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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.
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.
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.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
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.
It should be legal to hunt them...no season, no limit. In fact, there should be a bounty.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
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.
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.
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.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
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.
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".
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".
'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?
Good luck with that
Twinstiq, game news
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.
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.
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)?
In a world where we need toys that bench real fire, we also need robocallers. Everyone has a right to profit after all.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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?
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Firefox has add ons to get around pay walls
This is as ugly as the toll-free COCOT scams of the 90s. Is there no escape?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
My phones use T-Mobile service, and get Caller ID and the new 'Scam Likely' identifier. Landlines and VOIP are so passé.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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?
Agile Spaceport - You will never find a more wretched hive of scrum and villainy. We must be cautious.
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.
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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.
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
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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
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?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
A very nice service.
Seems like a good system. I don't know if I would call it "easy" however.
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.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
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.