Robocallers Win Even if You Don't Answer (wsj.com)

Sarah Krouse, reporting for WSJ: Caller ID is feeding one of the very problems it was developed to stop: junk calls. Illegitimate robocallers, or outfits that flood American landlines with marketing calls, use the decades-old identification system to make money, even when no one picks up. While scammers' biggest paydays come from tricking victims into handing over credit card or bank account information, many robocallers make incremental cash along the way, thanks to little-known databases that try to identify who is calling.

Each time a caller's name is displayed, phone companies pay small fees -- typically fractions of pennies -- to databases that store such records. Some of these fees are handed back to the caller. With millions of automated calls a day, the amounts can add up. "It's slow nickels, not fast dimes" for scammers, but it helps offset the costs of making the calls, said Aaron Woolfson, president of TelSwitch, a company that licenses out telecommunications-billing software.

Comments

TFA is paywalled

[Anonymous Coward]

nuff said

Re:TFA is paywalled

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, I am the Pope

Re: TFA is paywalled

[Anonymous Coward]

Only fags are associated with Wall street.

for every crime there is a law

[mapkinase]

One just need to apply it. Make a poster boy from one of the robocallers. Feed him to alligators, hang him on a Time Square, do something memorable with these invasive pests.

Humanity and dignity cannot be achieved without dehumanizing and removing any shred of dignity from the worst.

Weed out the weaklings, clean up the city

Put on your black shirts.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[dgatwood]

We tried to hang one in a time cube once, but it turned out that the day really is split into four days, and the guy just ended up in one of the other three.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

we will start with you and your lawless lynch mentality of Backwardness.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[sjames]

Require real caller ID. It's not like the phone company doesn't know who to bill. Set up *?? to report a do-not-call violation. If a particular number racks up enough of those, launch a full investigation. If the phone company lets a spoofed caller id get through and it is reported to do-not-call, they either figure out who really called or pay the fine themselves.

Before someone complains, allow any extension to report the main number as a caller ID. Allow 3rd parties to use a company's name and number IFF the company signs in blood that the 3rd party is a duly contracted representative and takes responsibility for any violations. Or they can use a reflector to make the calls actually originate from them.

If a foreign phone company won't comply, reject all of it's caller id info and change the id to "caller from [country]" OR just stop accepting calls from that carrier until they change their ways.

We're already to the point that many people don't even bother to answer their phones anymore. If this isn't brought under control soon we'll start seeing cellphones that do internet ONLY. and the telephone will be dead.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[tlhIngan]

Require real caller ID. It's not like the phone company doesn't know who to bill.

Except it won't work. One reason for spoofing the number is simple - many PBX systems at an office have lines that are dynamically assigned - if you call out, the PBX picks a free line and connects your call to it. Those lines will have numbers associated with them, but you can't call them because they're not valid DID or hunting line numbers. So the PBX tells the phone company to spoof either the DID number or the main phone number. (Likewise, when a DID or main line call comes in, the phone company picks a line and tells the PBX which number it's for).

No, what you REALLY want is phone companies to do the same thing most ISPs do now - source IP verification. As in the spoofed number they get must be associated with the group of phone lines it's coming from - so an office can hand out spoofed numbers properly, but they can only hand out numbers they actually own.

The only problem now is VoIP providers who rightfully have to spoof numbers to indicate who is really calling - again, they buy a huge clump of lines and those numbers are inappropriate for the calling party. And the problem is the database of valid phone numbers from those VoIP providers can be rather big to do a number verification. (Plus, it's just as easy for robocallers to sign up, wear out the number, abandon the account and sign up again). What may help is if the phone company could put like a "VoIP: Provider: Name" to the caller ID, so you'd get "VoIP: Vonage: John Smith"

Re:for every crime there is a law

[sjames]

At least do me the courtesy of reading the whole damned post. It wasn't that long. It wasn't even as long as yours. In particular, read the second damned paragraph again and again until you see that I answered your concern before you even raised it AND proposed the solution you suggested.

As for voip, it's on them to either provide proper caller ID or pay the fines themselves (see 1st paragraph) or if they are not in FTC jurisdiction, see 3rd paragraph.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

"If a foreign phone company won't comply, reject all of it's caller id info and change the id to "caller from [country]" OR just stop accepting calls from that carrier until they change their ways."

Nice idea, except there is no way to know where the call exactly came from.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[sjames]

Actually, there is. The PSTN isn't magic, it has switches, and ports just like the internet. While a call could be routed through another country or telco, those can be handled by the same rules. Do not route telco A to us OR ELSE.

Do you really think an American telco will accept a call without knowing who to bill?

Re: for every crime there is a law

[orlanz]

But we do this already today. Pretty much everything you and the GP posted. The main problem is:
"Plus, it's just as easy for robocallers to sign up, wear out the number, abandon the account and sign up again."

It's too costly and slows down business transactions to do a full background check and audit trail to vet out all the spammers. Imagine it takes a month to get residential telephone or cell phone.

Plus the total number of spammers is a really really small number compared to the legitimate customers signing up. This small percentage makes all those calls.

So people will still get through and spam you but the general customer pays both ways. Even if you vet all the spammers out, they just need to find one legit idiot to route through. By the time you wack a mole that one idiot, they got 2-3 others lined up.

It's not as easy of a problem as everyone thinks on these forums. Of course there is stuff the ISPs should be doing, but it's not a cure.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[squiggleslash]

He literally covered this in the second paragraph, starting with the words "Before anyone complains" clearly anticipating that this would be something Slashdot's army of Actuallys would need an answer to. The response you wrote out is not only longer than the paragraph you skipped, but the entirety of his message.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Bert64]

Phone companies already can, and in most cases do restrict your outbound CLI to a group of pre approved numbers. So although you might have 50 lines and technically each of those has its own number, you might also have 100 numbers but make most calls go out displaying the main switchboard number which is on all your advertising etc.

Actually filtering spoofed CLI is much harder due to number portability and roaming etc. Numbers aren't allocated in predictable prefixes to specific telcos, any number could be coming from any source location.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Wycliffe]

It's too costly and slows down business transactions to do a full background check and audit trail to vet out all the spammers. Imagine it takes a month to get residential telephone or cell phone. Plus the total number of spammers is a really really small number compared to the legitimate customers signing up. This small percentage makes all those calls.

It might be a small percentage making the calls but it's approaching 85% of the calls I receive and most of my friends receive. I would be willing to pay the $25 and wait the 30 days to get a phone if it meant that it reduced the number of phone calls I received by 85%.

Another possible option if the phone company is just too archaic is to implement 2FA. If I could sign up for a service where everyone who calls me has to type a code received by text, I would sign up tomorrow. You have a spoofed number, you don't receive the text and you can't get thru. Calling from a landline or voip that can't receive texts, too bad, call me from your verified cell phone or contact me in another way. Most legitimate businesses don't actually call you anymore anyways. Most of my legitimate calls are from other cell phones.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh piss off. Maybe you should go first. Except get skinned alive, then drawn and quartered and then lit on fire.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[gtall]

Yep...though the only problem is figuring out who the bad guys are...maybe we just need to ask them before stringing them up? Yes? Why don't you develop a Guilt-O-Meter and get back to us. Since you seem to have such a complete and full understanding of the situation, it should only take you, what, an afternoon?

