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Spam Calls Jumped Over 300% Globally in 2018 (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: According to the yearly report published by Stockholm-based phone number-identification service Truecaller, spam calls grew by 300 percent year-over-year in 2018. The report also found that telecom operators themselves are much to blame. Between January and October of this year, Truecaller said, users worldwide received about 17.7 billion spam calls. That's up from some 5.5 billion spam calls they received last year.
One of the most interesting takeaways from the report is a sharp surge in spam calls users received in Brazil this year, making it the most spammed country in the world. According to Truecaller, an average user in Brazil received over 37 spam calls in a month, up from some 20 spam calls during the same period last year. According to the report, telecom operators (at 32 percent) remained the biggest spammers in Brazil. The report also acknowledged the general election as an event that drove up spam calls in the country. As in Brazil, Indians were bombarded by telecom operators (a whopping 91 percent of all spam calls came from them) and service providers trying to sell them expensive plans and other offerings.
Spam calls received by users in the U.S. were down from 20.7 calls in a month to 16.9, while users in the U.K. saw a drop in their monthly dose of spam calls from 9.2 to 8.9. [...] Truecaller also reported that scam calls subjecting victims to fraud attempts and money swindling are still a prevalent issue. One in every 10 American adults lost money from a phone scam, according to a yearly report the firm published in April this year.
One of the most interesting takeaways from the report is a sharp surge in spam calls users received in Brazil this year, making it the most spammed country in the world. According to Truecaller, an average user in Brazil received over 37 spam calls in a month, up from some 20 spam calls during the same period last year. According to the report, telecom operators (at 32 percent) remained the biggest spammers in Brazil. The report also acknowledged the general election as an event that drove up spam calls in the country. As in Brazil, Indians were bombarded by telecom operators (a whopping 91 percent of all spam calls came from them) and service providers trying to sell them expensive plans and other offerings.
Spam calls received by users in the U.S. were down from 20.7 calls in a month to 16.9, while users in the U.K. saw a drop in their monthly dose of spam calls from 9.2 to 8.9. [...] Truecaller also reported that scam calls subjecting victims to fraud attempts and money swindling are still a prevalent issue. One in every 10 American adults lost money from a phone scam, according to a yearly report the firm published in April this year.
A simple Android App sends all calls not in my contacts list to voice mail. Voice Mail is a 90 second screed on all the reasons I WON'T call them back and 90 seconds seems to exceed the time limit on most automated systems.
Only people who really need to talk to me wait through all of that.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Get a premium number.
And if they still want to call, I'm more than willing to take that call and talk with them about whatever insurance they want to sell, about whatever problem my PC has and even about anything else that could trouble them.
For hours, if necessary.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
At first I wondered why the spam operators that run scams were still in business. Don't most people recognize it for what it is at this point when they get a call?
One in every 10 American adults lost money from a phone scam, according to a yearly report the firm published in April this year.
Oh... That's actually a way better chance of return on investment than I expected for spam scams. Also, that's fun to say. Spam scam, spam scam, spam scam.
Sweet app! Lovely way to reduce useless messages. I can imagine using it all the time for all sorts of awful phone calls
I've had my phones set to only accept calls from numbers in my phone book since 2004. Ditto with e-mails.
Add graylisting if you are in a country with non-spoofable caller ID and want to include other non-anonymous callers. By giving a "busy" or other reply the first time, where only humans would retry. Or use a butler system, where somebody you don't know first has to answer something CAPTCHA-like to an automated system, before being put through.
Nowadays, I plan the same thing for the leftover "necessary" snail mail, and for packages too.
My latest trick is to ask them to send round a sales representative (or equivalent).
When they arrive I tell them I'm deliberately wasting their time, I have no intention of buying anything and they can just fuck off. Repeat until they eventually leave.
It really works. I've got rid of some really troublesome companies. One that called me nearly every day for five years hasn't called once since I did it.
No sig today...
You know, I'm afraid I have very little sympathy for Indians being the recipients of spam calls.
Sorry, but India is responsible for most of the spam calls we get, and it's pretty much an entire industry there.
At this point, I'd say about 95% or more of all of my incoming calls are spam, or outright fraudulent. Since most of them originate from India, I have no sympathy whatsoever.
Boo fucking hoo.
Helps if you point your phone at them the whole time, too. As "evidence".
No sig today...
