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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.
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used to scam people with a difficult to track back to them and lock them up and/or their infrastructure is grossly out of date.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.
Because VoIP trunking can go anywhere and still lead to an endpoint in the US. It's just digital data that can be routed. The Caller ID spoofing for people who have no ownership of the number they're using should be much easier to shut down, and that would make it easier to block numbers of repeat offenders.
I've been reporting and telling that to the FCC for years now. These VOIP providers know exactly who they are doing business with, in fact some exclusively deal with these foreign call centers knowing full well they are violating the law.
We go after the providers as it is literally the only way it can be done.
But we won't, what ever law they pass this time will be full of loopholes allowing for continued abuse.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
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.
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.
Landlines also have the exact same caller ID and voicemail functions as a cell phone, so why would you feel sorry for people with a landline like me? I don't answer unknown numbers on my landline, just like I don't on my cellphone.
The best way to deal with them it to cost them money. And the best way to do that is to keep them on the line as long as possible. Not only is that keeping them from moving on and scamming the next person but that's also time they're paying that person to talk to you. You should look into http://www.jollyrogertelco.com... They provide bots that will talk to the telemarketers for you and it can get pretty hilarious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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.
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.
Here's a solution:
In order to transmit a caller id # which is different than the originating number, you must own that caller id number you are transmitting, or else have a signed delegation from the owner which you provide the phone company with.
Otherwise, if ANI number doesn't equal caller ID number, ANI number is substituted for caller ID number so that it's visible to recipients. Later, once the kinks of that are worked out, start outright blocking the call if ownership doesn't provably match.
Voip or other phone companies which violate the rules lose the ability to interconnect with those who enforce them.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
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.
My time (and cell phone minutes) are also worth money, and its costs me, too. A cost that I am absolutely unwilling to bear. There are better ways to put an end to this nonsense that don't cost me more of my limited time or money.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
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.
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.
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You are making the false assumption that the caller ID information is correct, or even a valid number. This has not been true for years, and the most recent behavior is to use your own number with the last four digits changed.
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