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they could just do it on the other end, i.e., compare usage to what would be normally expected, like they do for electrical bills to catch weed grow houses. If a phone company sees a customer making a gazillion calls, especially when they do things like dial all the numbers in a sequence (even if they hop around the sequence to try to evade detection), then you launch the investigation.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[squiggleslash]

Well, that's good to hear, that means the current plague of people spoofing caller ID numbers must exist only in our imaginations and the GP's suggestions are completely unnecessary. When I got a call the other day from 000 000 0000 it was clearly from someone who really owned that number, I'm guessing it must have been one of Alexander Graham Bell's descendants, am I right?

Re:for every crime there is a law

[radarskiy]

"And the problem is the database of valid phone numbers from those VoIP providers can be rather big to do a number verification. "

The providers know who to bill... but somehow they don't know what ID to apply.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[orlanz]

I agree with the 2FA like solutions. My original point was that it's rather difficult to do it centrally without collateral damage; not to mention there is very little financial incentive for the players. But a distributed model would work.

Personally, I like white & black lists. If you are not on it, you go to VM. I will call you back/whitelist you. Message 4 seconds, no notification to user. If I blacklist you, then you get a "Subscriber not found" message. I should be able to do wildcard based white/blacklists. 212 151 ****.

Centrally, if too many people blacklist a number; an investigation starts that hunts down the owner. Most importantly, that number is considered used till the investigation ends. That should slow the number churn and incentivize the carriers to be more careful handing out numbers.

This should be for both landline and cells. I doubt the carriers will do the central bit for us.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

You cried the last time you got a bloody nose. I have pictures.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[mark-t]

And what do you do if you had intended to accept calls from unlisted parties where no identifying information is transmitted?

All you can do is not answer the phone, forcing the caller to leave a message (which a robocaller will often do, filling up space on your voice mail and taking up just as much time to purge it as it would to answer the phone and hang up), whereas plenty of human callers may end up not leaving a message at all because of a preference for full duplex communication.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

I was equally confused on how i could receive a call with my own number showing up on caller ID. I called myself twice that day, I must of had something REALLY important to tell myself.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[green1]

complete BS.

Almost all of these calls come from overseas call centers, and yet every single one is spoofing my own local area code and even local exchange prefix (they hope you'll think it's someone nearby calling and actually pick up). It's pretty obvious that not only is this outside the realm of "number portability", I can also guarantee that they are spoofing numbers that are from a completely different telco than they are calling from, probably even numbers from the telco they are calling in to.

I can't even imagine how much incompetence would be required not to be able to filter out CID coming from outside your network that claims to be coming from inside it. This has absolutely nothing to do with "can't" it's entirely "won't". The sad truth of the matter is that telephone companies are paid to process phone calls. They have no financial incentive to reduce the number of calls on their network.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[reanjr]

I blame the shitty /. UI. You go to reply and when you get to the reply screen you can no longer see the original comment, nor can you use the back button (which takes you to the top of page). It's exceedingly frustrating, and I know at times I end up making assumptions about what I thought I read by the time I'm done writing and proofreading my response.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[swb]

Number portability means there is a database made available to telcos so they know where to route calls. "It's hard" was their principal objection to number portability, they wanted the simpler and less intensive route maps where telcos owned entire exchanges and could route calls with less effort and maintenance.

But now that we have number portability, telcos should be able to use that same database to determine if calling party identification actually matches the origin of the call. Businesses with PBXs and DID blocks should already be in this, as should the numbers associated with their trunks.

Bottom line is that they just don't want to, probably because of money changing hands someplace.

Either they don't want to annoy a service provider client with a huge set of trunks who could pretty easily find some other carrier to provide them with trunks or they're getting per-termination fees from the inbound source and don't want to disrupt them.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, from one of his ancestors.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't look like anyone in this thread so far is considering that many (most?) Of these calls are coming from compromised systems. There isn't a trail to follow because the trail stops at a pbx where the administrator didn't change the default password, or at an infected pc, running a voip trial with a stolen credit card number.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[4wdloop]

>> We're already to the point that many people don't even bother to answer their phones anymore. If this isn't brought under control soon we'll start seeing cellphones that do internet ONLY. and the telephone will be dead.

Isn't it already? How often do you type a number to call or text (similar to typing in IP address to read a web page)?

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why one should read *BREFORE* hitting reply. Also, if you really need, there is the quote parent button which will copy that post into your for you to re-read.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Registered Coward v2]

If I could sign up for a service where everyone who calls me has to type a code received by text, I would sign up tomorrow. You have a spoofed number, you don't receive the text and you can't get thru. Calling from a landline or voip that can't receive texts, too bad, call me from your verified cell phone or contact me in another way. Most legitimate businesses don't actually call you anymore anyways. Most of my legitimate calls are from other cell phones.

I remember (vaguely) a service where the caller had to enter a number or say their name to get through, which pretty much eliminated rob-callers. One issue with 2FA is political calls - Congress exempts themselves from laws against robocalling and will still ant to be able to robocall you to let you know their opponent is laying scumbag who beats their dog and masticates in public...

Re:for every crime there is a law

[johanw]

> If this isn't brought under control soon we'll start seeing cellphones that do internet ONLY. and the telephone will be dead.

And why would this be this is bad? Phone companies are clearly not interested in blocking this, let them become dumb datapipes. I can call someone with Signal, WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram and a bunch of others if I want. Those companies do act against spam. And the added advantage is that the NSA and FBI can't listen in. Trump might have liked the situation where overzealous FBI agents could not tap his lines.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[johanw]

Force telecoms to allow customers to block entire countries would help. Block India and Mexico and most of these calls are gone.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[green1]

They aren't even willing to honestly tell you what country it was (passing on known fraudulent CID) why would they let you block entire countries? Keep in mind that long distance is still the biggest cash cow for telecoms. They don't want to discourage any use of it.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

Number portability is no different than DNS in the internet world... probably fewer phone numbers. The internet seems to survive and be able to do reverse anti-spoof at least at the access side.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

Childish power fantasies are cute.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

If this isn't brought under control soon we'll start seeing cellphones that do internet ONLY. and the telephone will be dead.

Much to the joy of companies with POTS infrastructure subject to regulation. Maybe that's what they're banking on.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Wycliffe]

All you can do is not answer the phone, forcing the caller to leave a message (which a robocaller will often do, filling up space on your voice mail and taking up just as much time to purge it as it would to answer the phone and hang up), whereas plenty of human callers may end up not leaving a message at all because of a preference for full duplex communication.

