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Robocalls, and Their Scams, Are Surging (nytimes.com)
The volume of pesky robocalls -- and their scams -- have skyrocketed in recent years, reaching an estimated 3.4 billion in April. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.] From a report: In an age when cellphones have become extensions of our bodies, robocallers now follow people wherever they go, disrupting business meetings, church services and bedtime stories with their children. Though automated calls have long plagued consumers, the volume has skyrocketed in recent years, reaching an estimated 3.4 billion in April, according to YouMail, which collects and analyzes calls through its robocall blocking service. That's an increase of almost 900 million a month compared with a year ago. Federal lawmakers have noticed the surge. Both the House and Senate held hearings on the issue within the last two weeks, and each chamber has either passed or introduced legislation aimed at curbing abuses.
Federal regulators have also noticed, issuing new rules in November that give phone companies the authority to block certain robocalls. Law enforcement authorities have noticed, too. Just the other week, the New York State attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, warned consumers about a scheme targeting people with Chinese last names, in which the caller purports to be from the Chinese Consulate and demands money. Since December, the New York Police Department said, 21 Chinese immigrants had lost a total of $2.5 million.
Federal regulators have also noticed, issuing new rules in November that give phone companies the authority to block certain robocalls. Law enforcement authorities have noticed, too. Just the other week, the New York State attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, warned consumers about a scheme targeting people with Chinese last names, in which the caller purports to be from the Chinese Consulate and demands money. Since December, the New York Police Department said, 21 Chinese immigrants had lost a total of $2.5 million.
They get into the US phone system somehow. Why can't that be disrupted?
Telephone companies have the ability to track every call as to send them the phone bill. But they cannot block calls with fake caller IDs?
Either the Telephone companies just don't care their services are being actively used to scam people with a difficult to track back to them and lock them up and/or their infrastructure is grossly out of date.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Unless I'm expecting a call, I never answer unknown numbers. If it is a legitimate call, they'll leave you a message.
That said, I do feel sorry for people who still, for some reason, have a landline.
Summation 2
I keep getting robocalls from spoofed phone numbers where the first 6 digits are the same as my own phone number. Isn't that illegal? My cell phone is on the Do Not Call list, but obviously registering an FTC Do Not Call complaint is pointless when I don't know the actual legal name or number of the entity that is harassing me. Any suggestions on how to hold these scammers accountable? Play along until I can find out their actual identity? I suspect they are offshore to begin with, so criminal charges likely wouldn't go far.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I get calls at least twice a day from some variation of 'Canadian Online Pharmacy' or 'US Online Pharmacy' trying to sell me viagra or cialis. It's continued for close to 8 years. They pull every trick you can think of, ignore requests to "Do not call", spoof caller IDs, etc.
Unfortunately my phone number is used for business so I can't easily change it or ignore calls from numbers I don't recognize as that could mean potentially lost business. But I really don't need their dick pills. Occasionally if I have time I'll mess with them, I remember once telling the guy on the phone I lost my penis in a boating accident. I gotta give credit to his persistence he still tried to sell me Viagra anyways. . .
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
This only works because phone calls within the United States are basically free. There is no cost per call.
In Europe it typically costs at least something to make a phone call. It's not enough to matter to a typical America $100 per month cell phone bill, but it is enough to prevent robocalls.
I wish that we had some similar cost per phone call in the US because robocalls have effectively rendered my home and cell phone useless for incoming calls which I at this point I just assume are robocalls and telemarketers.
It was a FritzPCI ISDN card with CAPIsuite, and a simple Python script, that checked the caller ID against my phone book. It blocked anonymous calls outright, and otherwise used group-based rules. It also supported blacklisting in case you wanted to allow entire ranges (like cities or countries), except for certain numbers.
Sadly, with VoIP (SIP) dominating landlines (here in Germany) and mobile phones being such a mess, I did never re-implement it for newer lines.
But nowadays, I just use Signal for calls, and have everything else go straight to voice mail as basically "I do not know you. If I do, please re-install Signal."
