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Number of Robocalls Placed in the US Surged By 50 Percent in the First Half of This Year (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader has shared an NBC report, which explores the state of robocalls in the United States. The report, which shares several anecdotes, also cites data from YouMail, a company that provides voicemail and call-blocking services, according to which the number of robocalls placed nationwide increased by 50 percent from February to July this year. From the report: Robo-dialed and unwanted telemarketing calls were the top consumer complaint to the Federal Communications Commission last year, and they are again this year. This puts those complaints ahead of billing disputes, service availability and program indecency.
Not all robocalls are bad. Some, like appointment reminders and flight updates, are usually welcome. But robocall scams, such as the wave of calls that targeted Chinese communities this spring, can be harmful. According to news reports, more than 30 consumers in New York City were tricked out of an estimated $3 million by callers pretending to be from the Chinese consulate and demanding money to settle a criminal matter.
According to YouMail, scams made up about 40 percent of the 4.4 billion robocalls placed to Americans in September. Not all area codes are equal: Phone owners with a 404 area code (Atlanta) on average received 68 robocalls in September. That's much higher than the next-worst area code, 202 in Washington, D.C., which got an average of 49 robocalls the same month.
Not all robocalls are bad. Some, like appointment reminders and flight updates, are usually welcome. But robocall scams, such as the wave of calls that targeted Chinese communities this spring, can be harmful. According to news reports, more than 30 consumers in New York City were tricked out of an estimated $3 million by callers pretending to be from the Chinese consulate and demanding money to settle a criminal matter.
According to YouMail, scams made up about 40 percent of the 4.4 billion robocalls placed to Americans in September. Not all area codes are equal: Phone owners with a 404 area code (Atlanta) on average received 68 robocalls in September. That's much higher than the next-worst area code, 202 in Washington, D.C., which got an average of 49 robocalls the same month.
I sometimes answer these calls trying to keep them on the phone as long as possible. Yesterday I answered a call offering me wonderful health insurance options.
I pressed 1 to say I was interested. I answered the question of my zip code of a bogus one in my area. The caller verified the zip code was in NY and stated "You should know that you can't purchase health insurance over the phone in NY". I didn't know that as I have insurance through my employer.
I responded with "Why did you spam call a NY number then?" The helpful agent called me a name and hung up.
That explains those calls I was getting to my Google Voice number. I was trying to record them so my friend could translate but could never get my record app fired up in time.
At least Stacy with travel rewards speaks English. I just keep pressing zero until she goes away or transfers me to a real person that I anoy with my interest.
Or are the scammers just trying to get our voiceprint to bypass the new "your voice patterns are stored to secure your account details" BS that credit card companies are now rolling out?
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I am getting multiple robocalls a day though, thank goodness for spam call blocker apps that keep almost all of them from reaching me... starting to think about a complete whitelist approach, as terrible as whitelists are it may be the only way to weather the storm.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nothing -- that's the problem.
Worse is when the call "appears" to be coming from your phone number. Really? How am I supposed to block that? And aren't the telcos flagging the spammers doing this? Oh wait, because they don't care about spam as long as they get paid. /sarcasm
Nothing, really. I recently got a new work phone, and while I have hardly ever used it and never put the number out in public I get a significant amount of spam calls on it. The majority are in what I believe to be Chinese, which in all honesty makes them more amusing than annoying.
I don't even answer my land line anymore. it's just for calling out. It's always a robocall coming in.
Now my cell phone gets 5 a day. Since I do bussiness on my phone I sort of have to answer numbers I don't know. I loath this invasion because it's so disruptive.
What I want is an answering service that
1. asks the caller to press a specific digit if they are human and know me.
2. A single button on my iphone that reports the caller to the Feds or anyplace that could class-action these mofo.
I don't want to have to cobble that together. I want it built into the android or iphone as a universal feature. If it was universal we stand a chance of making a dent in their bussiness model.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I got got irritated and wanted to waste their time too. I got an English speaking person with no accent. They sounded like a US citizen. That's what bothered me the most. This crap should be shut down by now.