There is an easy solution to this. Turn off your voicemail and have a message saying to send you a text. This eliminates most spammers and prevents you from having to spend time trying to decipher a voicemail. It's faster to read a text than listen to a voicemail and it has the added advantage that texting laws are much more strict so spammers are less likely text you and there is more recourse if they do.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

It was yourself from the future letting you know how to time travel, then you can win the lottery, bet on sports teams and win, etc...

But don't worry, you broke that time loop! I'm sure you're happy about that.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that these VoIP calls are not true long-distance calls. Instead, they use the Internet to get as close to the destination as they can. For many calls, they are probably handled locally once they actually hit the telephone system.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[green1]

So in other words, someone is paying the local telco big bucks to tie directly in to their systems at the local level in various locations. Yeah, I'm sure they're in a rush to limit that revenue stream...

Re: for every crime there is a law

[BronsCon]

It's fine if that's where the trail stops. Running with a default password of no (or out of date) anti-virus is just reckless and should incur liability.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[BronsCon]

Huh, I only have that UI on mobile; and, then, only if I don't check the "View Desktop Version" option in my browser.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[sjames]

Ever try to whatsapp a business?

I do not advise attempting to whatsapp 911.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

This also eliminates any legitimate phone communication from a number you don't recognize that might be a landline or a business. The office I work at has an 800 number and a local number, but when we call out, it's the local number that shows, not the 800. I can't text people from the local number (although I can text from another number...only way our system could handle the one-on-one interactions) so your solution is easy, but only for person to person communication, not business to person or even person to business.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[mark-t]

Turn off your voicemail and have a message saying to send you a text.

No good... it blocks anyone who is calling from a landline and has no ability to text.

This eliminates most spammers and prevents you from having to spend time trying to decipher a voicemail.

It also eliminates people who hang up as soon as they hear a recording because they happen to be uncomfortable talking to what they know is a machine. The fact that they wouldn't have to leave a message is irrelevant because they haven't listened that far.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[sjames]

It's too costly and slows down business transactions to do a full background check and audit trail to vet out all the spammers. Imagine it takes a month to get residential telephone or cell phone.

They've been doing it from the beginning. Think about it, they know exactly where to send the bill and they already require some assurance that you can and will pay the bill. If it's a pre-paid burner, they at least know it's a pre-paid burner. If you don't pay the bill, they somehow manage to figure out what SIM to deactivate or what line to disconnect, even if it's pre-paid. If A corp is leasing 1000 lines, they know exactly which lines those are and exactly what phone numbers they might plausibly (legitimately) present in the caller ID.

They know that the zillion calls inbound from India or the Philippines are NOT coming from an Apple store in Texas. When that jackass (whoever it is) that spoofed my number and pissed some people enough that they called me, the various phone companies knew the call did not originate from my phone.

TL;DR: Lame excuse is lame.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not a solution. I'm already unhappy at how prevalent text spam has become. Car in for an oil change? You get text alerts! Schedule a dental cleaning? You get text alerts! Buy movie tickets? Here's a text alert!

Fuck off with that noise. If it's something where I actually need a notification (e.g. car in the shop; we know the problem is x; we can solve it y or z, which do you prefer?), then CALL ME to check. Don't blow up my phone with pointless text spam!

I know some people like getting text alerts for some things, but I really hate it. There's no way to prevent unsolicited texts, and getting them to stop is like pulling teeth.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

Junk calls were never a problem in the past because phone calls were more expensive before. They are a problem now because it is possible to make lots of calls cheaply (especially with "robots"). We don't want to increase the cost of most calls, but we do want to increase the cost of objectionable calls. So create a *NN code that the callee can send to the phone company after they hang up that adds a dollar to the bill of the previous caller.

If you get a legitimate call, they they don't pay any extra. If someone wants to help you pay off your non-existent school loans or whatever else, you get to express your displeasure.

The good thing about this solution is it does not require any changes to the phones. Only the Operating Companies need to upgrade the software on there Switches. Thus the solution will work for all customers: Smart phones, Dumb Phones, even POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service - i.e. land line) phones. Note: It is only a software change on the switches. There is no need for any additional hardware.

A few details:

One has to be careful about where the extra dollar goes. You can't give it to the phone company, because they will find ways to increase the number of junk phone calls. You can't give it to the callee since some will start tricking people into calling them. You can't send it to charities as fake charities will be set up so that people can trick others into calling them and collect the money that way. Probably the best solution is to send it to the treasury of the national government. There no one will profit personally from the money and it probably won't be a significant enough percentage of income to induce fraud.

The phone company itself will be on the hook to remit the money if it can't be collected from the actual caller. Note that since the phone company knows who the actual caller is for all calls (even when they submit fake caller ID info to us) they can cut off callers who are accruing excessively large debts. (Or give the the options to pay their bills early and/or prepay their bills.)

Those who are charged by this mechanism need to be told on their bills (or possibly earlier in the case of commercial customers) which of the numbers that they called fined them. This more than anything else will actually get you placed on their "Do Not Call" list. The rest of us need the info just in case one of our friends or family real don't want us to call them after all.

It would be best if a law were established that would prohibit companies from charging their customers/clients/etc a fee for utilizing this mechanism for encouraging people to write rather than call or abusive bill collecting companies will insist on charging their marks for having the audacity of expecting to be treated decently.

There should be no exceptions to whom you can apply the charge to or there will be no end to those seeking exceptions. Incidentally, there is legal precedent for this. There is a form you can fill out at the post office which says that a certain mailer sent you pornographic material and you wish them to be banned from sending you anything in the future. Naturally cases arouse where the mailer disputed the characterization of their missive as pornographic. The case reached the Supreme Court which ruled that the recipient of the mail gets to decide what is and isn't acceptable.

So it should be with our phones.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[sydbarrett74]

THIS. It's kind of like IBM during WW2, selling to both the Allies and the Nazis. Most corporations will take a dollar from Satan. With this robocall spam, bet your arse the telco's are padding their profits and will be loth to do anything that costs them even this ill-gotten filthy lucre. The solution has to be legislative as well as technological. As far as the former, don't hold your breath.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Bert64]

There are millions of possible phone numbers, and thanks to number portability and roaming you can't easily aggregate the numbers. You'd need to hold a huge database, and perform a lookup each time a call comes through to verify that it's coming in from a peering connection with the correct telco. You'd also need to keep track of intermediate telcos routing the calls between yourself and any other telcos to which you aren't directly connected, not to mention handling cases where an outage results in calls being routed a different way.
You also need to cater to situations with legitimate spoofing of cli - eg when a company has lines from multiple suppliers but wants to present the same cli so the people they call can recognise it and call back.

And then you still need to trust the intermediate telcos not to spoof numbers belonging to their downstream peers...

It would be extremely expensive and difficult to implement, and a reduction in spam calls would also mean a reduction in revenue for the telco. The end result of this would be higher costs for end users.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Bert64]

How would they know the originating country?
Telcos are not all directly connected, there are often intermediate telcos - and telcos which operate in multiple countries...