Sadly, "modern" IMs do not allow blocking unknowns, even though ICQ had it in 1998.
____ ... I'm an old fart.)
(With both IMs and file sharing, we went soo many steps backwards. Oh, and I miss the convenience of physical cursor keys and a physical copy/paste key on my old Nokia.
Is the phone ringing
-> N, do nothing
-> Y, look at caller ID
Is caller ID someone you recognise?
-> N, ignore it, it's spam
-> Y, look closer at caller ID
Is it your own number of something fairly close to your own number (same area code and exchange)?
-> Y, ignore it's, it's SPAM
-> N, answer it, but assume it's still SPAM.
An incoming call that I don't recognise the number is never answered. If it gets to the point of answering, you have about 7 seconds to convince me you're real. But my starting position is that you're probably a scam.
I'd say well over 95% of all incoming calls to my house are outright scams involving people with Indian accents and fairly brazen in their bullshit.
I just call them a lying paki and hang up. Sorry, you don't get treated with any form of respect if you're calling to scam me.
Unfortunately, I've had to tell my mother how to be completely paranoid and a complete bitch to unknown callers ... and fortunately she's learned to spot these things.
But the endless stream of outright fraudulent calls tells me the current state of caller ID is useless, because it's usually a lie, and that was to benefit companies who make robocalls ... and I don't fucking care about their business model.
I list my immediate family, close friends, and necessary work contacts in my favorites list. I then set my Android phone to silent, unless it's a call, message, or email from someone on the list. The only suck is when I'm streaming music and the incoming unknown caller silently interrupts it. It's a small price to pay though.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
The telephone industry has always been highly regulated, starting from the government-forced monopoly of AT&T, followed by the government-forced breakup of AT&T, and continuing with a large amount of regulations, including the Do Not Call Registry, which was more of my tax dollars well spent obviously.
Meanwhile, Google has effectively stopped SPAM email, at no cost to me.
Caller ID spoofing should require pre-approval from the phone company with appropriate documentation available to law enforcement.
After receiving more than a hundred calls from various numbers from a supposed solar energy provider, I sent a detailed call log to my state's attorney general, my state's public utility commission, and my state's consumer protection agency.. The response was, it's not our job, contact the FTC.
The best wardialer used to be sold by Sandstorm Enterprises. I'm not sure of they still make them, since they were purchased by NikSun. I suspect they yanked all the public advertising and sell it much more quietly directly to the spammers, advertising to telco's. They worked really well, detecting whether a call was a fax, a modem, or a human *much* more quickly to corectly connect the line to a salesman or sales message, rather than spending anywhere near as much time figuring that out as most war dialers. When you need to dial thousands of suckers a day, you do *not* want to waste time on modems or unanswered lines, or on switching context.
Yes, the scams are surging. Some scammers are even calling in the middle of the night. But if you're waiting for the telcos (or the government) to fix this, you'll be waiting for a very, very long time. Caller ID is completely broken, and it will clearly never be fixed.
But robocalling can be tackled on the user end. Robocalling requires a delay of several seconds between you answering the phone and the call being routed to a live human at a call center. I've got an Obi110 on my home telephone, configured with a "Press 1 to continue" screening message. By the time the robocaller switches the call over, the scammer hears nothing but silence. And unless the "1" is pressed, the Obi110 will not ring my home phone. In three years, not one robocaller has made it past the Obi110.
Obviously you can't put an Obi110 on a cell phone. However, Apple and Google could build a call screening function into iOS and Android. Give users the ability to activate a "challenge before ringing" function, give them the ability to customize the challenge and the response (with whitelisting of numbers in the phone directory), and you'd seriously cripple the robocalling industry. With every phone having different challenges / responses, the only solution for the scammers will be for a human being to listen to every call, at least until someone comes up with an AI smart enough to answer any challenge.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's better to fight back than do nothing.
And even then it should be announced to the one you do it to.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Every time someone calls you on a non-business line, $0.10 should get transferred from their account to yours.