Most of these are from India. The Indian govt does nothing to crack down on these scams. Sanction India as a country, watch it get cleaned up overnight. Heavy handed but the govt doesn't seem to care because they are in on it.
Robocalls, telemarketers, et al are the reason I just quit answering my phone.
Unless the number shows up as a known number from my contacts, I just let it go to voicemail.
I don't even bother to try anymore.
We really need a whitelist app that functions like an ACL. If the number isn't on the list, it goes
directly to voicemail without ringing.
Question is: Will the phone makers even allow such an app to exist ?
The surge was only 50%?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Not all robocalls are bad. Some, like appointment reminders and flight updates, are usually welcome
If you want to send me an appointment reminder or flight update, just send an SMS.
I should add that I don't want those features from a third party because I'm not interested in sharing my calling receiving habits with anyone other than my telephone provider. THus I want the phone to handle the intercept and reporting itself not route my calls to nomorobo or someone who is making money off knowing who I take calls from. Yes verizin probably also monetizes me but they also charge me for the phone too so I think they are less inclined to burn me since selling me out egregiously is not their main profit center.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Against my better judgment, and for the first time in months, I actually answered a call from an unknown number a few days ago. The call was coming in on my wife's phone, which I was holding for her at the time as I waited for her to finish up with whatever it was that was indisposing her. She's been getting multiple robocalls every day, so I was expecting more of the same. Honestly, I'm not even sure why I answered, since I was absolutely convinced it was a robocall. Maybe I was just bored.
Pausing the show I was watching on my tablet, I tentatively raised the phone and said, "Hello", intentionally withholding my name or any other identifying information that could be sold for profit or otherwise used by someone unscrupulous.
"Hello, is this Mr. [my last name]?", came the reply from a real human being speaking in a perfect American accent. Talk about odd and unexpected, especially so since they were asking for me specifically, but they were calling my wife's phone.
"Yes, this is he."
"Oh, good. We've been trying to reach you on your phone for the last 10 minutes, but the call hasn't gone through. This is the nurse's station at the hospital. Your wife is out of surgery and awake. You can bring your things from the waiting area and come back to see her in room Blue-3 now."
Right. I was supposed to be expecting a call from an unknown number...
many many decades ago I was a telephone solicitor. The worst thing you can do for these people is try to keep them on the line. Don't think about hurting the poor slob. If you make sales less lucrative the companies will have to pay these people more per sale. They will earn the same in the end but the employers will be hurt by using a spam model.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
How would you report the caller? The number is spoofed.
You should really watch the movie "Sorry to Bother You". It's a dystopian telemarketer movie.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
How would you report the caller? The number is spoofed.
You collect 5000 examples of this spoofing, then you sue Verizon for allowing spoofing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Democrats trying to drum up support... all year I've been getting 3-4 robocalls per week from various democrats looking for support against Trump or donations or stumping for votes. Probably 2-3 text messages per month too.
Robocalls are annoying but they rely on the fact that most people will hang up or ignore the call. The "take me off you list" option just gets you on another persons list, so I've discovered the best way (sans legislation) is to answer the call and press '1' immediately then '2' and put your phone back in your pocket. This will get you connected to a call center and waste about five seconds of their time before they hang up. It requires almost no effort to do this and imposes a slight penalty. If more people actually do this, it will have serious impact on their bottom line.
Simply ignoring robocalls wont fix the issue.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
after governor fuckshit got elected in wisconsin, and went all republican on the fraud laws, getting a lot of calls from there.
companies pay for "leads" which are generated by robo calls. When they get sued by the local Attorney General they say "We had no idea our vendor was engaging in Robocalls, such shock. You'll have to take it up with them as we did nothing wrong".
Europe has lots of laws that require businesses to police their vendors. In America folks say the laws are unfair and they don't pass. This is the result.
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I use an app on my android to route all numbers not in my contacts list to voice mail.
