Americans Got 26.3 Billion Robocalls Last Year, Up 46 Percent From 2017 (washingtonpost.com)

Americans are now getting so many robo-calls on a regular basis that many are simply choosing not to answer the phone altogether. From a report: That's one big takeaway from a report [PDF] released Tuesday by Hiya, a Seattle-based spam-monitoring service that analyzed activity from 450,000 users of its app to determine the scope of unwanted robo-calling -- and how phone users react when they receive an automated call. Consistent with other analyses, Hiya's report found that the number of robo-calls is on the rise. Roughly 26.3 billion robo-calls were placed to U.S. phone numbers last year, Hiya said, up from 18 billion in 2017. One report last year projected that as many as half of all cellphone calls in 2019 could be spam.

While many businesses have legitimate purposes for using robo-calls -- think package delivery services, home maintenance technicians and banks -- unwanted robo-calls represent a growing challenge for regulators and telecom companies. In its analysis of a month's worth of calling data, Hiya found that each of its app users reported an average of 10 unwanted robo-calls. Many more incoming calls, about 60 on average, were from unrecognized numbers or numbers not linked to a person in the recipient's address book.

Comments

Baloney

[Major Blud]

unwanted robo-calls represent a growing challenge for regulators and telecom companies

Hardly.....isn't it fully within the capabilities of the telecom companies to stop third-party caller ID spoofing?

Re:Baloney

[olsmeister]

I'm OK with that.

Re:Baloney

[olsmeister]

No, the assholes are the robocallers. You may call this self-defense if it makes you feel any better.

Re:Baloney

[ljw1004]

Hardly.....isn't it fully within the capabilities of the telecom companies to stop third-party caller ID spoofing?

How would that even help?

I get a phone call. I don't know if the number is from my dentist, my bank, my credit card, my doctor, my travel agent, my insurer, my mortgage lender, my employer, my employer's IT/security department, my dry-cleaner, a seller on ebay. Many of these legitimate calls are from out of state. I don't have their numbers in my contact list.

What difference would it make if they were forbidden from using caller-ID-spoofing? I'd still see an unrecognized number. I'd still have to answer it in case it's a message from one of these institutions.

Re:Baloney

[radarskiy]

"a way for a VOIP system to register the IP address with the phone company when it makes the phone call "

The phone company knows who to bill when they complete a phone call. Just impose a near zero call completion fee and hold the phone company liable if they can't figure out who to bill it to upstream.

On average, most callers will net close to 0. In bulk, the net calls could be rounded down to the nearest 1,000 to avoid the effort of chasing the small fry. All that's left are the big fish, and the phone companies have their incentive to keep track of who they are.

Re:Same exchange trick

[Kyr Arvin]

That's pretty good. I suspect in the future, higher-value phone numbers will have other numbers associated with them. IE, scripts will look through Facebook pages, trying to draw connections between people, trying to find out phone numbers. Then those numbers would be sold like they are now, but they could be charged a premium, as spammers could spoof their numbers to be someone you know.

Re:Pay attention stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

ORANGE MAN BAD! Arglbrglaglbrgl!!!Eleventy!!!

Show me on the doll where the orange man grabbed you.

Re:Raise your hand if

[MNNorske]

Caller ID issues have just been growing for years. This is not a "this administration" or "that administration" issue. It's a fundamental flaw in the way the caller ID protocol was bootstrapped onto the existing landline networks. Landline networks were harder to spoof because phone numbers were hard tied to geographical regions and if you spoofed stuff on a landline chances were the landline would get cut off or if you were a provider you would lose access to the network.

Then along comes number portability which gave consumers the right to move their landline phone number to a cell carrier or take it from one carrier to another. And, at the same time the growth of VOIP and suddenly there was no way to say provider X actually does have that number on their network. Because the numbers can bounce all over the place now in terms of ownership and whether they are landline, VOIP, or cellular.

Then VOIP hardware became cheap and easy to implement. Et voila! The perfect storm. This has been building to this point for at least two decades. Now anyone can pass a law saying they have to stop it, but the telecom companies have to come up with a solution of how to stop it that all of them can implement before that will do any good. It sounds like there are some good proposals out there, but for them to work a lot of hardware will have to be replaced/installed and it will take a while.

Taking aim at one administration or another in this case is just not helpful and doing so in such a childish way is not helpful. If you want people to agree that something needs to get fixed on something that should arguably not be political then don't turn it into a political mudslinging contest.