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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."
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.
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.
silent is a call centre. What happens is that real people are "expensive" (comparatively, even in whatever 3rd world country the call centre is in) whereas the auto-dialer is practically free. So the dialer calls more people than it has agents ready to talk to, knowing that many won't answer the phone, each one that answers is sent to an agent, but if there are no agents ready, you get silence. The goal of the system is not to match called parties to agents, the goal is to make sure that any time an agent is free there's a call immediately ready for them (minimize downtime) The end result is that many people will get called, but there will be no agent ready to talk to them.
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.
And that's why if you do end up on the receiving end of one of these calls, you talk to them as long as you can. If everyone did this, their business model would die because each sucker they reel in would cost too much in human time.
"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.
There is a free service called NoMoRobo that implements a massive cooperative blacklist on a grand scale. I use it on my Comcast phone (requires multiple ring). One of the few workarounds for tele-scammers is to falsify caller id with a random number in the victim's area code and exchange. Most telemarketers who call me are dumped by NoMoRobo after the first ring, but once in a while I see what appears to be a local call from an unrecognized number. Any number I don't recognize ends up in voice mail, which is where telemarketer calls go to die.
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...
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?
The voice keeps talking, and I am left w/ no choice but to hang up.
Do NOT hang up. Instead press "1" so that you waste the time of an actual human, and then put the phone on hold. If everyone did that, their business model would not work. If you enjoy annoying people that deserve it, then stay on the line and pretend to be interested, and give them bogus CC numbers until they start swearing at you. But please don't just hang up.
Better is to feign age. That gives you hard of hearing, confusion, memory problems and the need to go look for your wallet with the credit card. After diddling with them for around five minutes I carefully and quietly lay down my phone on the desk and go about my business.
That or, if I'm in need of catharsis, I speak very softly to make sure they're listening then scream like a I'm being attacked by an axe murderer. Always makes me feel more relaxed.
> 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.
And then there's this classic of Tom Mabe pretending to be a police detective at a murder scene scaring the sh*t out of a telemarketer.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
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?