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Almost Half of US Cellphone Calls Will Be Scams By Next Year, Says Report (cnet.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the set-to-silent dept.

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."

6 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Easy to fix by OrangeTide · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But carriers don't feel like doing it.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    1. Re:Easy to fix by omnichad · · Score: 5, Informative

      They don't have to buy blocks of numbers. Just spoof caller ID. It's illegal to do with numbers you don't own, but they're not bothered by that.

    2. Re:Easy to fix by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

      How ?

      Calling party pays.

      This is the way most of the world does it. Spam calls are mostly an American phenomenon.

      Other countries have the "one ring scam", where the caller rings once and then hangs up, hoping a foolish person will be curious and call back. But most people do NOT call back, and the call can be traced since you have to disclose your real call back number. Also, phones in some countries have a feature where the second ring is the first audible ring.

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

    3. Re: Easy to fix by AntronArgaiv · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. All of 'em by fyngyrz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
  3. Fight Fire with Fire by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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:
    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] ... [strangled voice] ...no... [line disconnects]

    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.