These scams work because the scammers can externalize their costs on a massive scale. A robocaller can make thousands of calls an hour, millions of calls over the course of a month, because the marginal cost of the next call is zero. Commercial robocalling operations charge less than a penny a minute.
Internalizing the cost of a spam call is a market solution. It doesn't depend on some government bureaucrat reviewing the telephone number called and the purpose of the call and deciding if it's allowed. It's dependent on that communication being worth a dime to the originator, which spam calls are not. The market price charged by robocalling service bureaus is less than a penny a minute.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There should be a standard option to flag a call as spam. If enough customers flag the same number or source (if number spoofed), then a law enforcement investigation should be started. Email systems use a similar technique already.
Table-ized A.I.
You have no right to be free of advertising. Get over yourselfs libtards.
Easy. Waste their time.
I got spam calls by the dozen. I picked up, immediately terminated the call when I noticed it's a spam call and they kept coming back. Until I was pissed enough that I felt like playing with the asshole. Be bizarre. Be crazy. Talk about him with some weird conspiracy shit. Eventually you'll get written off as some lunatic batshit crazy idiot and they stop calling.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
thats all
Robocalls from scammers, er, politicians... up 10,000%
Politician's created a spam phone bill the first time around which was doomed to fail because 1) no serious enforcement or punishment, 2) loop holes so the politicians could get their "public service" messages out. I noticed that among the first violators were zealot religious groups with a public service announcements couched as phone surveys which almost immediately became some sort of conservative religious lets break the constitution and destroy the separation of church and state..and that is before you even get to the IRS, Nigerian Ministers or Microsoft Support (we've noticed a problem with your computer and we will help you fix it if you give us access) calls.
The longer your information doesn't change, the worse it gets.
I have found one solution, but I do not know if it will get me in trouble.
I equate them running to the authorities to complain about me would be akin to a drug dealer complaining that someone stole their drug money.
What I do:
Any time they call me, first I notify them of my intentions to fight fire with fire: "I'm going to call you as much as I can during peak hours and tie your phone systems up as much as I can".
And then I started doing it.
I have been called so many names, most I cannot even put here on Slashdot.
The spammers do not like being spammed.
Therefor advice: Spam the spammers. There are more of us (pissed off people reading this) than there are of them (spam callers and robo callers).
5-8pm every day, if you're not calling anyone, just call them over and over. Mute your mic though.
When this conversation comes up it's always good to take a look back at good ol' Lenny
https://www.youtube.com/playli...
crazy dynamite monkey
They want me to call back. They are local.
If you look up your home's value on the wrong site, they tell everyone who asks that you're interested in your home's worth. These scum are happy to help you refi, or sell, or find you the new home. Doesn't matter why you looked up your home's value. And of course there are interposers who happily scrounge your browser history and sell that info.
If you answer your mortgage broker's come-on for more info, that gets sold.
Needless to say, searches for certain terms will link you to interesting terms, and you get calls. Have fun. Search for 'shipping containers'. Warning, this becomes more of a nuisance than looking for garage door opener parts and getting ads for them for months.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Fn traitors. Line 'em up against the wall. Take aim and fire.
and it continues to filter out the semi-legitimate telemarketers. The kind that called you at 8pm to sell you insurance. This is an entirely new class of scammers likely made possible by changing tech (cheap voip, Google Voice, etc).
Things change. When they do regulations have to adapt. That's just the nature of the world. It's like complaining that rail road crossing are bunk because cars can run stop signs. New tech and new processes need new regulations.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Who the fuck ANSWERS these calls? Much less, who ACTUALLY GIVES THEM $$ in enough numbers to justify the effort/expense?
I mean, we've *always* hung up on them instantly.
-Styopa
Once or twice a week lately I see these sorts of calls: fake caller ID, same area code and prefix as my phone. I don't answer them; if it's a for-real call and they need to contact me they'll leave a voicemail, otherwise I guess it's either a scam or not important enough.