My voice mail is a 90 second long screed about all the circumstances under which I will not return a call. It seems to defeat most automated calls since I rarely get a message.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
What I want are three things:
1: US telcos to step in and stop CID/ANI spoofing. Every other country in the world, if you get a phone number, it is authentic. You can't just fake numbers from abywhere. This is a trivial step for them, but they just won't bother since it doesn't bring them cash. Stop the spoofing, so robocallers can't keep faking their numbers everywhere they go.
2: Ability to copy known good contact phone numbers from my phone's contacts to the telco. Any numbers not on that list are given a message, then press a random number to proceed. Wrong number, insta-hangup.
3: A Do Not Disturb mode with the telco. Calls that are not from registered businesses or on the contact list automatically go to voice mail, and the voice mail alert doesn't get set until the next morning. Add PIN functionality so contacts dialing from a different number can get through.
The vehement increase in these this has essentially destroyed the value of voice calls. I just keep my phone's ring set to "off" at all times, because of the 8 phone calls I got yesterday, 0 were legitimate. But at least I can rely on my text messages being safe. But once the scammers realize nobody answers their phones any longer, you can be sure robotext messages will start arriving. I might as well turn off my phone at that point.
What amazes me is that anybody still does this. Sure, I can imagine a few scammers trying this for a short while and getting away with it. But how many scammers are out that the problem is this bad? Even the most gullible person must be reaching the point where they don't even pick-up any longer unless it is from a number they know.
68 is barely over 2 calls a day. I get ONLY half a dozen A DAY if I'm lucky! A dozen or more A DAY is commonplace! It's reached the point where I'm blacklisting numbers whenever they are reused. I have to unplug my phone when I want to sleep!
I gotta say, the ones that leave voicemails, filling up my mailbox, are the worst! And I pay per minute on my cell plan to clean them out.
These spoofed # scam calls are devaluing the telephone.
I know a good amount of people, myself included, that simply don't answer their personal phone anymore because of these calls.
For every 1 call that is a friend, expected or genuinely good to receive, I get 9 that are spam. My phone rings all day with spoofed numbers. One of these scammers robo calls is now leaving me voice mails too which means I can no longer ignore them, as I have to listen and then delete them or my vm box will get full.
I am seriously considering deleting a phone from my life and going email only. txt -> email and email -> txt is straightforward for every mobile carrier these days, right?
I found an app called MacroDroid where I was able to have actions happen depending on if a number is in my contacts list.
1. if a number I'm being called from is not in my contacts it changes the ringer to silent and disables vibration.
2. after a missed call it changes the ringer back and turns on vibration
I wish this was part of Android itself but this will work for now
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
Who TF still answers unknown or blocked phone-numbers nowadays?
(I mean beside actors and screenwriters)
Your kids us Whatsapp or messenger, your friends too ...
Are people afraid to miss a call from the famous Nigerian Prince?
I'd like to log that 2018 is the first year I started receiving spam SMS. Not a lot, but a few. I'd also like to report, I have stopped telemarketers from calling me.
My secret? Abusive behavior. Lots of swearing and belittling the human on the other end of the phone, encouraging them to question their life's choices. They stopped calling.
And no, no sympathy for telemarketers. You sign up for that job and call me, I will run you into the ground.
I gotta say, the ones that leave voicemails, filling up my mailbox, are the worst!
Can't you just let it fill up and leave it at that? I have yet to see a human listen to, or intentionally record, a voicemail.
For some reason phone companies don't let you disable voicemail or make it hard to do so, but since you (at least here) don't pay for storage, you can just ignore it.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
One of the better call blockers, free of charge to it's users.
http://dsweb.straighttalk.com/...
Callcentric has incoming call filtering capabilities that work quite well (if you enable them). When I check the logs I see numerous calls that were sent to voicemail (my preference; other actions are available) and usually, though not always, those callers don't leave any voicemail. Non-spam non-scam calls get routed to my cell phone.