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

we'll start seeing cellphones that do internet ONLY. and the telephone will be dead.

Yeah, okay. That's probably fine.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

2FA can likely be handled by a telemarketer or scammer much more easily than dear old grandma, or grandpa. If an older relative with little technical skill were to dial your number from a POTS line, how would they be able to receive the text, write the text down, and then enter it in? And hopefully they are not still using a rotary dial telephone to do this.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

I give callers a menu with Asterisk - press 1 to be connected, press 2 to send me a voicemail. That's plenty of Captcha. We haven't heard from a telemarketer or received unwanted voicemail for the last 15 years.

Re: for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

one should read *BREFORE* hitting

Loves it.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[green1]

I disagree with you on almost every point, except the part where you state that it would mean a reduction in revenue for the telco. That part is real.

The rest is complete hogwash. And that's coming from someone who works for a telco.

You don't think they already have a database and perform a lookup each time a call comes through? They do manage to bill the right person despite it being SOOOOOO difficult to figure out who's calling.

There may be millions of possible phone numbers, but telcos know which network to route them to. When I call my neighbour who's a subscriber of the same telco I am, the call never leaves the carrier's own internal network. Yet if someone claims to be my neighbour when calling in to the network, they happily pass it along, even though they know it couldn't possibly be a valid CID because my neighbour is their customer, and they know that.

Worse yet, I often get spam calls that are spoofing my own number. The modern switches don't even have a facility for making a call like that, so it's pretty obvious that one's not legit.

Sure there are reasons why a company should be able to spoof an outgoing number to be another one they own, but the key is it should be one they own! CID was a ridiculous system right from implementation. The whole idea of allowing the end customer to dictate what it says instead of leaving that with the carrier was a disaster waiting to happen.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Bert64]

When a call comes in from a link to another telco your telco doesn't bill the end user, they bill the peering telco. Your local telco doesn't know or care which of the peering telco's customers originated the call, and the call could have come into that telco via another peering link.
Each telco can only bill the lines which are directly connected to it, they in turn can bill along the chain until reaching the end customer.

CID is left to the carrier, with most telcos end user lines won't have the ability to set arbitrary CLI or will have that ability heavily filtered, but this system relies on trusting the carriers and clearly many such carriers can't be trusted.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[green1]

So they bill the peering telco, but they still can't figure out that the number that peering telco is claiming is from WITHIN THEIR OWN NETWORK???

Sorry, I don't buy that level of incompetence as a technical defence. There is zero excuse why the CID of a calling party should EVER show as my own number, or a spoofed number from my local area which is served exclusively by my own carrier.

Re:for every crime there is a law

[Anonymous Coward]

call someone with Signal, WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram and a bunch of others

I keep hoping those companies will one day evolve to create a unified network like the telecoms accomplished ages ago. Imagine having to have a phone line from every single provider in the world just to be able to reach everyone.

Always pick-up

[Anonymous Coward]

... to databases that store such records ...

So, a third-party service converts a number into a name? How is spoofing possible then? If a call-originating device is sending out an alias, why can't it just send (say) "Microsoft" instead of a fake number that must be converted to a fake name?

When I originate a phone call, the tel-cos are providing me a service, (displaying my name to the recipient), but they pay me? I'm surprised their TOS hasn't enabled over-charging me.

... even when no one picks up.

You're saving the scam-artists, debt collectors, tele-marketers, their money. Always pick-up with robo-diallers: I say "please wait" and wait for them to hang-up.

Re:Always pick-up

[Anonymous Coward]

When I originate a phone call, the tel-cos are providing me a service, (displaying my name to the recipient), but they pay me?

Yeah, that part confused me. I've certainly never seen anything to reflect that on my phone bill.

Re:Always pick-up

[jrumney]

This must be a US "feature". Around here, you get a caller id converted to a name if it's in your phonebook, or on Android there's an option to let Google search for a company to match the number to. There is no third party service run by the robocallers that is selling databases of phished contact details back to the phone companies.

Idiom

[Anonymous Coward]

>"It's slow nickels, not fast dimes" for scammers
That doesn't sound like it's supposed to be a saying, but apparently it is.

Is this a paid promotion for WSJ?

[alzoron]

The article is apparently submitted by: "Sarah Krouse, reporting for WSJ:" and there's no link to a non-paywalled source. At least have the decency to mark this as a paid promotion if that's what it is.

Re:Is this a paid promotion for WSJ?

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why I won't move my GitHub projects to SourceForge.

Re:Is this a paid promotion for WSJ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats slashdot, you've gone from being an influential tech website to being a dumping ground for paid media spam masquerading as articles, and unhinged "FUCK DRUMPF" spam masquerading as a comment section.

The people behind robocalls...

[hyades1]

It should be legal to hunt them...no season, no limit. In fact, there should be a bounty.

Re:The people behind robocalls...

[dwywit]

Legitimate charity calls get my polite attention and perhaps even the purchase of a lottery ticket - I once won a "consolation prize" from the local rural fire brigade, and that made me happy*

Scammers get trolled (personal best was 20 minutes and ended with "Mike" from "Windows Technical Department" screaming at me), political "vote for me, opposition candidate is a scumbag" calls have exactly the opposite of the desired effect, and surveys generally are accepted.

But yes, scammers should be hunted down, tarred and feathered.

* three smoke alarms, a fire blanket, a backpack, two large towels, and a Garmin GPS.

Re:The people behind robocalls...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't agree on that. It should be government regulated.
Use that nuclear arsenal to something useful ;)

Problem with scammers are that they usually don't even reside within the country (or, the automated parts at least) they are targeting, so local laws usually can't be applied. In order to really combat the problem there is a need for international regulations.

Re:The people behind robocalls...

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump is not the head of a phone company. I'll bet he does not have to deal with anything regarding bad phone lines and telemarketers. As such I doubt he is concerned about it. He will need someone to go and officially and tell him there is officially a problem. In other words, if you think it is such a big problem, become a polition to get things changed. If you are right, you will be elected.
In regards to your personal problems, there are a few possible solutions:
- If you are recieving phone calls at all hours, I would check your local laws and then the phone company. Many countries have laws about when you can be called by telemarketers. Report them and get them blocked
- Look into changing your number. Numbers get recycled, and you may have a number that is on many lists. changing your number may alleviate your particular problem
- Your phone company may have a message service. Unplug your phone, get some sleep, plug it back in when you wake up and check messages. Do you need to be contacted 24/7? A cell phone or pager might be a better option.
- Use a mobile phone. This may not stop telemarketers, however there usually is an option to whitelist known numbers.
- See if your phone company will whitelist numbers.

Re:The people behind robocalls...

[Anonymous Coward]

3 and 4 are redundant as all humans are stupid. its not just an american problem.

Re:The people behind robocalls...

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been a problem LONG before Trump was even known to the majority of Americans

Re:The people behind robocalls...

[Linsaran]

Sounds like you could really use some time away from it all. Why not take a cruise!