This sort of thing, to me, is just another sign of the times being tough, people being desperate for money, and unscupulous/criminal types will do whatever they think they can to squeeze money (or something they can sell) out of whoever and however many people they can.
Email has distinct "From:" and "Reply-To:" headers. Why can't the phone service?
Caller ID spoofing should require pre-approval from the phone company with appropriate documentation available to law enforcement.
Too much bureaucracy. A simpler solution is to just send a 6-digit authorization code that needs to be entered on the targeted phone.
"Since December, the New York Police Department said, 21 Chinese immigrants had lost a total of $2.5 million.'
That's ~$120,000 per person? I think the scammers found their niche market!
If you're not in my contact list, then no pickup. leave a message, but robots don't usually. ...No more annoying calls!
And never, ever give your phone number out to anyone you don't know/trust.
It does. But you don't get access to the From (ANI) header. Just Reply-To.
Why ate phone numbers still numbers instead of legible addresses like email addresses?
Check out http://www.jollyrogertelco.com... Basically you can conference call a bot in to talk to the scammer for you. It may not stop the calls but at the very least it will waste their time (which costs them money) and it's good for some laughs. They have some pretty funny examples on their YouTube channel.
There's all sorts of laws
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It's a robocall... I'd say I think I might have a whole lot more fun with it if it was an actual human except it's in Chinese anyways, and they'd probably just hang up the instant I tried to say anything in English.
I still get calls from "microsoft windows" every so often... it's hilarious. When they try to prove that they supposedly know that their "error messages" are coming from my computer by telling me that they have my computer's CLSID, I tell them what I know about what a CLSID actually is and it invariably produces a reaction.
The calls from the Canada Revenue Agency claiming that I owe money and that I am going to be arrested are funny too, although those are also robocalls, and I never get to talk to anyone.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Figure out where these calls originate from. Show up with baseball bat. Beat the ever living fuck out of the people running them.
I don't even think you could get a conviction for doing that.
my guess is legacy hardware and lets face it, the carriers don't want to change or replace anything unless they absolutely have to
They aren't "local". Many are simply spoofing your own number with the last four digits changed. If you actually think there is any guarantee that the caller ID number is valid, then you are naive at best, or completely stupid. Fortunately I live in a big enough city that we recently got an overlay area code, so the chance of someone worth talking to with those digits being the same is extremely low. It also means that they will likely never call back with the same number out of the 10000 possibilities, so trying to block it is useless.
With the currently available features from the phone company, I only get to block 100 numbers (it used to be 20), with no wildcards, and no filter on the name. If I could filter on the name, and have a wildcard on the last two or three digits (some apparently have blocks of legitimate numbers to call from), that would eliminate half of my junk calls, at least until they start to randomize the name too.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I prefer to just ask Microsoft support why one billion people won't eat with their left hand. Sometimes I even get to finish before they hang up. Hello, Dhalit!
I called the number back a few times to request deletion. Two were mapped to local Realtors. One was just some agency trying to market me. All hung up as I started my 'please remove me' speech. They could have been forwarded, but if so then their decades-old businesses are founded on forwarded service, and since they need licensed agents, this seems kinda stupid.
I'm just bright enough to know the difference, bucko. But nice try, keeping me on my toes.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I thought killing it with fire or Nuking it from orbit were the ways to be sure?
Tell them you are not interested, but have a phone number of someone who is. Then give them all of the phone numbers for your government representatives. Until they feel the pain, nothing will get done.
Answer it and approve of everything, be enthusiastic. Then give them fake payment information. Waste their time. They are paying people to take this info down by the hour. It costs them a shit-ton if everyone starts just giving them information that will never work.
I've gotten so many of these that I don't even have to hear that much of the spiel before I've launched my smartphone's call blocker and am entering the number into the backlist. These calls always come from my area code and my exchange followed by four random digits. I figure there's no point in reporting these calls; the phone carriers don't care.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
It does. But just like email "From" and "reply to" headers, it can be spoofed and just like in email it is by malicious actors.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Itâ(TM)s just time. There needs to be an authentication system in place for caller ID.