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John Oliver Fights Robocalls By Robocalling Ajit Pai and the FCC (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comedian John Oliver is taking aim at the Federal Communications Commission again, this time demanding action on robocalls while unleashing his own wave of robocalls against FCC commissioners. In a 17-minute segment yesterday on HBO's Last Week Tonight, Oliver described the scourge of robocalls and blamed Pai for not doing more to stop them. Oliver ended the segment by announcing that he and his staff are sending robocalls every 90 minutes to all five FCC commissioners. "Hi FCC, this is John from customer service," Oliver's recorded voice says on the call. "Congratulations, you've just won a chance to lower robocalls in America today... robocalls are incredibly annoying, and the person who can stop them is you! Talk to you again in 90 minutes -- here's some bagpipe music."
When it came to robocalling the FCC, Oliver didn't need viewers' help. "This time, unlike our past encounters [with the FCC], I don't need to ask hordes of real people to bombard [the FCC] with messages, because with the miracle of robocalling, I can now do it all by myself," Oliver said. "It turns out robocalling is so easy, it only took our tech guy literally 15 minutes to work out how to do it," Oliver also said. He noted that "phone calls are now so cheap and the technology so widely available that just about everyone has the ability to place a massive number of calls." Under U.S. law, political robocalls to landline telephones are allowed without prior consent from the recipient. Such calls to cell phones require the called party's prior express consent, but Oliver presumably directed his robocalls to the commissioners' office phones. Oliver told the FCC commissioners: "if you want to tell us that you don't consent to be robocalled, that's absolutely no problem. Just write a certified letter to the address we buried somewhere within the first chapter of Moby Dick that's currently scrolling up the screen... find the address, write us a letter, and we'll stop the calls immediately."
When it came to robocalling the FCC, Oliver didn't need viewers' help. "This time, unlike our past encounters [with the FCC], I don't need to ask hordes of real people to bombard [the FCC] with messages, because with the miracle of robocalling, I can now do it all by myself," Oliver said. "It turns out robocalling is so easy, it only took our tech guy literally 15 minutes to work out how to do it," Oliver also said. He noted that "phone calls are now so cheap and the technology so widely available that just about everyone has the ability to place a massive number of calls." Under U.S. law, political robocalls to landline telephones are allowed without prior consent from the recipient. Such calls to cell phones require the called party's prior express consent, but Oliver presumably directed his robocalls to the commissioners' office phones. Oliver told the FCC commissioners: "if you want to tell us that you don't consent to be robocalled, that's absolutely no problem. Just write a certified letter to the address we buried somewhere within the first chapter of Moby Dick that's currently scrolling up the screen... find the address, write us a letter, and we'll stop the calls immediately."
Why such a long period in between calls? It should be 90 seconds.
Of course it has a business purpose... to get press coverage, publicize his show on HBO, and get more viewers.
Is this happening to anyone else? About two weeks ago we started getting regular robocalls at 6 AM local. (Usually they've waited until 8:30 AM local time.) And then, late last week we got one robocall at 5:15 AM. (I'm on call, so I *have* to answer the phone.) And this is to a cell phone! (We haven't had a land line for a couple years.) This is going beyond annoying, to the point where I'm going to start calling FCC commissioners myself.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I know it's annoying, but it's quite likely that the person who linked to it did not know it was region locked. I know that in many cases I would have no way of knowing and no reliable way to test if it was.
They DO have a legitimate purpose. The people being called are public officials. They are the natural recipients of petitions for the redress of grievances WRT communications in the United States. No law may abridge that right.
Basically ingress filtering. If you are accepting an inbound call from a subscriber, any calling party ANI you pass should match DIDs for which you are the owner.
They know what numbers belong to what carriers so that they can terminate calls to them correctly. I mean, we have number portability and that doesn't work without a database that says which carrier each number belongs to.
If you do this you can go a long way towards killing off robocalling and other scam calls with forged numbers.