Re:The people behind robocalls...

[Anonymous Coward]

so the TL;DR is humanity is stupid?

Re:The people behind robocalls...

[hyades1]

Excellent point.

paywall. tl;dr

[Anonymous Coward]

just like the old 900# scams, long distance scams to 1+10digit dialed "north american" numbers (e.g. some caribbean islands), and scammy local telcos charging absurd call termination fees (this was a big deal in some markets back in the dialup days where a greedy dialup provider owned or got kickbacks from the clec that provided their incoming numbers)...

caller id is also a fucking scam. instead of a free exchange of data between telcos to provide this feature, origin telcos (or a data clearinghouse) charge terminating telcos to access caller id data on a per call basis. the scammers have deals with their clec or line providers to share that revenue and cash in a little bit on every call, answered or not.

Simple answer

[imidan]

phone companies pay small fees -- typically fractions of pennies -- to databases that store such records. Some of these fees are handed back to the caller.

Knowing nothing else about the problem, I suggest that phone companies stop contracting with databases that hand fees back to the caller, or else make it hurt. If AT&T and Verizon declare a new policy to pay their fee less an amount equivalent to whatever the database hands back to the caller, the practice will end double quick. The database suddenly gets a big incentive to stop those kickbacks, and the profit motive for the scammers dries up. This, without any loss of income on the part of the phone company. The databases can't exist without the patronage of the phone company, so the phone company has a lot of power.

Re:Simple answer

[Wycliffe]

The databases can't exist without the patronage of the phone company, so the phone company has a lot of power.

Not only this but the database is mostly obsolete. I haven't had a cell phone that used the callerid database for probably 10 years. It shows the name if they are in my contactlist but not the name of people not in my cellphone's local contactlist. I'm assuming callerid might still be used for landlines but who has landlines these days? Everybody I know uses cellphones for personal and voip/pbx for businesses.

It doesn't even work

[imidan]

I can't read the article because of the paywall. But I can say I don't even see any caller ID information for 99% of the spam calls I get. All I see is a phone number. It's usually a fake phone number (I assume because it's my area code and prefix plus a random 4), but there's no name associated with it. If my phone company is paying anyone money for the "service" of displaying a fake phone number to me when I get a call, then maybe they should rethink that.

Re:It doesn't even work

[antdude]

Interesting. I see Caller IDs on landlines most of the times from robocallers.

Kickback

[Anonymous Coward]

Do do-not-call registers give kickbacks to the assholes that make do-no-call registers necessary in the first place?
How is this NOT illegal?

Stupid America

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do the called person has to support part of the communication fee ?
This was/is/will forever be just plain stupid.
Why do (stupid american) telco just drop it ?
In Europe (at least in France) 100% of fee are supported by caller.
So yes they can try to trick you but
if it's a spam company they will try to fool you so that you call back an overpriced number, you can sue them.
if it's a legitimate company you can sue them it if they're calling you despite the fact you registered yourself on a govt operated do not call list.

   

Re:Stupid America

[ledow]

America have always had it backward.

I pay NOTHING for any unsolicited call that makes it to my phone. There's no way to make a call to me that doesn't cost some amount of money to someone somewhere. But it's certainly not me paying.

The only way to get me to pay is to try and trick me into dialling a number for whatever reason. Which ain't gonna happen unless it's a 0800 (free) or 0845 (local rate).

Why on earth would you charge someone - who's already paying monthly fees or whatever to keep the line active - for daring to use your service to receive a call, especially if anyone in the world can cause that charge to the end-user without their consent? Ridiculous.

As such, my phone stays silent of any unsolicited calls through the vast, vast majority of the year. I just received 2 texts from a credit card company to tell me their systems were down and I'm annoyed at it and looking up how to make them stop. It's really that abnormal.

My phone number is unchanged for 15+ years and been transferred through several phone companies in that time (so prime opportunity for it to "leak"). It's the number for my bank, etc. so it's in a lot of databases, but I don't get spam calls or texts.

If I ever do (rare), then it's always from a withheld number or a number that - when I Google - pops up on all the anti-spam sites detailing others experience when answering those calls. "Oh, yes, this is actually British Gas, it's genuine", or whatever. Guess whether I answer that or not, or whether I then just it to a "spam" contact with silent ringtone and auto-refuse the call.

I stopped using landlines many years ago, but pretty much it's the same there. Register for the proper services, tell people to bugger off, never tick the "you may contact me by phone" box. If it annoys, literally it costs pence to change your number.

I manage the switchboard in work too... where the phone number is 20+ years old and has gone from analog, to ISDN, to SIP over the years. The number of duff calls is really, really low and usually just companies who found the phone number online and are touting for business. GDPR is going to cut that in half, at least. We don't actually have to block any numbers that come in, because it's just not big enough a problem. And it costs a pittance to run a SIP trunk capable of supporting a huge number of lines, when you're not paying for every incoming inquiry.

I have actually reported, to police, more cyber-fraud attempts - including chatting on the phone to the finance department trying to get them to authorise a phony payment sent by email - in the last year than I've received unsolicited calls.

Because, when the spammers have to pay, it's not as easy to talk people into quickly buying some junk. We don't have (or even allow) political robocalls without explicit consent, and never have. What kind of nonsense is that?

Honestly... my last unsolicited call on my mobile was... hold on... scrolling... scrolling... September? And that's because THEY have to pay for them, not me.

America really needs to wake up about the "everything is about money" thing, and the "my data needs to be respected".

Re:Stupid America

[110010001000]

You guys aren't understanding what is happening. The person who was called isn't paying anything. That hasn't been true in decades in America (landline or mobile). What they are saying is the CALLER gets money from the phone company when their number appears on a caller id. Personally I doubt this is true but I didn't read the article. The reason you don't get called as much as America is because America is highly targetted due to the high number of English speakers and the relative wealth of the residents. Scammers don't speak German or Polish or whatever. They speak English.

Re:Stupid America

[Anonymous Coward]

America really needs to wake up about the "everything is about money" thing, and the "my data needs to be respected".

LOL yeah right.
"The business of America IS business."
Guess which American president said that.

Re:Stupid America

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in England and having signed up to the do-not-call list I don't get any spam calls. If anything England probably has a higher proportion of English speakers than the USA, in fact the language is even named after us!

Re:Stupid America

[PPH]

Why do the called person has to support part of the communication fee ?

I don't pay to receive calls on my land line. Cell phone is different, but that's one reason I maintain a basic landline. Someone needs my phone number (watch a cashier throw a hissy fit if there's no phone # on a check) but I don't want them calling my cell. I can't really stop them from calling, as my providing them a phone number establishes a 'business relationship' exemption from the do no call laws.

Re:Stupid America

[Anonymous Coward]

It's $.10/call to receive on a prepaid. Prepaid for light users is the only sanely priced plan. That ought to be changed.

