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

[Archangel Michael]

It is, and it would break every VOIP system out there which can set its own Caller ID.

Double edge swords cut both ways.

Re:Baloney

[olsmeister]

I'm OK with that.

Re:Baloney

[agent_blue]

Not really. The way Caller ID was originally implemented, the Caller ID information is transmitted along with the call as a set of ultrasonic tones, therefore any caller and set their caller-id number to whatever they want. This is useful if you are calling from an office that gets routed through a local switchboard.

Some kind of standard is being worked on, but it is a hard problem to implement with the current telepohny network was it exists today

see https://datatracker.ietf.org/w...

Re:Baloney

[AndyG314]

It is, and it would break every VOIP system out there which can set its own Caller ID.

Something has to be done about this however. When >50% of calls are robots or hang ups the system is already broken.

Re:Baloney

[olsmeister]

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

Re:Baloney

[HiThere]

But should a VOIP system be able to set its own caller ID? That's a clear invitation to fraud. Perhaps the system needs to be modified to allow setting a "call back" ID while not allowing the caller ID to be hidden.

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

[Holi]

What do you mean expired? The Do Not Call list is not expired, It's ineffective, but it is still in effect.

Re:Baloney

[Holi]

>The problem is that most of those robo-calls are not US based, so nothing you do here in the US really effects the problem.

I disagree, go after the companies that provide the VOIP to POTS interface. They know who their customers are, they know if they have been abusing the system. If you want access to our phone system, you have to follow the rules, Move enforcement to the places it can work and oversee it with an iron fist. If you are acting as a gateway, you have a responsibility.

Re:Baloney

[Holi]

Because robo-calls are illegal, and if you could identify the companies responsible you or law enforcement could go after them. Having the ability to change your number makes it exponentially harder to track down the origin of the call.

Re:Baloney

[Aristos Mazer]

There's no reason it has to end VOIP systems. We'd just need a way for a VOIP system to register the IP address with the phone company when it makes the phone call and some sort of authentication to say, "Yes, I'm me, so let my phone number appear for people who receive this call." It just has to be built into the protocol.

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.

Raise your hand if

[Anonymous Coward]

You thought the Drumpf administration was going to solve a real problem like this under Ajit Pai. Now, look around the room. Those people with their hands raised are fucking morons. You may put them down now.

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.

Telcos don't care

[orev]

Telcos have 0 incentive to resolve this issue. They get paid every time a call traverses their lines, and they desperately want the wireline phone system to die so they can get out of regulatory obligations, maintenance costs, and union obligations. The only chance they have to allow this to happen is if customers get so annoyed with the service that they cancel, and when enough people cancel they can make the case to shut it down.

Re:Forget Net Neutrality

[HiThere]

While that's malfeasance and corruption, it's not treason. The US constitution specifically defines what treason is, and that's not it. It's only two or three major felonies.

Re:Same exchange trick

[Waffle Iron]

A couple of days ago, they came up with a new one: They called me and spoofed my own number AND name. I guess it worked; I picked it up out of sheer curiosity, but as expected it was a typical robot scam. After they did it again a few hours later, I had to block my own damned phone number.

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:Government "Solutions"

[Kyr Arvin]

Good thing I registered with the 'DoNotCall' registry. I cannot wait for the government to take over healthcare, something much less important :(

The problem becomes when their is no enforcement. Regulations should have teeth, otherwise what is the point?

Spam could make the phone obsolete

[ripvlan]

I rarely answer the phone these days. At home I've turned off the ringer on the land line. On my cell I look to see if it is a known number or not.

Last week I had a repairman coming to the house, and I missed several calls that I should have taken. My insurance company called me with an important announcement - I let it go to voice-mail.

Why? Because 99.999% of all calls are spam/scam calls. That is my new conditioned mindset. If I'm not answering the phone, legit companies need to find a way to get a hold of me. The phone isn't the reliable method.

  Therefore, the phone will become obsolete.

Re:Forget Net Neutrality

[bill_mcgonigle]

How did we end up with a government where no one on either side ever fixes anything?

You have a system where a large percentage of the rulers are psychopaths or sociopaths and they crave power which has to be given to them by voters and to get this they have to promise voters things that they never intend to deliver, and you expect them to get rid of things that they can dangle in front of voters, like stopping robocalls? The politically-desirable outcome is media coverage, not solutions to real problems.

It's a well-known secret that both parties have an agreement to slowly raise the minimum wage below the rate of inflation but to have a big media shit-storm every time to socially signal to "their" voters that they're being represented. The whole thing might be the biggest con in history.

I'm glad to have found a good call blocker that works on Pie; had to update my voicemail to say, "sorry, you're not on my contacts list." Government didn't solve this problem for me, nor did I ever expect that it would. Some dude called Vlad Lee did and he has a Play Store account.

Re:Forget Net Neutrality

[jythie]

When fixing things gets you votes, then things will get fixed.

I'm no longer receiving robocalls...

[Anonymous Coward]

All I had to do was change how I answer the phone. When a person answers the phone, the recipient usually says something like, "Hello?" Most robocallers wait for that and interpret that as being a human on the other end of the line. At that point, it spews out its spiel like, "Your warranty is about to expire on your car. This is definitely not the last time you will hear from us. Press 1 to talk to a human who wants to scam you out of your money. Press 2 to not be removed from the list and you will get another call from us in the next 48 hours once you've had a chance to think about how much you really do want to be scammed."

However, if the person doesn't say anything, the system will wait 15-30 seconds and then automatically hang up. When it hangs up, two things happen: You never hear the scammer's automated message and...the phone number is removed from the calling list, which causes the robocaller to cease making calls. Repeat that process a half dozen times and the robocalls drop off like a rock after that. Pressing buttons or anything constituting an "action" tells the system that there's someone there. Not doing anything causes the system to think nothing is there and that its time is just being wasted. There are plenty of suckers out there, so removing the unresponsive phone number just cleans up the calling list to increase the likelihood of finding a person they can scam/con/whatever. Putting a number on the Do Not Call registry is an open invite to receive robocalls because that means those numbers most definitely want to receive automated phone calls.