I'm sure the more legitimate call center business will get upset, many of them forge ANI for legitimate reasons but this can be pretty easily handled either administratively (by some form or signature from the number's owner) or on the back end with communication between the owner and their provider (so that the owner physically routes outbound calls).
Ordinary business phone systems shouldn't be affected, they're already associated with the DIDs they send out as ANI as well as any base numbers assigned to their phone circuits.
They have been, but those calls have exploded in volume in the last 2 or 3 years.
That is true, but I know for a fact I installed my robo-call blocking apps way before Trump was elected.
It is ALSO true it was enough of a problem when Obama was president, the FCC should have been doing something at that point.
Doesn't mean they shouldn't do something about it now as well.
One fun new trick I've just started seeing in the last few months - calls from *international* numbers where the number ends up looking like a local number - so a call from Greece for example has a country code of "+30". You get a call from 304-298-8442 (not a real number), and if you are not looking closely for the leading "+" in callerID, you don't realize it's international number instead of a number from West Virginia (for example).
Let that soak in fo ra bit - calls are so cheap that even if you start doing something about U.S. numbers. spammers may just move to international lines.
What I would love to see is a discussion of - what CAN the FCC actually do to stop this? What would work? Or does the solution need to come from somewhere else, like congress? Maybe a few spammers wake up to a Seal Team 6 visit, or inside a CIA black site? I'm open to ideas here.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They're political robocalls, and as such they do not need a business purpose.
If only he had some sort of position of power involving communications. He could do something about robocalls.
The reason they report incorrect caller ID is because the exchange that the call is coming from is falsely reporting it.
The only way I can imagine to correct this would be to perform an end-to-end reverse lookup on the phone number that is claiming to be the one calling you and ask the exchange that is directly connected to that particular number if that number is making a call to your number, right now via a handshake protocol not entirely unlike starting a tcp connection.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Oh he said he’s against them but he’s also on record as being opposed to rules that former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler put in place to fight them. Also his current solution is to “urge” the telecoms to do something about them. Perhaps if Pai was head of the FCC he could do more but he simply doesn’t have that kind of power.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It is not that hard.
The phone company know who they're billing when they complete a circuit. They know who every caller on their network is and what numbers they are assigned. The TELCO should be responsible for assigning the id to the circuit. Not the subscriber.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Here's an idea for starters: For each incoming call that has misrepresented caller ID information, you get $10 off of that month's phone bill.
"But the phone companies can't do that due to $TECHNICALITY"
This is 2019, and they can't keep track of 20 bytes of information? Give me a break. They always seem to know who to bill for a call. With this financial incentive in place, they'd figure it out right quick.
If they want to annoy the controllers of the FCC shouldn't they be robocalling Verizon CEO's?
I stopped getting robocalls partway through the Obama administration, and started getting them after Trump took office. It may be coincidence, but it's easy for me to think it's related.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Robocalls LIE about their number. They use random numbers in the same area code as you (often) to encourage you to pick up. They do NOT own these numbers.
What you're advocating would be punching a random person named "Frank X" cause two days ago someone hit you in the dark and yelled "I'm Frank X". Not the most reliable source of information there.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
please explain what the FCC can do?
The FCC should ban number spoofing, unless the company doing it has full legal control over both the calling number and the spoofed number.
Any spoofed call should be required to have a live human available to handle callbacks on the spoofed number, and that human should be required to provide the full name and legal domestic address of the entity that made the call.
There are legitimate reasons for spoofing. There is no legitimate reason for anonymous spoofing without accountability.