Re:Stupid America

[Bert64]

If you're in the uk then 0845 is not local rate at all, it was always called "lo-call rate" and are actually extremely expensive to call from mobiles.
From a landline their cost is based on what local rate calls cost in the 90s, today they are expensive even from landlines.
Also the recipient of the call receives a kickback from the call charges, which is why so many companies use them. This actually gives them an incentive to waste your time on the phone for longer.

There is even a website called saynoto0870.com which was dedicated to finding alternates to 0845/0870 numbers for people who wanted to avoid the excessive call costs.

Re:Stupid America

[Anonymous Coward]

How is the caller supposed to know what the charge will be for calling some random phone number? How am I to know what the "mobile code prefix" is for every country? My company got a $5,000 bill for a single conference call when a contractor chose the "call me" option to his mobile phone. So we disabled that otherwise very useful option. Because of one "caller pays" jerk. The owner of the mobile will know exactly how much is being paid for a call, and should bear the responsibility of taking the call if it's expensive.

Also, as another said, recipient doesn't pay in America anymore anyway. Nearly all mobile phone plans are "unlimited minutes" now.

Re:Stupid America

[toddestan]

If you are prepaid, then you do pay when someone calls you. Likewise, if you have a limited number of minutes, those minutes are used when someone calls you. The only consolation is that if you don't pick up, you don't get charged. But if they leave a message, you could end up paying when you call your voicemail to check/delete them, though at least on my pre-paid plan, calling voicemail was no charge.

The spam texts were annoying though, as each received text was 1 minute, and there was no way to turn them off. At least spam texts are still pretty rare, though I'm expecting that will change at any moment.

Re:Stupid America

[Anonymous Coward]

This is America. We invoice the caller and the called ...and we charge them a fee for the invoice.

Similar to online advertising click fraud

[nicolaiplum]

This is a very similar business model to online display advertising click fraud. They are causing hits on a service that then pays themselves per-hit from someone else's money.

The remedies are similar too: look for outlier usage patterns and terminate the contracts of those people.

Re:Similar to online advertising click fraud

[Antique Geekmeister]

As long as the losses are small enough, spammers will persist. They don't have to make a profit, and in the long term usually do not. Their clients have to _believe_ they can help make a profit, enough for the spammer to invest in the work of spamming. This caller-id cost recovery is, I'm afraid, merely a reduction in operating costs for the spammer: it's not a profit center. As such, reducing its abuse seems unlikely to make any significant change in spam.

Why not cache the caller id?

[misnohmer]

Robocalls make tons of calls, one after another or many in parallel. Once a phone company identifies the caller, why not cache that information, even just for 24hrs? One fee per phone company per day isn't going to make any robocallers rich.

I'm a fucking genius ... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject. I am a fucking genius because I can run ping on linux not as root
Crazy right, but here I am able to do the impossiable
All you fags can't which is why you should run my incredible APK hosts file engine version 77.839#^#W*+++ now for linux
If you don't or disagree with me you are a fucking ne'er-do-well and I will fucking fuck your fucking face up

Headline contradicted by summary

[gdr]

The headline says "Robocallers Win Even if You Don't Answer". Summary says "it helps offset the costs of making the calls". So if you don't answer (and therefore the scammer doesn't get any money from you) the scammer makes a loss on the call, they don't "Win".

Re:Headline contradicted by summary

[PPH]

Sounds like when you receive a call and you have caller ID, a lookup is done in some third part database. Paid for by your phone company. The payment is split between the database owner and the caller.\

My VoIP line displays the calling number, but no further identifying information. So I imagine that no db search fee is being paid. I can maintain my own whitelist of people I know and the rest just remain unknown.

Re:Headline contradicted by summary

[Waccoon]

So if you don't answer (and therefore the scammer doesn't get any money from you) the scammer makes a loss on the call, they don't "Win".

What about answering machines?

It's fun...

[Nicole Evans]

'Hello? 911? I'm betrayed by the boyfriend, he is a fraud and deceives people for money, block his number.' So it will be, or what?

Do they win if I don't have a phone number?

[HalAtWork]

Good luck with that

The jokes on them

[Anonymous Coward]

My primary phone is a VoIP line and doesn't have caller-id because I don't pay for it. It also detects spammers and redirects them to a "This line is disconnected". I do however have to pay for the time used to answer the phone which means spammers directly cost me money. Fuck off, assholes!

Re:The jokes on them

[Drethon]

My primary phone is a VoIP line and doesn't have caller-id because I don't pay for it. It also detects spammers and redirects them to a "This line is disconnected". I do however have to pay for the time used to answer the phone which means spammers directly cost me money. Fuck off, assholes!

My phones are Verizon mobile phones, caller ID costs extra which isn't worth the cost. That said, this article means what to me (other than being paywalled so I just read the summary)?

Re:The jokes on them

[rickb928]

My phones use T-Mobile service, and get Caller ID and the new 'Scam Likely' identifier. Landlines and VOIP are so passé.

Definition of stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of these callers spoof the phone number anyway. Are the phone companies really paying them to display a fake phone number? The money is making it to the right person somehow, fake number and all.

Impersonating me again pussy? OK... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

I said all I have to say here (& you RAN as you stalk me by unidentifiable anonymous posts or impersonate me) https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12190270&cid=56731102/ you disgusting little punk.

APK

P.S.=> One day, I'll find out WHO & WHERE you are & fuck you up... apk

Re: Impersonating me again pussy? OK... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Just create an actual account if you want to avoid people impersonating your ephemeral persona. Duh.

One way to discourage them from calling

[Vermonter]

Next time you get a scam caller, pick it up. Talk to them. Play along. See how long you can keep them on the line before letting them know you are just wasting their time ("Feel free to call back whenever you want me to waste more of your time!").

The biggest expense for telemarketing scams is having a live person talk to you. And if they get no money from you, that time spent talking to you is completely wasted. If enough people do this, the scam becomes unprofitable, and the scammers give up. Their only other choice is to start removing numbers from their database of people who are known time wasters.

I propose a website where people can post recordings of their calls, and people can be ranked based on how much time they can waste talking to live scammers. Unless there is a serious government crackdown (which would be difficult and require multiple nations to do it), this would be the best option for fighting back.

Re:One way to discourage them from calling

[aaarrrgggh]

This used to work, but not any more for the egregious offenders. It only hurts the "legitimate" call centers trying to renew your paper subscription or some other menial task.

The robocallers have bots on the other end, and drop most of the calls they make anyway.

Re:One way to discourage them from calling

[110010001000]

There is a website like that (Youtube). There are entire channels devoted to that. Search for "lenny robocall" for some hilarious ones.

Re:One way to discourage them from calling

[Vermonter]

It should be easy enough to tell within 5 seconds if a telemarketer is legitimate or not. If they are trying to renew your paper subscription, just tell them no thanks and ask them to take you off their list. If they are "Calling from Microsoft because we noticed a virus on your computer", then go nuts.

Any legitimate cold calls should be honoring the national do not call registry anyways.

