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A Florida Man Has been Accused of Making 97 Million Robocalls (bloomberg.com)
A Florida man accused of flooding consumers with 97 million phone calls touting fake travel deals appeared Wednesday before lawmakers to explain how robocalls work and to say, "I am not the kingpin of robocalling that is alleged." From a report: Adrian Abramovich, of Miami, who is fighting a proposed $120 million fine, told senators that open-source software lets operators make thousands of phone calls with the click of a button, in combination with cloud-based computing and "the right long distance company." "Clearly regulation needs to address the carriers and providers and require the major carriers to detect robocalls activity," Abramovich said in testimony submitted in advance to the Senate Commerce Committee. He has asked the Federal Communications Commission to reduce the fine proposed last year, calling it disproportionate, in part because most calls went unanswered or resulted in a quick hang-up by consumers. The panel's chairman, Senator John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, called Abamovich and officials from the FCC and other agencies to discuss ways to stop abusive calls.
People like Adrian Abramovich have ruined the phone system. Their abuse has led to people no longer answering their phone from anyone who is not in their
contacts already and maybe not even then. While you can use blacklisting software, this is troublesome for people who need to receive calls from any
number. I've talked with a number of people who say they just don't answer the phone anymore.
Fuck these pieces of shit and throw them in jail where they belong.
$1.24 per nuisance call seems pretty fair. Hell, even $5 per unwanted call seems reasonable and would quickly end robocalling.
Florida Man strikes again!
Zero sympathy. Takes a lot of work to set up such an operation to scam grannies out of their credit cards.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Florida Man Accused of Making 97 Million Robocalls While High On Bath Salts and Boxing an Alligator .
Fixed That For Everyone.
... ."the right long distance company."...
"'My name is Adrian; I inherited the phone from the previous Dread Pirate Robocaller, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from is not the real Dread Pirate Robocaller either. His name was Tommy Tutone. The real Robocaller has been retired 15 years and living like a king in South Carolina.' Then he explained the name is the important thing to inspire the necessary impulse. You see, no one would ever buy a travel deal from the Dread Pirate Adrian."
I've heard from this scumbag twice today, a dozen times so far this week. Fines and prison are too good for him. He should be keelhauled.
There are one or two scammers calling just about every American phone number more-or-less weekly, way more than the 97 million calls this guy is alleged to have made. They always spoof the source number into something the same as yours except for the last 4 digits, which are selected randomly, in an attempt to make the call appear to come from one of your neighbors, in the misguided belief that people still use phone numbers which were assigned to landlines sequentially throughout neighborhoods decades ago. It probably works for them because Granny who's had the same phone number for 40 years is the kind of person they are trying to prey upon. [This also has the side-effect of making it difficult to blacklist all the calling numbers, which drives the hatred seen elsewhere in the thread.]
When I ignore the call on my cell phone, the robocaller, who doesn't understand answering machines or voicemail, just starts talking anyway as soon as it hears voice and then the voice stops, and leaves a long rambling message (the first few words of which is cut off) about one of two scams: Either "you qualified for a free trip based on your previous stay at one of our resorts" or "there is a problem with your account", both of them being very vague (the resorts or account in question are never specified) and trying to social-engineer actual information out of the victim.
Of course, those of you with phones have probably already heard these calls enough times to learn to ignore them immediately.
That fact that a button is easily pushed does not in any way exonerate the button pushers. The President has a button, and, "gosh, who knew it would screw things up" for people won't fly if it were ever to be pushed. Neither would "gosh, I didn't build the nukes" won't either. Even if they're open source at the time.
I haven't gotten any of my own recordings up yet, but I've had a great time working on getting scammers to a Lenny bot I run at home, as on https://www.reddit.com/r/itsle...
There shouldn't be prison gangs. Prison should reflect society--the community we want to create--so that people come out of prison ready to thrive in society, to go on to be productive individuals. Prisons that create insecurity and fail to treat people with basic human dignity fill with gangs and violence, and emit violent and damaged criminals to terrorize our communities.
By creating an environment in which the prisoners are secure, treated humanely, and given attention to their individual needs, we develop a better community within the prison, and release into society those well-adapted individuals who are brought up and made whole by the support of such a community.
Prisons such as we see in many areas of the United States are cruel and unusual punishment.
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Just don't say anything when you answer a call from an unknown number. A real person will always ask "Hello" in a questioning voice. Robocalls don't know how to deal with silence and hang up. And even if they learn to interpret long silence, they'll never navigate the awkward handshake that happens when the person answering the call doesn't get in the first "Hello".
I'm imaging a Life of Brain-like movie, where someone impassioned stands up, and delivers with deep, sonorous eloquence the famous line from Jesus: "let he who is without sin cast the first stone".
And everybody in the crowd seems to take a deep breath, and the underfed scoundrel at the center of things is about to kiss the dirt beneath his scabby feet, but then somewhere in the crowd a phone rings, and then an agitated Hebrew voice mutters "fucking robocall" with dark resignation—and immediately the execution is on again, with twice as many stones in hand as the first time.
Psssst, Jesus, word to the wise: don't deliver that epic line while someone in the crowd is receiving a robocall, it just won't stick.
Hello. This is Homer Simpson, a.k.a. Happy Dude. The court has ordered me to call every person in town to apologize for my telemarketing scam. I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send one dollar to Sorry Dude 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power.
#DeleteFacebook
>"to reduce the fine proposed last year, calling it disproportionate, in part because most calls went unanswered or resulted in a quick hang-up by consumers"
Really? So, the fact that we didn't answer or did and hung up quickly somehow means we weren't annoyed, or weren't disturbed, or didn't have our privacy invaded?
We need CRIMINAL laws against *all* robocalling (and most other unsolicited spam calls) and an easy way to report them (like dialing a number after a call) AND enforcement. None of the existing "regulations" and "fines" seem to make any difference at all in the problem.