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Almost Half of US Cellphone Calls Will Be Scams By Next Year, Says Report (cnet.com)
According to a new report from First Orion, nearly half of the mobile phone calls received in the U.S. next year will be scams. "The percentage of scam calls in U.S. mobile traffic increased from 3.7 percent last year to 29.2 percent this year, and it's predicted to rise to 44.6 percent in 2019, First Orion said in a press release Wednesday," reports CNET. From the report: The most popular method scammers use to try to get people to pick up the phone is called "neighborhood spoofing," where they disguise their numbers with a local prefix so people presume the calls are safe to pick up, First Onion said. Third-party call blocking apps may help protect consumers from known scam numbers, but they can't tell if a scammer hijacks someone's number and uses it for scam calls. "Scammers relentlessly inundate mobile phones with increasingly convincing and scary calls," said Gavin Macomber, senior vice president of marketing at First Orion, in an email statement. "Solving a problem of this magnitude requires a comprehensive, in-network carrier solution that dives deeper than third-party applications ever could by detecting and eliminating unwanted and malicious calls before they reach your phone."
But carriers don't feel like doing it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The remnants of AT&T's ancient SS7 are still infecting voice calls today. Back then, it made sense to not authenticate caller ID information because the threat model required physical access to phone company switches and a lot of equipment to implement. It wasn't feasible.
Now that VoIP and packet-switched networks have replaced circuit-switch voice band twisted pair landlines, we still lack a way to enable secure authentication to a trusted root of who is actually calling. The FCC is supposedly looking into solutions, but implementing PKI in the network can prevent these calls from ever getting to people. Many of these scams are on VoIP gateways that have default passwords.
Normally I'm against a lot of government involvement in people's lives, but this is one place where it's required. If Congress could pass the CALM act to end annoying loudness changes in broadcast TV, the passing of which had little economic consequence, then Congress can definitely get their act together and pass a law to do the same for authenticating phone calls using PKI and removing security holes. Inaction in this area already has a tremendous negative economic consequences, particularly for the elderly and other vulnerable individuals who are defrauded systematically and who are typically more reliant on phone services due to their ease of use and familiarity.
The real tell in all of this will be what the carriers do when this is enacted. I suspect there will be tremendous resistance spearheaded by the argument that it will require equipment replacement. I'm not sure that's the case given that the magic is in firmware, but more on the system engineering side. In that case, let them put a deadline down to get their act together. Where there's a will (and a law), there's a way.
>"At least it's still illegal to spam cellphones"
Except it is apparently civil and not criminal. So nobody cares and they go right ahead and spam. Same thing with junk faxes- which are also illegal, and yet only civil. As if someone is going to find and pay a private detective to find out who REALLY faxed, then find and pay a lawyer to maybe find and sue that party, then have to take time off work to do all that and to go to court, to MAYBE get a few dollars or something. It is a total joke.
Unless it is criminal and actually enforced, nothing will change. We need a system where if you get a spam call on ANY line, you hang up, then dial a simple code, and it automatically reports them to the FCC/FTC/whatever, real-time, and they actually DO something about it when it is confirmed by a second report from someone else. But don't hold your breath, that will never happen.
The best we can ACTUALLY hope for, MAYBE, is to close ALL the loopholes that allow people to fake or hide their actual phone numbers and where calls are coming from. At least then, some filtering and blocking techniques might have a chance.
We all get these stupid calls. Indian-based Microsoft support proactively finding a problem on your computer and they have the solution. We heard you suffer from chronic pain, we have things that will help. You've been selected for a free trip to Disneyworld. There's a solution for your creditcard debt. Refinance your student loans to get a lock-in before DeVoss ends the program.
It is all bullshit. We know that.
So why do they keep coming?
Because they freaking work. You get one moron that only goes online once a week on their 56k dialup line at home to check the facebook, they're more than willing to whip out their credit card to take advantage of such a limited time, exclusive offer.
It's that one moron that ruins it for us all. The scammers then make money, the carriers make money, etc., so they are incentivized to call the rest of us looking for more idiots.
I used to get a lot of calls from India. At first I just told them to fuck off but the calls kept coming. Then I tried spending time winding them up but that always seemed like a waste of my own time. The thing is, I spent more than a decade studying psychology so it eventually occurred to me to use that. The question was not how to tell them to fuck off but how to get them to decide to fuck off for themselves. India is heavily honour and family oriented. This is a rough transcript of the last call that I answered, now many years ago: ... [strangled voice] ...no... [line disconnects]
Me: Hello?
Scammer: This is John from Microsoft, you computer has a virus.
Me: Have you told your parents that your job is trying to steal money from people like them in another country?
Scammer: [5 seconds of silence]
The number of scam calls dropped hugely. I like to hope that at least one Indian decided to move on to an honest job instead.