T-Mobile Kicks Off Industry Robocall War With Network-Level Blocking and ID Tools (venturebeat.com)

T-Mobile is among the first U.S. telecom companies to announce plans to thwart pesky robocallers. From a report on VentureBeat: The move represents part of an industry-wide Robocall Strike Force set up by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last year to combat the 2 billion-plus automated calls U.S. consumers deal with each month. Other key members of the group include Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Verizon. T-Mobile's announcement comes 24 hours after the FCC voted to approve a new rule that would allow telecom companies to block robocallers who use fake caller ID numbers to conceal their true location and identity. From a report on WashingtonPost: The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday proposed new rules (PDF) that would allow phone companies to target and block robo-calls coming from what appear to be illegitimate or unassigned phone numbers. The rules could help cut down on the roughly 2.4 billion automated calls that go out each month -- many of them fraudulent, according to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. "Robo-calls are the No. 1 consumer complaint to the FCC from members of the American public," he said, vowing to halt people who, in some cases, pretend to be tax officials demanding payments from consumers, or, in other cases, ask leading questions that prompt consumers to give up personal information as part of an identity theft scam.

Comments

Block on the phone.

[sycodon]

Just provide a feature to automatically send to voice mail or block altogether calls from numbers not in your contacts.

Kinda like a White List.

Re:Block on the phone.

[green1]

That't technically easy, but socially difficult.

It may work well for some people, but it doesn't work for many others. My phone is often used as the emergency contact number for events that I volunteer on, as a result I need to receive calls from many different numbers that are unknown to me ahead of time. Not answering isn't really an option, and I won't get a list ahead of time that I can program in to a whitelist of the hundreds of people that will be on or near the event.

Other people use their phones for their business, if you don't answer when a customer phones, they'll phone someone else, and while that may make your business easier, it also makes it quite unprofitable.

Re:Block on the phone.

[Sloppy]

I like the idea of moving as much decision making as possible to the phone, but I don't want a whitelist. That would require me to make the effort to whitelist people, plus having the prescient power of anticipating which strangers I want to hear from (e.g. whoever found my dog and called the number on her collar). I'm ok with getting a call from a stranger, as long as their "return address" isn't forged. If the return address is correct, and they are annoying, I can blacklist 'em. Allowing strangers to call me is the best default. Not perfect (it's easy to imagine some failure scenarios), but best.

Good job! T-mobile

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It is good. I wish other companies and landline phone companies will follow suite.

Robo calls are killing the phone industry. People stop using phones and turn them off due to this nuisance

Good

[b0bby]

I get at least 2-3 calls a day now from unknown numbers. A few months ago it was all out of state, but now they seem to be using local numbers. I never pick them up, and they never leave a message, but it's pretty annoying.

Re:Good

[hojo]

I no longer answer the phone, ever, unless I know who is calling.

It really works.

I also add any "unknown number" to a new contact that I call e.g. Detroit Blocked, or NYC Blocked, or Louisiana Blocked (whatever google says is the caller), then "route to voicemail" all calls from that number. Plus I disabled voicemail, so it's really just a new version of the old killfile. :-)

AT&T already there

[stevel]

AT&T has had their Call Protect feature for a few months now, including telemarketer identification and network-level fraudulent call blocking. I use it and it works very well.

I reported them for 2 months. They went away.

[michaelcole]

https://complaints.donotcall.g...

Re:FCC says wha?

[dgatwood]

It hasn't been squelched because it isn't consumer-friendly. It actually causes even bigger problems, because the obnoxious scammers have already changed their tactics, and now are using actual phone numbers that belong to other people.

About two weeks, I got a text message from somebody asking why I called them. I had not made any phone calls in nearly a day at the time, as verified on my phone. And I keep getting telemarketing calls from random assigned phone numbers in the area that belong to random individuals, all of whom are innocent victims.

It is not sufficient to ban calls from unassigned numbers. Our phone network is hopelessly insecure, dating back to the days when only trusted carriers could add calls into the system. The only way to fix this is to ensure that at every injection point, the system verifies that the call is really coming from where it claims to be coming from—one wire, one or more fixed number blocks. And because there are probably major carriers complicit with this abuse, doing this right would require some sort of authenticated source check further down the line as well. This would probably require a major rearchitecting, which is why it probably won't happen any time soon. Basically, we need the equivalent of TLS and CAs for the phone network....