If it a number that isn't in my address book, I just ignore them. If there is no voicemail, the call gets added to my truecaller block list. Same with text messages. I don't know who "Ray" is, but the poor guy has trouble with getting it up, needs to exercise & makes thousands from home.
I try to check the Caller ID against multiple websites to determine if they are spam calls and send them to Lenny. I've had some good results:
Lenny vs Tech Support
Lenny on a 16 minute call with Visa/Mastercard Services
Lenny taking a survey
Lately they seem to generate random CIDs and are getting past my CID checks.
Pure evil. I like to arrange meetings with these individuals during rush hours in places that are hard to get in and hard to get out because of the traffic.
One in every 10 American adults lost money from a phone scam
Now imagine walking down a sidewalk, and every 10th adult you pass being that stupid... :(
Not the Mississippi kind, but real, honest to God, public hangings. Or as the French would say, let the eat their fucking cake already, just give me the head of Alfredo Garcia if he dares!
Scam Artists thrive in an environment where there are fundamental problems in the economy.
People are suffering, so offer them false hope.
People are scared, so offer them protection.
Life is complex, so give them easy solutions.
We have a fundamental failure in our safety net and support systems. So we can't trust our neighbors, government, religion, companies, families, and friends. So we are fighting for ourselves, and desperate for any sort of tool to help.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'll take Things That Never Happened for $1000, Alex
I mean seriously .. stop buying these items and fake services c'mon America your better than this.
Obviously the phone companies could stop this, but they make money selling the lists. But just this year, the pure volume seems to be changing behaviors, both mine and a number of people I have talked to. Everybody is starting to let any number not in their contact list go to voice mail. These companies buying numbers are going to soon realize that they are not as valuable, per call, as they had been previously, as the response rates must be dropping through the floor, and so the price they are going to be willing to pay per number will drop accordingly. At the same time, the phone as a tool to be able to reach out to people you already don't have a connection with is being devalued. This year is going to be looked back on as the year the phone companies shot themselves in the foot. People are just going to increasingly turn to skype-like tools to talk to people they already know, and anonymous contacts are going to be relegated to email spam. Similar problem to snail mail, but that has a monopoly and certain legal requirements protecting it. Many people would tear out their mail boxes if not for a few legally required things that come in every year. People are not going to have that issue with ripping out their phone numbers, using only internet based tools.
Exactly. Spam companies do it all online. There is no in person "appointment".
If you don't know anyone that lives there, I see no issue with blocking entire area codes, or at least exchanges. Wildcard blocking is fun; as I don't know anyone in my same exchange, or even close, I can just block the entire prefix of (area code) + first two digits. No more neighbor spoof spam for me, and no more rings from my poor neighbors to whom my own number got spoofed.
Depends on the company, I guess. And/or if you live out in the boonies.
eg. I did it to a telephone operator/ISP. I told them we'd need to switch three mobile phones plus Internet, needed to talk in person to work out the details, they came around next day.
No sig today...
Exactly. Spam companies do it all online.
What sort of calls do you get? There must be a way to get them to do something that costs them real money.
No sig today...
I went from one or two a week to one or two an hour...
whats really bothering me is if you register here but the list of people or organisation is so large that its almost useless to use. Companies like to hide under the huge list of exceptions so this makes this feature kinda useless.
number 1? I get 3+ calls everyday with numbers I am pretty sure are scammers. So that is around 90/month or 3X brazil. Some leave VM's, if I am not busy I may answer press 1 and wait for them to hang up while the phone on the desk. Amazing how many times some of the scammers say "Hello", "Hello"...
I've seen a huge increase in spam calls in the past year (at least 6 calls over the past two days). Luckily, my cell phone area code is from a place where I only lived for a few years so that when they spoof a number it's always from that area and easy to determine as clearly spam.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
I did this: They we calling selling air duct cleaning. So I booked an appointment and when he arrived I told him to get lost and never call me again. I filmed it.
No it doesn't "depend." Some Indian spammer doesn't come in person.
No one cares, incel soyboy.
Exactly. Spam companies do it all online. There is no in person "appointment".
I don't know, one particularly noxious spam call I got for a while was for air duct cleaning services (they never said the company name in the call, different number every call). Eventually someone would have to come out? Unless it was a scam that just collected credit card info and then did nothing I suppose...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Of course it was a scam. Just like how the IRS doesn't accept Target gift cards as payment.
Cool story Kendoll. You probably cleaned the ducts of his penis before he left.
