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."

Comments

All of 'em

[fyngyrz]

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.

It's not a phone — it's a pocket computer

Re:All of 'em

[Attila Dimedici]

The spammers count on that sort of behavior by people who are not likely to fall for their scam. When their robocall gets no answer, it moves on to the next and costs them essentially nothing. When I get those calls I spend as much time as I can spare (usually when I am doing something else that does not require verbal interaction from me) keeping a human on the line as long as I can. That costs the spammers money. It doesn't really cost me anything because they are following a script that does not actually require me to pay attention to what they say and just provide an affirmative noise at the appropriate points, right up until they ask for a credit card, at which point I tell them "No". At which point they usually put on another person who goes through the script again. And if I finish whatever I am working on before they are done, I hang up.

Re: Easy to fix

[AntronArgaiv]

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.

Re:Easy to fix

[Solandri]

Nope. For cell phones, most of the world uses the "both parties pay" model (the receiver pays for the convenience of getting a call via mobile). Under this model, because the recipient is paying for the spam call, they have a financial justification to complain to their carrier and require them to block the spam calls, and a legal right to sue the spammer for costing them money. The U.S. used to have this model before most cell phone plans went to an unlimited minutes model.

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.

Another reform would be to restrict spoofing. You should only be allowed to spoof if you own both numbers. This is another "American problem".

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.

Re:Easy to fix

[Jaime2]

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.