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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

The people behind robocalls...

[hyades1]

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

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.

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".

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?