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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."
Actually, it would be a killer feature. "Choose Versprint&T Mobile and avoid those unwanted calls"
When I lived in South America (years ago), there were extra costs to call a cell phone from a land line. Not sure it would be a good idea, but the only reason telemarketing works is because the economics are there to support it. Want to stop it, change one of the inputs in the equation.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
All of my cellphone calls are unsolicited and unwanted.
Because anyone who actually knows me knows I don't answer phone calls. My default ringtone is silence. I have actual make-a-noise ringtones for a couple of family members in case of emergency, but (thankfully) no one's tried to call me for an emergency in the last ten years or so. And the fam+friends know better than to make that thing ring for anything else; I'll just bite their head off. :)
AFAIC, The phone system's been outright ruined by spammers. And so far, unlike email, there's no phone call spam filter worth the name.
Text me or email me, otherwise, you go your way, I'll go mine.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
>"Until then, I'll continue to set my blocking app automatically hang up if they're not in my contact list."
Care to share the love with info on what you did/use? First, I didn't think any app could have that permission, so I think it would require root, which rules out use by most people.
But it sounds like you have something similar to what I want (which is doable on a land line, but apparently not on cellular). I don't want a "service" from some third party. Ideally I would like something, non-root, that would silently answer calls from anyone NOT in my contact list and challenge the caller with a simple math problem or something like that. If they fail, it hangs up WITH NO VOICEMAIL OPTION, perhaps with a warning to remove my number from their list. But it still logs the call event WITH NO NOTIFICATION. If they pass, it rings through as normal.
The problem right now is that stock Android is EXTREMELY weak when it comes to anti-call-spam. And almost any option you try, still gives them freaking voicemail options, which are just as annoying as a call, if not more-so, because you still get annoyed by a notification, have to go find the stupid voicemail app, wait for it to load and download the audio, listen to it, then delete it, every time.
I would even be partially happy if I could just have the option to not allow voicemail for dismissed calls. So frustrating.
Within my remarks is a potential 0-spam, 0-coldcall, 0-dunning, 0-buttdialer, 0-random-idiot solution for those adept enough to grasp it.
It's quite possible that group may not include you.
I'm okay with that. In fact, your "who cares" is exactly how I feel you. Isn't that curious?
Cheers. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Extremely easy.
1. Set default ringtone to a single "ding" (as used to announce an SMS or email arrival)
2. Set ringtone for everyone in your contacts list to "old telephone"
3. When phone "dings", check number, answer if it looks like one you were expecting, otherwise easy to ignore
4. Folks in your contacts list will cause phone to ring normally.
Carriers in the U.S. could be forced to cooperate by the FCC. For calls from countries that don't play ball, force the caller ID to display the country of origin.
There are few if any reasons to allow a caller to spoof a number that they don't actually own. Those few could be handled by a call relay or at least a signed legal document accepting responsibility for the spoofed calls.
Calling party pays (and unlimited minutes) frees the spammer from any liability for spamming. They're paying for everything, the recipient pays nothing. So the recipient has no legal nor financial recourse to request a reduction in spam. This is why your mailbox is full of junk mail. Because the junk mail senders are paying for everything, and in fact are subsidizing first class postage.
Spoofing numbers you don't own (as part of spam or a scam) is already illegal. The problem is (1) there's no way for the recipient to figure out who the actual caller from a spoofed number is, so they don't know who to sue or even complain about. And (2) as with junk mail, the spammers make up a significant fraction of phone company revenue, so the phone companies don't want to fix Caller ID to make it impossible to spoof a number they don't own.
With regards to (2), the phone companies are protected by their Common Carrier status, so it's probably going to take a change to phone protocols to prevent spoofing. e.g. Change how VoIP-to-VoIP calls are made so they also send a datagram encrypted with a private key owned by the caller. The receiving VoIP device looks up the Caller ID number in a public database to find that number's public key, and uses that key to decrypt the datagram. If the decryption fails, then it knows the caller doesn't have the proper private key for that Caller ID number, meaning the number has been spoofed, and drops the call. If the decryption is successful, then it knows the Caller ID info is accurate and allows the call to ring through.
Even easier - carriers shouldn't accept a call from outside their network if the caller id is for a number that's inside the network. That would stop 95% of the spam calls I get.
I was really proud one day that I managed to get a scammer to cry in the phone with this exact same line.
Non-Linux Penguins ?