Re:One way to discourage them from calling

[aaarrrgggh]

Nobody honors the do not call list anymore. This on my cell phone as well.

Re:One way to discourage them from calling

[green1]

Any legitimate cold calls should be honoring the national do not call registry anyways.

You're funny.

To start with, half the world is exempt from that, specifically the worst offenders (political parties and charities), and in my country for some inexplicable reason, newspapers are also exempt.

But beyond that, even "legitimate" businesses still call me all the time (assuming you can call furnace and duct cleaning companies legitimate, as those seem to be the bulk of the non-exempt callers that get through to me,) I do however report all of them to our national regulator, and surprisingly, I even had the regulator call me to follow up at one time as they were apparently building a court case against one of them. (They may be able to spoof CID, but if it's a business that actually wants to do business, they need to give you a real way of contacting them)

Caller pays fixes this

[Anonymous Coward]

Make every call cost $0.10 when over 50 calls a day are made.
$0.20 for every call over 100/day and keep raising it.

Profit is good

[fluffernutter]

In a world where we need toys that bench real fire, we also need robocallers. Everyone has a right to profit after all.

Re:Profit is good

[Anonymous Coward]

In a world where we need toys that bench real fire, we also need robocallers. Everyone has a right to profit after all.

What in god's name are you trying to say. What point are you trying to make? Are you drunk again?

Re:Profit is good

[fluffernutter]

The point is, if we don't stop someone from profiting because they are immoral, this would is going to be a very shitty place. All these calls for robocalling to stop means nothing, because your inconvenience and annoyance means nothing.

agreed

[nten]

It sounds like that is exactly what is happening though. I only get numbered spam. Also, I seem to get less than my friends and family. I think it is because my number lists as a landline instead of a cell. But that is just speculation. I don't get spam texts either, or is that still a thing?

Re:agreed

[imidan]

I believe I've gotten a few spam texts over the years, but so few that I could probably count them on my fingers. I get a lot fewer spam calls these days, also. I used to get two spam calls every day. One of them was reliably at 7:30 in the morning. A loud ship's horn and then "This is your captain speaking..." which went on to suggest I'd won a cruise. The other was notifying me that the warranty on my car had or was about to expire (my car was around 15 years old at the time, and had never had any warranty the entire time I'd owned it). These days, they never seem to leave messages, so I don't know what they're about.

Re:TFA is paywalled-use firefox

[schwit1]

Firefox has add ons to get around pay walls

Damn...

[rickb928]

This is as ugly as the toll-free COCOT scams of the 90s. Is there no escape?

Voice mail another acknowledgement

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of us have voice mail attached to our numbers too. Even if you do not answer the caller knows the line is a active one. With spoofing numbers becoming very prevalent it also does little good to block numbers. This is something where the telecommunication industry needs to step in and require more accurate calling credentials and start blocking known offenders and do so in a way like spam email.

Re:Voice mail another acknowledgement

[green1]

Great idea, all that's missing is any incentive whatsoever for the telecommunication industry to care. They make money from phone calls. They don't exactly have any incentive to reduce the number of calls on their network, and they don't care whether or not they're legitimate.

I'm afraid I don't see any of that changing without regulatory requirements. All of the technical solutions I've seen are dead easy to implement (compared to the scope of their business). What's missing isn't the means to make a change, it's the desire to do so.

Re:Seriously, it's 2018, get a whitelist/firewall!

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot.

Jolly Roger Telephone Company

[Anonymous Coward]

Let their bots talk to your bots!

http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/

I look forward to telemarketers calling me.
Sometimes the bots can get past the robocall part and get a real human on the phone.
My record is 12 minutes.

Re: Jolly Roger Telephone Company

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the best way currently on the market to smash into the profits of telemarketers. Everybody should use this.

Re:Jolly Roger Telephone Company

[j-beda]

Let their bots talk to your bots!

http://www.jollyrogertelco.com... [jollyrogertelco.com]

I look forward to telemarketers calling me.
Sometimes the bots can get past the robocall part and get a real human on the phone.
My record is 12 minutes.

A very nice service.

Making money?

[tomservo84]

So, can I just call one of my cell phones from my landline millions of times and start making money? WTF is this? Why does the caller make anything?

Charge the caller

[Nkwe]

If it cost 10 cents (or some small amount) to place a call, robocalls would greatly be reduced. Provide an option for the receiver of the call to press a key to cancel the charge so legitimate person to person calls don't have to cost the caller. Use the money to support universal service, E911, charity, or whatever.

Easy solution: adhoc numbers in large address spac

[Miamicanes]

1) Set aside an entire IPv6/32 prefix for North American VoIP (and other prefixes, for other regions). Instead of today's 10-digit phone numbers, you'd get a /64 prefix to subdelegate to yourself as you like... give everyone who calls you a unique 128-bit number, via some API that simultaneously whitelists incoming calls to that number and identifies them to you going forward. Start getting spammed by calls to a number you gave out to some business whose customer database got harvested? Block it, and let that business figure out how to get in touch with you going forward at their own expense.

2. Declare the aaaa:bbbb:cccc:dddd::0 number to be the "public" one, but treat it as a mere gateway to a rich API that can be used to enforce arbitrary rules dictated by the called party (with a TLS-like protocol and legally-standardized format for unambiguously communicating those rules to the calling party). For example, I might decide to charge $100 to callers who reach me by voice, $10 to callers who leave voicemail or send an "urgent" SMS-like message, or $1-5 to callers who leave "non-urgent" text messages I can peruse at my convenience (caller chooses amount they want to pay, with messages in my incoming list sorted by payment amount in descending order). Called parties CAN opt to refund those fees on a call-by-call basis, but would be obligated to do so ONLY under terms they pre-disclosed to the caller (which could legitimately include, "entirely at my personal, arbitrary discretion", leaving it up to the caller to decide whether it was worth accepting those terms & the dictated up-front charge).

This neatly solves the problem of businesses that need/demand a number from you -- generate one & whitelist it in one easy step, retaining the ultimate power to cut them off at the first hint of that number's abuse.

We'd also need laws prohibiting businesses from trying to strong-arm customers into refunding charges for marketing calls made to them. Say, allow companies to refuse to do business with anyone who doesn't provide them with a valid number, but prohibit them from demanding refunds made to the customer's public number (including calls made by the collections dept... if they have a valid claim, let the courts handle it instead of trying to pawn off the job on the debtor's friends & family members).

There's no need to trust the identity of calls to the non-public numbers... the address space is so sparse, it would be nearly impossible to discover numbers within it by blind dialing... especially if the FCC mandated exponentially-increasing delays between call attempts after dialing attempts to invalid numbers that extended (at reduced timing) to ALL numbers collectively managed by a telephony service provider (coming up with a formula that slows down all dialing attempts from customers of a service provider who fails to police and punish its own customers for spamming attempts). The idea isn't to make it impossible (which is itself impossible), but rather, to throw enough speedbumps to make it too expensive for spammers to try and evade by being shitty customers to multiple providers. Eventually, providers themselves will decide that certain customers are too toxic to keep & will shut them out of future service.

