next asshat to take over the operation....
So then, put him in jail also. As an added bonus, also put into jail those who are paying these asshats to do the robocalling. Go to the source of the asshatness.
Certainly not a corporate policy as I order by phone, pay with a credit card over said call and get it delivered.
Tell me more about how brown people can't solve their own problems, but they can only be solved from the outside. Do you have more details about your Final Solution to the India problem?
India is an emerging economy. Change takes time, but their economy is growing at twice the rate of the US economy, and unlike Chine their manufacturing base is for local consumers, not exports. They're certainly capable of becoming a modern industrialized nation, and have come a long way along that path in the past 20 years. They're certainly moving faster than we did in our industrial revolution.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
> There's no way to filter these without going to a strict whitelist (and even that has some chance of a collision error) and unfortunately whitelists aren't suitable for all people.
The way to deal with this on cellphones is to set the default ringtone to "none", and whatever ringtones you prefer to your legitimate contacts. Most telemarketers won't leave a message. The ones that do, I can screen at my own leisure.
That would be a white list. Works great if you can, but it's not a solution for everyone. I regularly have my phone number given out as an emergency contact on events. I don't have the luxury of letting everyone go to voicemail and sorting it out later.
Those are easy, I never answer calls from myself, I don't like what I have to say anyway.
The environment is deteriorating, and the population is growing, at a rate that will never allow India to actually go from "emerging economy" to modern economy. They can be an industrial nation, but not what we would consider a modern one, with all the benefits. There's just too many people, too high a growth rate, and a huge baby boom in the making which will result in even more poverty, because most of those people having kids don't have even an outdoor toilet to shit in.
They already have 18% of the human race living on just over 2% of the land. They will pass China as the most populous country in the world in 2022 - that's 5 years. And unlike China, they will continue to increase in population.
It's simple math - the rest of the world cannot create enough consumer demand to lift the rest of the globe out of poverty. You want to increase your market share, you have to lower your selling price - and your profits, ensuring you stay poor. And there are far too many other countries with over-abundant labour ready to take your place the moment you raise your prices.
And next, throw in robotics and AI, and it really won't matter how cheap you go, the machines can always go lower.
They will solve their problem the same way humans have always solved this problem in the past - famine, war, disease, death. Nothing new under the sun there, and it's stupid to deny it, and the associated risks for everyone else.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I am the opposite. I can talk to myself for hours.
Yeah, like we did with the drug dealers.
I turned out that there were only a small number of people willing to deal drugs for money, and once we had them all in prison, the drug problem went away.
I'm sure it will work for telemarketers, too.
Two "new" robocall comanies incorporated today
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It essentially is. What they are doing is spoofing the Caller ID -- you may have noticed that many of the calls come from numbers that are essentially 1 number off (or shuffled) from your own number. Spoofing is illegal, but of course they don't care about that -- if the company is based outside the US, who is anyone going to sue?
Oh, absolutely. I especially love doing this with the "PC support" scammers. It's easy to take forever to walk to the computer (that I'm actually working on the whole time), boot it up, fumble my way to and through the whole Event Viewer flim-flam, and so on, with all the stalling tactics Oligonicella suggests. Eventually I get bored, tell them I need to get my son to help me, and put the phone down. I've been tempted to finish with a scream or a police whistle, but I'm afraid my condo neighbors wouldn't appreciate that.
Cuz that lying bitch won't stop calling me.
Silent calls are quite minimal in terms of annoyance.... In my case, it was extremely invasive and rude and stupid too... Two types of calls:
1. I pick up and the other end says "Hey, can you hear me? [pause 1 sec].. Good! blah blah blah"... This wasn't a person asking me for a yes, then "Good, blah blah"... it was a recording with a 1sec pause.
2. I pick up and the other end yells "Stop what you're doing and listen"... first time I heard it, I said FU... but then realized it was a recording... so now I just simply hang up.... better yet... if I see out of state calls with unrecognized number, I simply don't answer.