I've got news for you. Just like gun laws, there are NO laws that will stop robocalls. The scammers/spammers will ignore anything on the books. The ONLY way to stop them is to hit them in the pocketbook. It has to cost more than a few pennies to call a million people. As long as their computer can call people and their call center people only have to talk to a tiny fraction of those who are likely to fall for their scam, the rest of us will have to endure it. I for one am doing my part. EVERY time I get a robocall, I press 1 to be connected to a real person. The second that happens, the meter is running for the guy calling you. They have to pay someone real money to talk to you. About half the time, I don't even engage them. I just say "WHAT?" a couple of times to make them repeat their script. If I'm not doing anything but watching TV, I will play with them awhile. I pretend I am getting my credit card. I ask them silly questions. I pretend I am old and can't hear. Etc. etc... If everybody did this, the robocalls would stop tomorrow!!!
The FCC should ban number spoofing, unless the company doing it has full legal control over both the calling number and the spoofed number.
Sounds great (and I don't mean that sarcastically), is that better accomplished through the FCC or Congress? Not sure myself. I am sure we need some kind of action.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The reason they report incorrect caller ID is because the exchange that the call is coming from is falsely reporting it.
The only way I can imagine to correct this would be to perform an end-to-end reverse lookup on the phone number that is claiming to be the one calling you and ask the exchange that is directly connected to that particular number if that number is making a call to your number, right now via a handshake protocol not entirely unlike starting a tcp connection.
Actually there is a much easier way to do this. Our VOIP provider for our customers has implemented it. You can't spoof their calls. They require the sent from number to match the actual number if not the call will not complete. We had trouble when they did this with a hospital and a bank who were sending out the incorrect number string with their forwarded calls. Its possible but the companies have to care and for the most part all they care about is selling phone service and not what the people that are purchasing it are doing.
As the saying goes: sometimes you have to swallow the bad-tasting medicine in order for it to heal you.
The bad-tasting thing in this case is not medicine, it's corporate cock. Your willingness to accept it into your throat does not have any bearing on its healthfulness.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Congress should set broad guidelines and leave the technical details up to the regulatory agencies.
So this should be done by the FCC.
And the means of achieving this imperative?
Allow consumers to directly sue the telcos for spoofed calls in small claims court, with a minimum penalty of $500 per call.
I'm actually working with phone switches for a living. There are so many legitimate reasons to change the caller ID, that I really doubt you can come up with a working definition for "misrepresentation".
A hint: Just because the line a call goes out has a phone number assigned to it, it does not mean that the number of that line should ever be used in a call. It could be that this line is just the overflow line for the main line, and thus the number of the main line should be used. There is no warranty that a callback on that technical line number even works, as all calls should be directed to the main line's number. And with the somewhat screwed up U.S. phone number plan (each and every number has to have 10 digits, with 3 of them have to be the area code), you often need a lot of magic to even get a working caller ID. There are many local phone switches with more connected lines to it than the number plan for the trunk line allows. So you have to overbook the numbers your provider gave you.
As usual, a bunch of excuses.
The ID misrepresented if the person making the call is not entitled to use the number displayed. It's as simple as that.
You people have known about this problem for decades, but have done jack squat about it so far. But I'm sure at $10 bucks a pop, smart people like you would figure out a solution in no time. After all, protocol handshakes, whitelists and the like aren't exactly rocket science anymore.
If this problem were really so hard to resolve, it would be an issue in every country. But it's not. The volume of robocalls in European countries is orders of magnitudes lower than in the US. I get maybe one every couple of months. That suggests to me the issue is much more one of political will and regulatory teeth than it is about technical challenge.
Who do I trust to have a better handle on it, John Oliver and the lawyers at HBO, or random anonymous internet guy?
And I don't even doubt you're a lawyer. It is just that your swollen head won't make your opinion as important as the opinions of the lawyers who are involved. They put a lot of work in to make his show even possible.
Why not just make it illegal to even store your phone number without your permission, like it is in the EU?
GDPR means that companies have to get opt-in permission to store your phone number and use it to call you.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I nearly never get robocalls in Germany, none of my friends watching LWT does.
I guess we're using a completely different phone network or technology in Europe.
That must be why universal healthcare works here, too, and cant work in the US :-)