You could even set up rules to automatically hand off incoming calls to the called party's own server for custom handling. For example, I might charge $100 for blind incoming calls, but reduce the fee to $10 if the caller plays "Simon Says" with the dialpad (or some more sophisticated captcha-like time-gated barrier requiring active participation that can't be easily automated). (10 years ago, this worked brilliantly for me using Asterisk with VoIP to screen incoming calls before ringing my home phone, but would be trivial to overcome now using speech recognition if enough people did it to make telemarketers care).

With a system like this, even celebrities could openly share their phone number. Say, you call Tom Cruise, and see the following rule

Re: Seriously, it's 2018, get a whitelist/firewall

[Anonymous Coward]

Voter

Why not secure the phone system?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? Why isn't this secure. It would cut down on swatting and spam and other undesirable behavior. I would think this would be a national security issue given that it could be used to robocall people to push a foreign agenda around US election times.

My guess is money. It would cost phone companies money to secure their system. But it costs them nothing to turn a blind eye to this. Believe me if they were losing money from robocalls, this would have been fixed within a few weeks of the first barrage. Time for the US government to step in and make them clean this up.

You're an aspiring murderer, then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because murder is legalized doesn't make it just. By wanting to kill someone (with the approval of "law," of course) over a mere societal annoyance, you are a wannabe murderer.

Sick and tired.

[NormanHaga2580]

I am so sick and tired of spam calls. Especially on my business cell phone that I cannot afford not to answer. I have been through numerous scanning services and they all fail, I have made noise with the cell company and I get a song and a dance. Seems to me the solution is rather simple. Ping back the number listed in the caller ID, if you do not get a busy signal, then drop the call before it rings through. Sooner or later I will start working on that.

Here's an easier solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Drop SS7. Use only IPv6 addresses.

Seriously, does anyone posting know their own MAC address off the top of their head? How about IP address - the real one connected to your router? Yet here we all are, communicating.

Re:Here's an easier solution

[sydbarrett74]

This is actually slowly happening. Telco's are switching to Diameter, which is a part of the System Architecture Evolution platform, which is all-IP.

Simple Solution:

[Anonymous Coward]

From Pratchett's _Soul Music_
Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats—and then people were suddenly queueing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.”

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

(captcha : 'decrees')

How the *bleep* do you acheive human dignity

[rsilvergun]

by dehumanizing people? You might be over reacting just a _tad_ bit. Ignoring that these are nowhere's near the worst humanity has to offer (they're not even in the same zip code as guys like Hitler & Stalin) you threw in some disturbing tripe about weeding out the weaklings (speaking of Hitler...). Is this the kind of stuff that gets modded +5 on /. now? I mean, I know we're not supposed to complain about the mods, but seriously?

Re:How the *bleep* do you acheive human dignity

[mapkinase]

> I mean, I know we're not supposed to complain about the mods, but seriously?

Actually, you are. It's even institutionalized in the form of meta-moderation feature. You probably haven't heard about it because you are an imbecile reddit reject who never even got a chance to get to that feature.

Re:Easy solution: adhoc numbers in large address s

[j-beda]

Seems like a good system. I don't know if I would call it "easy" however.

A Simple Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Junk calls were never a problem in the past because phone calls were more expensive before. They are a problem now because it is possible to make lots of calls cheaply (especially with "robots"). We don't want to increase the cost of most calls, but we do want to increase the cost of objectionable calls. So create a *NN code that the callee can send to the phone company after they hang up that adds a dollar to the bill of the previous caller.

If you get a legitimate call, they they don't pay any extra. If someone wants to help you pay off your non-existent school loans or whatever else, you get to express your displeasure.

The good thing about this solution is it does not require any changes to the phones. Only the Operating Companies need to upgrade the software on there Switches. Thus the solution will work for all customers: Smart phones, Dumb Phones, even POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service - i.e. land line) phones. Note: It is only a software change on the switches. There is no need for any additional hardware.

A few details:

One has to be careful about where the extra dollar goes. You can't give it to the phone company, because they will find ways to increase the number of junk phone calls. You can't give it to the callee since some will start tricking people into calling them. You can't send it to charities as fake charities will be set up so that people can trick others into calling them and collect the money that way. Probably the best solution is to send it to the treasury of the national government. There no one will profit personally from the money and it probably won't be a significant enough percentage of income to induce fraud.

The phone company itself will be on the hook to remit the money if it can't be collected from the actual caller. Note that since the phone company knows who the actual caller is for all calls (even when they submit fake caller ID info to us) they can cut off callers who are accruing excessively large debts. (Or give the the options to pay their bills early and/or prepay their bills.)

Those who are charged by this mechanism need to be told on their bills (or possibly earlier in the case of commercial customers) which of the numbers that they called fined them. This more than anything else will actually get you placed on their "Do Not Call" list. The rest of us need the info just in case one of our friends or family real don't want us to call them after all.

It would be best if a law were established that would prohibit companies from charging their customers/clients/etc a fee for utilizing this mechanism for encouraging people to write rather than call or abusive bill collecting companies will insist on charging their marks for having the audacity of expecting to be treated decently.

There should be no exceptions to whom you can apply the charge to or there will be no end to those seeking exceptions. Incidentally, there is legal precedent for this. There is a form you can fill out at the post office which says that a certain mailer sent you pornographic material and you wish them to be banned from sending you anything in the future. Naturally cases arouse where the mailer disputed the characterization of their missive as pornographic. The case reached the Supreme Court which ruled that the recipient of the mail gets to decide what is and isn't acceptable.

So it should be with our phones.

robo calls to lan line

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to ask the name of their company - so I can Avoid ever doing business with them Lately I am trying to fake being the answering machine as I am tired of missing calls from people I actually Gave my number to .. a.t.&t Must be selling our information!
paying for a 'service' = pay for pain

Yes, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... can I make more via that scam than the Bitcoin-mining scam?

TAKE THE CALL.

[Anonymous Coward]

We've been doing it wrong.

Don't hang up, don't refuse to answer. Take the call.
Seriously, take the call. For every minute we can keep the line tied up we put a dent in their profit.
There are 330,000,000 of us and only a hand full of them. We can win this. IF we all TAKE THE CALL and tie up the lines as long as possible. It's easy. It's even fun if you make a game of it.

Put it on speaker phone. Get to the human and let them make their pitch. Ask a lot of questions.
The more of their time we can waste, the more expensive it is to run this kind of operation.
"What's the name of your company?"
"What are you selling?"
"You sound so nice. Do you like your job? Is it something I can do?"
"I don't understand, can you explain all that again?"
Etc...

Of course, never give them anything they want.

We already waste decades of collective time each week playing dumb phone games. Why not play this one with me and do the world a favor. Take The Call. If everyone did it, trust me, the calls will stop.

Pass it on. Start a campaign. Take the call.