If it becomes common culture that anybody calling on the phone for money is probably a scammer, maybe we can finally build support for legislation against Bill Collector companies that do not provide any services, the aren't even the companies that people owe the money to, the act as leeches on the economy providing nothing that people intrinsically need. The idea the debt can be sold at a discount is a horrific practice. It encourages and supports the worst traits of humanity
Yup, get those pretty regularly, it's a common scam.
Several years ago I saw a story about this that the CBC ran.
Basically they cleaned the ducts and put in a bunch of hidden cameras. When the company came to 'clean' the ducts, they just rattled around and made noise, but didn't do any actual real work while pretending to.
The guys doing it know full well they're just scamming, as do the assholes from "The Microsoft Service Provider" telling you they've detected you have a virus.
They can't possibly not know. As such, I just go straight to "fuck off you lying sack of shit", hang up, and add their number to my blocked calls.
That scam has been around for years.
I've had people show up at my door claiming to be from "the energy company", so they can insinuate they're from my energy company. One of them talked their way into the house by convincing the wife there was a regulatory change that required us to change the piping in our furnace, which is utterly false.
I happened to be home, thankfully, and it took me about 30 seconds to see through the bullshit and chase them out of the house with threats that I'd be calling the police and treating this as criminal trespass and removing him forcibly from my property in about 15 seconds.
He got the hell out of there pretty damned quick.
At this point, all unsolicited calls, and all door to door sales people in our house are summarily treated as scams and told to fuck off.
I have neither the time nor the patience to try to spend time trying to figure out which kind of asshole is calling me -- being an 'honest' telemarketer is no different from being a scammer in my books, not my problem.
I ask them existential questions, and tell them that I just can't focus on new business until the current business answering this question has been satisfied completely. Then I see how long I can keep them on the phone. Time they spend talking to me , them opportunities they may have succeeded at elsewhere. I actually landed a whole new account one day from inviting a prospective client to have fun screwing with the team working on wasting their time. Nothing builds repoir better then working together on a low pressure endeavor and laughing your ass off together
I'd like to have a way to explicitly reject an incoming call so that it does NOT go to voice mail. While I'm (cross my fingers) lucky that my cell phone doesn't get many spam calls, I don't want to waste my time even deleting their inevitable voice mail.
For my home phone, things got bad enough long ago that I put it behind Asterisk. Checking my CDR, the spam call situation is worse than ever, but they never get past my CAPTCHA, so the phone stays quiet. Some numbers are whitelisted to bypass the CAPTCHA, but anything unknown has to key in a randomly-assigned digit before the call goes through.
I also ended up ditching the landline in favor of VoIP; the VoIP service costs me less per month than what AT&T charged for Caller ID alone.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
According to the yearly report published by Stockholm-based phone number-identification service Truecaller, spam calls grew by 300 percent year-over-year in 2018.
I think it was a LOT more than 300%. I didn't used to get any. Now I get them almost daily. I have taken measures to block as many as I can but really the problem won't be solved unless there is legislation forcing the phone companies to take active measures. I almost never answer any call that isn't from someone in my address book anymore and then they have to go through a voicemail and spam filtering service.
"Just block everything not in your contact list".
Yeah sure, and if the phone number being spammed is for your business which depends on new people calling it, like for reservations? What if you're a freelancer?
This must be the tolerance that I keep hearing the left pushing for.
So only the right is allowed to act like assholes to people they disagree with?
I don't remember the right ever claiming tolerance. But however you slice it, comments like "Republicans are just faggot pseudo-Libertarians." are not tolerant at all. They're blanket statements.
You have never done that, not once. It sounds funny, but only a complete sociopath would enjoy doing something like that. So, quit lying, this isn't twitter.
The U.S. has the technology to stop spammers but the phone companies don't want the government to do anything about it. It is so sick that scammers and spammers get away with this but your phone provider is the real culprit behind why we still have problems today.
If you don't like it write to your congressman and your phone provider CEO and tell them. Either that or just spam them. They're too stupid to realize what is happening so it won't work
spam calls would drop like a rock if they were traceable. I do not understand why it's technically possible (why it's allowed by the operators) to fake callerID. I would cheerfully set my phone to go straight to voicemail for anonymous calls, if I knew that callerID could be trusted.
Uh, must mean "jumped by over 200% in 2018".
100% = 11
200% = 16.5
300% = 22
The numbers don't add up in my anecdotal experience.
Moved US to UK. Used to get shit tons in the states now here in the UK I literally (in the literal sense) got less than 5 this year.