If the number isn't in my address book, I just swipe it to voicemail. If it is important, they will leave a message. If they don't, it goes into my block list. 99% of the phone numbers I get that start with my area code and my prefix are spam anyway. I've had my same number for over a dozen years, so I know there isn't a lot of them left, so they are obviously SPAM.
Doesn't google voice have an option for something like this?
Or ... i'm 99% sure they did at one point. It had an option which required callers to announce themselves then would ring you with 'XYZ is calling, do you want to accept'. If they didn't answer the prompt though I don't think it would pass the call to you at all.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
1. I don't think you know much about telcos ... since my still-limited knowledge tells me that preventing 'spoofing' is not nearly as easy as you claim. Also, is it spoofing if my company assigns an arbitrary number to my outbound call? What if it's an arbitrary number from within our DID pool? Etc. etc. etc. There are MANY legitimate uses for many different aspects of this. It's just annoying when people mis-use it.
2. Plenty of call filtering services. Pretty sure you could find one on google in less time than to write this point.
3. Your phone does this already with DnD + exceptions. Well, unless you somehow don't have a phone with Android or iOS. And the wonky pin-mode you suggested is just silly and no one remembers phone numbers, much less PINs these days...but IIRC DnD can be set to allow a call through if they call multiple times back-to-back such as that lost-phone-emergency situation.
So there you go. Early Christmas for you.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
I knew it was out of hand when I got a call from my own home phone. I was a state away, so I called my local PD to make sure no one had broken into my house !!! I have a landline, but wonder why....the home phone is rung 4x per day, spam calls all. I can't totally dump it, the cell is spotty here, but now that I can use wifi for my cell phone, the landline's days are numbered.
No one needs to spoof.
Just don't deliver a number. Caller ID gets an "UNKNOWN" tag and the customer can decide if it want's to answer "UNKNOWN" or not. Phone company must, for free, allow customers to block "UNKNOWN".
Businesses will probably accept "UNKNOWN" most other people likely not.
The place to make this happen is congress, so the present or next FCC commissioner can't kill it.
The phone companies make too much money from spammers. It will never happen.
I had about 1 commercial call since I had my cellphone number. I have had it for, I think, 10 to 15 years. And that call was from a company I had a contract with.
I live in belfium and although it it possible to add it to http://www.robinsonlist.be/ s (legit) marketing companies will not contact you, I have not. I have done so for my postal adress and it seems to work.
The thing is that calling will cost the caller, not me. So cold calling is not as efficient. Just cold-calling where you have not opted in is also not allowed.
I know. Why is the governement stepping in here. Stupid EU people doing laws for the people, by the people.
What you try to do is a technical solution for a social problem.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I have yet to see a human listen to, or intentionally record, a voicemail.
Then you're not paying attention. I get and leave VM frequently. I'm often on conference calls, and can't drop to pick up an incoming call from my disabled mom or mother-in-law, or doctors office, or one of the ~50 people I supervise. I have to clear out my old VM about once a month just to keep it available.
Just another day in Paradise
Scammers can go die in a fire.
My phone numbers are on the do not call list. I get robocalls all the time; when I pick up these calls I tell them I'm on the do not call list so I know they're low life scammers (to which rather than disconnecting they start cussing me out, proving my accusation to be true) and invite them to consume copious amounts of strychnine, because suicide is far more honorable than being a fucking scammer and they'll be doing humanity a favor. Alternatively I'll play along and then after a bit I tell them I know they're scammers and while I've kept them tied up in a conversation I've kept them from scamming suckers. Another approach is to read Trumpster/Deplorable racist rants (based on their accent) I have bookmarked, hoping to demoralize them. Blocking their numbers doesn't work due to CID spoofing.
CID spoofing has become a big problem because it's trivially easy (in fact you can do it on most (all?) smartphones). I occasionally get calls from people claiming I called them marketing crap, so obviously someone used my phone # in their CID spoofing. No, I didn't call them. I tell them about caller ID spoofing and how it works but they are usually unconvinced. I end up blocking their numbers so I don't get repeated calls from people who choose to remain aggressively stupid.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Yes. It works well.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin