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Why Robo-Calls Can't Be Stopped (washingtonpost.com)
"When your phone rings, there's about a 50 percent chance it's a spam robo-call," reports the Washington Post. Now a computer science professor who's researched robo-call technologies reveals the economics behind automatically dialing phone numbers "either randomly, or from massive databases compiled from automated Web searches, leaked databases of personal information and marketing data."
It doesn't matter whether you've signed up with the federal Do Not Call Registry, although companies that call numbers on the list are supposed to be subject to large fines. The robo-callers ignore the list, and evade penalties because they can mask the true origins of their calls.... Each call costs a fraction of a cent -- and a successful robo-call scam can net millions of dollars. That more than pays for all the calls people ignored or hung up on, and provides cash for the next round. Casting an enormous net at low cost lets these scammers find a few gullible victims who can fund the whole operation...
Partly that's because their costs are low. Most phone calls are made and connected via the Internet, so robo-call companies can make tens of thousands, or even millions, of calls very cheaply. Many of the illegal robo-calls targeting the United States probably come from overseas -- which used to be extremely expensive but now is far cheaper...
Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission has been asking U.S. phone companies to filter calls and police their own systems to keep out robo-calls. It hasn't worked, mainly because it's too costly and technically difficult for phone companies to do that. It's hard to detect fake Caller ID information, and wrongly blocking a legitimate call could cause them legal problems.
The professor's article suggests guarding your phone number like you guard your credit card numbers. "Don't give your phone number to strangers, businesses or websites unless it's absolutely necessary."
"Of course, your phone number may already be widely known and available, either from telephone directories or websites, or just because you've had it for many years. In that case, you probably can't stop getting robo-calls."
Partly that's because their costs are low. Most phone calls are made and connected via the Internet, so robo-call companies can make tens of thousands, or even millions, of calls very cheaply. Many of the illegal robo-calls targeting the United States probably come from overseas -- which used to be extremely expensive but now is far cheaper...
Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission has been asking U.S. phone companies to filter calls and police their own systems to keep out robo-calls. It hasn't worked, mainly because it's too costly and technically difficult for phone companies to do that. It's hard to detect fake Caller ID information, and wrongly blocking a legitimate call could cause them legal problems.
The professor's article suggests guarding your phone number like you guard your credit card numbers. "Don't give your phone number to strangers, businesses or websites unless it's absolutely necessary."
"Of course, your phone number may already be widely known and available, either from telephone directories or websites, or just because you've had it for many years. In that case, you probably can't stop getting robo-calls."
It is a nearly-universal business practice: if you are ordering a product or service online, they will require a phone number. The form won't submit unless you put in a valid one.
You really can't refuse to do business with people on these grounds; all competitors require a phone number as well. Further, if you put someone else's number up there, it's fraud.
You can complain. If they respond at all, it will be a roundabout way of saying "too bad."
It only takes one conscientious citizen to humor a robo-spammer long enough to get the real name/contact information behind the call, after which that company can be reported so the FTC can enforce their severe Do Not Call fines.
I've never in my life experienced a robocall. If we can avoid them in Europe, so can the US.
If it didnâ(TM)t make me so angry I would spend more time wasting theirs. I think itâ(TM)s best for my stress is to hang up before saying anything.
It's impossible to guard a number, when at this point they are simply calling all numbers in a valid area code, probably sharing any numbers that even voice mail picks up on...
Almost getting to the point where I wish there was an hour a day I could designate as a time it was possible to call me, that I could set arbitrarily - then the rest of the day have my number reported by the phone company as disconnected.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All it did was move calls to overseas (India being a big one) and by publishing the "Do Not Call" list all they did was provide the callers with a list of numbers that they knew people would pick up if they were called.
Ironically, the people who are bothered the least are the ones that didn't sign up for the "Do Not Call" list.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I use asterisk to screen calls. If it is an previously unknown number a message will request the caller to press a number. If the number is correct the callerid will be added to a whitelist and the call connected.
And lose a source of amusement? I've had the callers crying, screaming, cussing and generally butt-hurt. I mock them with their accent regardless of what it is and insult them in kind. Why in hell do I want to remove that catharsis?
If my so-called smartphone is able to run arbitrary code, then it could answer calls from unknown numbers without ringing, test the caller for humanness (with a message asking to press # to go through with the call), and *then* ring my phone.
Any argument that we can't stop robo-calls because it's "too expensive" is just stupid. The cost of stopping them is miniscule compared to the cost of allowing them.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Whenever you receive a call from one of these scammers do what you can to talk to a live person. This is what costs them money. When I get a robo-call telling me about pack pain medication or having an import message from my credit card company, I always press whatever button I need to push to seem interested and speak with a representative. Then I keep that person on the phone for as long as possible until they give up and hang up on me.
If everyone did this, the overhead of these bastards would be too high to keep calling people. At worse, it would make them limit their calls to known suckers.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I guess in extreme cases (and if your telephone system supports it) you could go to a whitelist system:
Anyone who wants to call you has to give you HIS number in advance and you enter that number as "may call me" in your system. Anyone else gets blocked.
For me personally, it is not that bad yet but I have on occasion wished for a service that would block calls with spoofed numbers. Not those where the caller uses his real number, but those using faked numbers.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I use Asterisk* to screen calls. Any unknown callerid will be put through purgatory. The caller will be asked to press a number and if entered correctly it will be entered to a whitelist and connected. So any valid caller only has to go through this once and robo-calls are blocked unless they guess a "known", whitelisted callerid.
Seems like something as simple as a (cell)phone setting to ignore calls from non-contacts would make a lot of us happy.
Everyone I know is already in the habit of ignoring calls from numbers they don't already know.
If it's a legit call I want, they can leave voicemail, I'll call them back.
This has already been solved on the web using certificates.
Extend it to phones. You call me and present an invalid or incorrect cert, my phone doesn't event ring.
Of course, this requires everyone to have a valid cacert.
They manage to find out enough information to make money don't they? Every single call can be traced... if they wanted to trace them. The key is that there is no motivation to do so. It is just easier to allow robo-calls and collect money from a subscriber.
Every system could implement a technology that when a person receives a robo-call they hang up and immediately dial... say Start or Pound 666... nice number for that shit, and it immediately drops an electronic note to the phone company that the last number that called was a robo. It all goes into a database and now they have at least the exit phone number attached to a business, whether that number is VoIP or Traditional is meaningless. That number itself like an IP address is registered to a business and then you go to that business and tell them... if you keep letting your telephony infrastructure make/forward robocalls we fine you into oblivion or force the telephone company to cut your phone/internet.
The problem is actually very easy to solve, the problem is political and businesses do not want to lose the revenue robo-calls generate. There really are lots of ways to solve this problem. But it will never be resolved because leaders don't actually care about citizens, they just care about your votes. We all can't be William Webster.
If your phone rings, and you don't know the calling number - just let it go into voicemail. If it's important, they will leave a message which you can retrieve at your convenience (or if like me you use Google Voice, the voicemail is transcribed to quasi-accurate text). Almost always it's some marketing scam. Fuk Them.
Notice that people have been moving away from phone calls and email for years now. Robocalls/spam are a large part of the reason why. If those old systems aren't capable of stopping the crapflood, then people will move to systems that are.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Pretty much this. It's surprising how much education I've had to do with people about leaving a damned voicemail, though. I have mobile service through Verizon; the fact that the caller hears the phone "ringing" doesn't mean that my phone is actually ringing. The only way I know for sure that you called is if you leave a voicemail. Doesn't have to be long. "Hey, demonlapin, this is Dave. Call me back, got a quick question for you."
Until Trump came into office, they were.
Today? I doubt there is any effort at all. Ajit Pai testified to congress on the subject and thought it would be funny to make a joke out of spam callers.
The only way keeping your phone number a secret might reduce spam calls is if the current successor to NANPA (Neustar?) takes a currently-unused areacode, then uses it as the prefix for a random 40-digit phone number (approx. number of decimal digits in the largest unsigned 128-bit value), then allows consumers to link an unlimited number of randomly-picked numbers to your "real" one (and allow you to know what number an incoming call dialed, so you could program your phone to ignore incoming calls to your "real" number, but allow incoming calls to one of your incoming 40-digit numbers to ring).
Then, whenever you had to give someone "your number", you'd peel an unused 40-digit number from the metaphorical stack & give it to them (probably, via an app running on your phone).
If a specific incoming number of yours started attracting too many junk calls, you could unceremoniously nuke it & unlink it from your real number. Likewise, since you'd give a unique inbound number to everyone, you could do 'traitor tracking' & punish businesses that failed to safeguard your number.
Random dialing would cease to work, because a robocaller could literally try random numbers for HOURS before hitting a valid one... especially if the system were designed to detect and frustrate such attempts.
The same service could reserve the shorter numbers (say, 12-16 digits) for more public purposes. Say, I might buy a 16-digit number & post it to social media after linking it to a service that charges callers $20 to complete the call (if I answer) & pays ME $15 for answering it if I agree to talk to the caller for at least a minute. We could ALL have the equivalent of 1990s-era 900/976 numbers to give out to the public & use dollars as a tool for screening our calls. I might even set up one number with a $5 charge explicitly FOR telemarketers to call me at, agreeing to give them 5 minutes of my time in exchange for paying me to listen.
Or... I could point one number to a bot that answers the call, then makes the caller play "Simon Says" & spend 10-20 minutes answering captcha-like puzzles for the privilege of making my phone ring (or the privilege of leaving me a message) for free.
Pretty sure that if we had the CIA rendition third worlders who pretend to be federal agents it would stop really fucking quick when Pajeet starts thinking "I might disappear to a black site if I make that call and pretend to be IRS Agent Jack Stone."
If the cellular carriers actually cared.
They could use their monitoring tools to track call levels by number, and assign weights to the caller based on call frequency during a time period.
After weights were assigned to numbers, the carriers could create an "alternate billing rate" for calls originating from those numbers. The actual numbers, not a spoofed caller-id...
Many people don't actually make many calls, it's all texts and other IM services.
Someone could create audio captchas for incoming calls to ferret out robocalls.
Send callers that are not in your contact list directly to voicemail. Don't even ring your phone.
It would be nice to able to set up your voicemail to wait for 10+ rings in your settings) it could slow them down even more.
If it's important, they can leave a message.
Require by law, telcom operators to verify the phone number of the caller is correct. Forget caller ID, just let me block the damn scammers phone number.
You just need a system to credit the person called by ten cents for every call received from the originating party (whether answered, or not).
Even better if each phone owner can establish his or her own price. I'd probably set mine my inbound threshold at 25 cents to see how that goes, initially.
Mostly these small tithes would just slosh back and forth and be largely a wash for many people.
But somehow you need to make sure that your phone company doesn't install a tollbooth and then take a bite of 50% or more on every transaction (which they will surely justify as as a necessary economic response to the lower call volumes).
My favourite is to come on to them. Doesn't matter if it's a man or a woman. Talk dirty. Gets them every time.
I signed the papers on a new place the other day and I'm planning to use Asterisk to screen my calls. Two or three whitelisted numbers, block everything else.
...laura
Robocalls CAN BE STOPPED.
It's the phone companies who can't be stopped! From letting 50% of all calls come from a tiny minority of customers and not flag that as suspicious behavior. And remember, in the USA they charge the chump receiving the call as well. We should end that, how bow dah?
it should cost 5 cents for every call placed. The money would go to the carrier of the person receiving the call and taken from the carrier of the person making the call. It would be up to each carrier to decide how to bill or refund the money to keep this simple.
I can easily afford 5 cents a call (note not 5 cents a minute). And Likely they would reimburse me an other casual callers, just not industrial scale ones.
This way no one has to actively do anything, like report a call. It just snuffs out the tragedy of the commons with a trivial fee.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
My favourite is to come on to them. Doesn't matter if it's a man or a woman.
90% of the calls I receive are neither man nor women.
They are robots.
Some of them are good. I try to trip them up by going off script, and some of them are capable of making reasonable responses and try to steer the conversation back on track.
If nothing else, robocalls are advancing the state-of-the-art in voice synthesis and recognition.
I've said this before, and for some reason tons of people take offense at this idea, but the only solution that I can see is to charge for communication. What I want is a cell phone number and an email that's linked to a bank account. You want to call, text or email me? It's gonna cost you about 5 cents, per communication. Money into my account. Up front. You want to talk to me, you gotta have a real identity, a real bank account in a reputable country and the ability and will to transfer a token amount of money to me.
Nobody who counts will balk at 5 pennies but no scammer or spammer is gonna cough up that much per person. It will shut their business model down cold. Overnight. My phone will stop ringing off the hook with trash calls and my email won't need a spam filter. My friends, colleagues and I will have cleaner lines of communication. Everyone who matters at all wins.
I understand that this would be a 2-way street. I'm willing to pay similar to send things to others. I wouldn't be making money at this.
then there are a lot of people who never get them, to make up for how many I get. For me, it's one real call for every 20 or so robocalls.
Got a comical one last week - deep male voice, saying, "Hi, this is Barbara with the Visa/Mastercard Alert system..."
If this becomes as bad as email spam has become, then it will make the US phone system completely useless. People will simply stop answering their phone unless it is a number they know. However, sometimes you do have to take a call from a number you don't recognize, such as for a delivery or a call from a doctor or small business. When people stop taking those calls, then how will these companies reach their customers?
The referenced paper cost $33 to download and it is pretty much shit - there are good reasons why none of what it proposes will work. The abstract of the paper does not even hint and what the paper is about. Yes we should work on robo calling - follow the work of people like Professor Henning Schulzrinne at Columbia university.
No it's not. The phone companies don't depend on caller ID. They know exactly who is making the call - that's how they know to bill them, or to allow the call to go through if the subscriber has an unlimited calling plan. The problem is they're refusing to share that info with the number being called. The reason they won't share is because the robocallers and telemarketers constitute a substantial percentage of their revenue. And they're afraid that if they let us filter out those calls, that revenue will dry up.
The end-game here is pretty obvious - the end of the POTS (plain old telephone system). It's not like email where you can scan the entire message before putting it in the inbox, thus filtering out spam emails. A phone call actually has to be connected before you can scan its content to filter it out. Meaning either the person has to manually answer and filter out the calls, or we'd have to develop some sort of sophisticated voice recognition voicemail system which would be annoying for legitimate calls to navigate through (would you make phone calls if you had to complete a captcha before each call?). Instead, what's more likely is that we won't have phone numbers anymore. Everyone will instead have some sort of Internet identifier. All phone calls will be VoIP calls. Your ID will probably use some sort of private/public key system so others cannot spoof a call pretending to be you. There will be public whitelists of known good callers (people and businesses) which you can load into your phone, and the phone will allow calls from those numbers to go through. If an ID somehow gets hijacked by telemarketers, it'll be reported and blacklisted within a few hundred if not a few dozen calls, and the telemarketer won't be able to get through to anyone using that ID.
The phone companies will have put themselves out of business by not addressing the spam and telemarketer problem.
I use nomorobo on my land line - works well. On my cell phone I use Call Blocker by Vlad Lee. It blocks all calls from numbers not in my contacts or whitelist. Blocked calls can leave a voicemail.
I think all numbers should get 5 extra digits. Let the PBX or mobile phone decided which of the 100,000 extra numbers to answer and let the rest go to a voice mail system. That would make my phone useful as a voice device again and end the scams.
This used to be true for me. In the last year or so however, 99.9% of all incoming calls on my mobile phone are scams and spams. Sometimes they don't even call but go straight to voicemail.
It is far easier to place a SIT tone sequence at the start of your voicemail. The technique is shockingly effective. https://lifehacker.com/trick-a...
A lot of robocalls I get are because I signed up for something at least tangentially related to the purpose of the call. Usually they apologize and ask if they can send direct mail or email. I don't see any point in chewing out some Indian or college kid. I have a friend who really likes to lay into these people and make them cry. It's funny when it's a really ill-behaved company but why react more than necessary and waste your time distressing some poor slob making minimum wage?
I had written up some patents for going after spam as well.
Simply have customers enter a *number AFTER spam call. While you and I see DiD # (ones that the customers use), the phone company gets a LOT more data. Then once say 100 phone calls from a single number over a day have entered *#. block that # for a day.
TO makes this work fast, have all of the western phone companies cooperate to a central DB. Once they get 100 spread over all of them, then shut down that line. The cost of this coming from places like India, China, Russia, North Korea, will become WAY too expensive in a hurry. After all, paying for a high speed connection is still expensive.
And for those stupid enough to do this from western lines, they should all be turned over to FBI.
But, I doubt that CLECs/ILECS will be in a hurry to do this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Guarding your phone number doesn't work. They literally call every number, they don't care whose it is. Robocalls would be stopped cold is phone calls transferred a dime from the caller to the callee. Or a penny. Robocalls are only economically viable if calls are free to make.
You know WHO they are. break limbs.
Who knows where the calls come from? The phone company. Who makes money for each call placed? The phone company.
Let me file a complaint that a call was bogus, and if shown true I get $1. This will cost the phone company money, seeing as they are the only ones that can fix the problem they will suddenly be motivated to fix the problem.
I only wish my scam calls were 50%, I'm pushing close to 90%. Not because I get more of them than most, but most of my communication is via text messages nowdays.
Pai has threatened regulation if they do not implement it voluntarily. https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
"A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
- 'K' in Men in Black.
One key problem with keeping your phone number confidential is the spammers don't care who you are as long as someone picks up the phone. Lucky for them, phone numbers are very easy to brute force, so they don't have to mine phone numbers from databases. They just pick a target area, string together the country code, regional code, then iterate through the list of the remaining digits... cheap. However, I've been wondering how long it will be until the vast majority of voice services are handled by messaging applications like Facebook Messenger, discord, skype etc which have the capability of bypassing the need for phone numbers entirely. What is keeping our phone tied to the ancient concept of a phone number? I think a short lived invite code to initiate a conversation with a new contact, then whitelisting that contact by a user id for all future calls would go a long way toward preventing robocalls. In my opinion, robocalls are hastening the demise of the phone number for personal use, however businesses that depend on phone numbers will keep the technology alive for decades to come, much like they did with the fax machine.
I get no robocalls. I have the same number since 20 years, or so. In that period I have received no robocalls. I also have received no calls from companies I had no business relation with.
The companies I had a businesss relationship with (i.e. I bought something from them in the last year) stoped the moment I asked them to.
So ckearly it IS possible to stop these type of calls. I also never heard any of my friends having any issues.
Disclaimer: I live in Belgium. I also work ata company and we do robocalls to our own customers who are late with payments. Sometimes we have the wrong number, so yes, unwanted robocalls do exist.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You can't begin to stop them while you're not enforcing laws to do exactly that.
Even then you can't stop them completely but you can certainly punish them historically. The UK ICO has gained powers last year to not only fine those companies (as it always has) but to now push those fines to the company directors even if the company goes bust (the trick was: dial a million people, wait until you're fined, shut up shop, start a new company with the same people and phone lists).
We have a do-not-call list called the TPS. Though not perfect it stops UK-based companies dialling UK-based households. I signed someone up to it who was having serious amounts of junk ringing all times of the day and they went from 2-3 calls a day to nothing. Maybe one a month, from someone in India.
The way to stop the remainder is easy: Hold the telecoms companies responsible. They have caller-ID records, they have traces, they know exactly who actually put those calls in, which provider they came from, and have the power to cut the contracts of those people who facilitated that call, they also know who facilitated the propagation of fake caller-ID and in a position to eliminate falsified Caller-ID. They don't do it, because nobody has made them.
It won't *stop* such calls being attempted. However, there is a way that stops such calls ever getting through, and you can do it yourself, and you don't even need to get your telecoms provider to sell you additional "call blocking" services (you think I'm going to pay you to NOT put obvious spam that you're allowing to happen through to me?). You turn your phone ringer off. Then you set your contacts to ring.
Bam. Problem solved. Now, to ring you, people have to be on your whitelist.
It's at this point people say "Yeah, but what if you're a company / self-employed and need random, unannounced people to ring you any time of the day or night to find work". Then you have an insoluble problem, my friend. You can limit the problem by using automated office services (it costs a pittance to hire a company to provide a business phone number where a real person the other end answers the call, takes down the caller's details and pass it on to you, or tries to ring you from the second they realise it's a genuine caller, while sounding like you have a enormous company with a posh receptionist), voicemail, or just finding a different communications medium (I haven't phoned a company except to complain in years).
Robocalls are easily fixable. You just need a regulator with a vague interest in doing so, legislation to stop the industry gaming the system, and then a small series of technical measures to prevent it interfering with the average person's life.
Case in point: I've had the same phone number for nearly 20 years. I used it for both business and personal use over that time, exclusively (I've not had any other number that I've ever used). I don't have any fancy call blocking. I'm on the TPS. I get a stray call once in a blue moon (anecdotally, my work colleagues in the same office get several a week). I don't answer anything from anyone I don't know. They ring once, don't get an answer (because it rings silently) and then that's it... end of. It'll be another month or more before anyone I don't know tries to ring again.
P.S. Political robocalls are basically illegal without explicit prior consent in the UK. Always have been. We also do not pay for receiving calls (even on mobiles) as some places do, so the cost is all on the sender and not on us. If the cost were on us too, we'd be up in arms.
Since GDPR, there is also a huge axe to hold over their heads about where they got your number from, and whether they can prove explicit consent (they can't just say "well, we got your number from a list from one of our commercial partners" - which partner, when, what authority do you think that gave YOU to call me, did I explicitly say YOU could ring me or even handle that information, who gave that partner explciti consent to share
The PSTN was never designed with this problem in mind. You have to remember we didn't even have caller ID back in the day. The entire phone system needs to be re-designed to deal with this problem. I suggest we make India pay for it.
We'll make great pets
I still have what they call a "land line" although it is actually a VOIP line that I get from AT&T via their Uverse service. Other cable TV providers offer similar lines. I have it set up at the cheapest cost possible and my call minutes per month are limited. I don't remember but the limit may be 300 minutes. That's fine because I only have one person in my life who ever calls me on that number. It's an old friend who lives in a distant part of my state and once or twice a month he might call for a brief 10-15 minutes to say hi and stay in touch.
So why do I still have the land line? Simple. I can give it out to anybody who demands a phone number. I use the Nomorobo service (it's free on land lines) to stop spam calls and it works really well. So now I have a phone number that I can give out to anybody who wants it and it can't receive text messages and spam calls almost never get through. For businesses that demand a mobile phone number, I usually just don't do business with them. If you have to be able to send me a text message for me to buy your stuff, then I will probably go elsewhere. Fortunately that rarely happens. It did mean that I couldn't join the diners reward program at Chilis though. I had a conversation with a waiter there about how I wasn't interested in joining because I wasn't willing to give up my mobile phone number so they could text me and he told me that other customers had told him the same thing. Getting a first text from them is a required part of activating the program so using my land line number won't work.
I understand why businesses want a telephone number, so they can contact you if there are problems with service, and so they try to insure your bill gets paid.
The Robocalls and other Telemarketing problem is really the fault of the Telephone/Telecommunication companies being too lazy with their service.
1. They have the technology to log every call you made to send you an itemized bill.But not to give the receiver of the call the ability to see where the call is truly coming from. I understand the legit use of Caller ID Spoofing. At work we send automated Appointment Reminders for Doctors Visits. The company that send the calls out for us is about 500 miles away from us, but if someone calls back we want the right people to answer the phone. (With our organizations name, to insure the right number was called). However such things shouldn't be done willy-nilley but with some levels of authentication of the phone number holder, and perhaps a modest fee for the administrative expense.
2. Unlimited call plans. Much like the debate on ISP's capping or throttling heavy Internet users, with Unlimited Internet Plans, because some people get abusive with it. We should do this with telephone calls. Really get rid of Unlimited, and replace with plans, that encourage proper telephone use, and not mass robocalling.
3. (OK not fully the Telephone company, and breaks my assertion that it is squarely on the telephone company) But the politics loophole, is damn annoying. What was probably sold to the public, as a way for the officials to alert the public about a major problem, has became a wall of phone calls during reelection season.
4. Trying to work with the Do Not Call registry. Heck the best thing a telephone company can do, is with basic data analysis determine who is a robocall or telemarketing company. Ping it against the Do Not Call Registry, and let the phone number ring 4 times, before going to your phone. This will mean the less calls the telemarketing company can deal making their operation more expensive (unless they obey the Do Not Call Registry) and not bug their customers with unwanted calls, because most calls hang up after 4 or 5 rings.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Oh lookit you, brave defender of the monopoly telcos.
If you ever answered one of these calls or paged through a voicemail they left; you paid something.
If your phone ever rang or buzzed for one of these calls, that's a minor, but real expense.
If any of these robocalls ever held your attention, that's a bit of your life you can't have back.
They should turn it into a source or revenue for the phone companies. When a phone call completes, have an option for the recipient to charge them $1.00. The phone company keeps half.
Even if it was a penny it would probably work...
^^^^
This is it.
The reason that there are a billion robocalls a day is that there is no cost to making a call. They don't pay for the resources they use.
Even a penny a call would stop the robocalls dead. Even a tenth of a cent would stop them dead.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I feel like the solution is to prevent people from spoofing caller ID. If it's a physical phone, the phone company should be able to verify the physical path to some extent. If it's a VoIP number, put some PKI in place that requires connection be signed somehow-- something like DKIM for VoIP.
It's not a complete solution, but you're not going to solve the problem if you can't create some system of accountability.
Not a solution for all robocalls, but a partial one for using up your mobile minutes. My understanding is that some countries issue mobile numbers from different blocks then land lines. And have enforced laws. So it's trivial for a robocaller to identify and remove mobile numbers, and real penalties if they don't. The robocallers police themselves to make sure they don't call mobile and hit hit with penalties and fines.
Now, this doesn't help out-of-country callers, but those at least probably have some costs per call which should reduce the number compared to domestic calls. Even the foreign call center ones probably currently have the calling being done domestically and then connecting you to an open line with a person if someone picks up - that's how to have a lot more robocallers going then agents to cut down on your human costs.
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
Robocalls can be stopped, it's just that the phone company doesn't want to stop them.
We can stop a DOS attack, right? How is this any different? One PBX somewhere suddenly starts launching a flood of calls. Disconnect that line upstream. Boom - done.
It's your fucking network - don't tell me you can't fix this.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
So, I hold telephone numbers in a few countries as it makes sense as part of my business.
Only my American phone receives more than one spam call occasionally.
Consider that my normal phone is registered in one of the richest countries in the world per-capita. My normal phone should be a target. However, the local phone company blocks all calls from numbers which have been reported as sources of spam... or it blocks calls coming from numbers which are obviously spoofed... meaning the "reverse path forwarding check" fails for the number.
So, if for example these companies were using Skype, each time a number gets reported, Skype loses the ability to make calls in this country using that number. as such, if Skype loses enough numbers, it can no longer make calls in this country. So, Microsoft makes a genuine effort to ensure that their numbers are not being blocked.
So far as I can tell (and I have SIM cards from middle east and third world countries like Greece), only America has the problem that they can't get this problem under control. I can't speak about England though, I would imagine that as with so many other things, England is equally bad as the U.S.
It's amazing that the FTC and FCC can't investigate and put and end to these scams in the U.S.. If nothing else, the American tax payers deserve to have wide spread commercials informing the people "Any company making these calls is in violation of the law and any information you gather (including recordings) can help put a stop to them".
I agree with many of the proposed solutions, I hope they come to fruition sometime soon.
Until then, all calls that are not from my contacts go straight to voicemail. If you don't leave a message, then I guess it wasn't that important.
the only one that can fix the problem are the people that make money from the calls, the phone companies. as long as the phone companies make money from this it will continue. and saying the phone company does not know the true origin of the call is a lie.
I have a device called Tel-Lynx, which is a call screener and reliably stops any call without a human being, and announces the ones it hasn't been programmed to allow through immediately. Of course one can program this into one of the Open Source phone systems or a microprocessor, it was just a matter of time for me - too many projects and too little Bruce. Tel-Lynx is sort of clunky, for example it doesn't provide net access to your voicemails or a web interface to approve numbers. But no nusiance calls.
Bruce Perens.
It's very easy to stop robocalls with a combination of two things:
1. Hold people accountable for the calls they make.
It would be very easy for phone companies to disincentivize spam calls by charging them for it. The receiving phone company should be allowed to bill the sending phone company for spam calls. Or if necessary, bump it up the food chain and have a government utility middleman do the collection on behalf of the receiver. And whoever fails to do their job on the way down the food chain of watching the proverbial hen house should get stuck eating it until they collect from the next guy along the way. Make people accountable, or failing that anyone who protects them.
2. Criminalize caller ID spoofing at a federal level.
This makes sure the first part works and punishes people who put on disguises to get around it.
If you try to duck out of the first method of getting stuck with the burden of spamming, then you're cheating the accountabiliity process and deserve penalties. Making it a crime will also pierce any corporate veils and make sure that the human actors responsible for it are the ones that get nailed for it. It will also allow police and the like to investigate it as a crime instead of as a mere civil matter.
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Make sure people who try to duck out on their rightful blame get burned, and you'll have a much easier time wrangling the finances to put the burden where it belongs.
This is so much bullshit. The telecoms arn't doing it cause they can't be bothered to, for a variety of reasons.
All the calls I've recieved have been from "local" numbers. I refuse to believe that it's that difficult for them to come up with a hashing function that takes a number, figures out the telecom that "owns" that number, and see if the incoming route is from that telecom. If not, it's fake. Done. It's an O(1) operation.
The only hard part is keeping the database updated as phone numbers get shuffled around, but even that isn't that bad, provided they just freaking work together and commit to a standard protocol.
Back in the dark ages of the internet (90's) there was this thing called EMail where mail servers trusted everyone. Then unscrupulous people started abusing the system. Any IP address could send email via any trusting server to millions of address's for next to nothing. Servers allowed open relay, didn't check for valid email reply to address's, reverse check domain mx records, etc ...
Then smart people started to implement solutions to stop the spam. Mail server configurations were changed. Open relays disappeared, Website submission forms were fixed. Reply to address's were validated, MX records were checked. Many other tricks were implemented, some active, some passive. Antispam examination of email contents improved.
No one change eliminated the problem. But each change in turn helped reduce the flow.
Today, I get less much less than %1 spam even though I have the same email address that I have been using for almost 20 years.
Now voice communications is facing a similar problem.
With the introduction of voip service providers, it is to easy to initiate a voice call from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world for next to no cost. The traditional phone carriers, for the most part, are able to do very little. The voip carriers are exempt from many of the restrictions that the traditional carriers face. In the days of analog, it was next to impossible to "hack" into the system. Today anyone with a little knowledge, a computer and an internet connection is able to "hack" into the voice system.
If your using voip for your voice communications, you are not going to get any help from the traditional phone carriers. With the protocols so open, the carriers (traditional and voip) are able to do very little. But, over time, changes will be implemented that will improve the system. Little by little things will improve until, 20 years from now, no one that still uses a phone will remember what it was like "Back in the "20's"".
outside of Trumpistan
This has nothing at all to do with Trump. Knock off the TDS.
the caller pays a few cents/min to call a mobile phone
We have more than just mobile phones. We have landlines, too. If it is long distance, the caller pays for both. If it is local, not.
You can tell the difference between local and long distance, or at least you used to be able to. (With the implementation of ten-digit dialing to allow the creation of more exchanges this is harder now.) The bit you are missing is that you can't tell before hand that you are calling a mobile. You can't tell afterhand, until the bill comes if calling a mobile were to cost the caller.
This has been how it works here since the system first began. My first mobile number was in the local area code. That was twenty years ago or more. For routing, specific exchanges were assigned to each mobile carrier, just like exchanges cover a certain geographic (city) area. E.g., area code 541 is routed to Oregon. Exchange 367 is routed to the central office in Sweet Home.
Now we have number portability so it is impossible to know from the phone number whether you're calling a land-line or mobile. Or what state, or what city. (I have a number from a city 2000 miles away for my VoIP line.) Number portability came about through consumer demand, not corporate greed.
If a phone service provider won't shut down the spammers then that service provider should just be blocked by all the telcos in the west. I very much doubt that countries like India would continue to turn a blind eye on this when telco after telco was blocked from calling countries like the US.
Here is another quote, professor
2.93 billion is not a big number. Only 10 times larger than the number of people in US.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
So it's local? Why do I want to answer it?
Let me blacklist all callers, then permit by number or area.
2nd: before it rings on my phone, let my answering machine
pick up and ask them to type in the extension of the person they are
trying to reach. If they don't know your extension, they don't
get through.
There are tons of ways to block unwanted callers, its just that the
phone company doesn't want to give customers the right to block
them -- if they did, they'd lose a huge revenue stream from the callers.
"Ninety percent of those calls will have familiar caller IDs" (from CNN article, referenced in FCC report by third party study)
That means it isn't just companies selling your number, Someone made a connection to your contact list, either on your phone or on a social network. Gee, who has become notorious for letting all this info slip through their fingers, possibly because the other hand was holding cash? FACEBOOK. APPLE. GOOGLE. How often were apps allowed to upload your contact list?
Who wants to correlate Spam calls to either Facebook or app whoring?
I'm not on facebook/social media, and don't download apps like they are, well, the next 'big' social media app....
I get about one spam a month.
There are some services that offer a solution to this, for example, Google Voice lets you turn on "call screening" which requires the caller to say their name and press a button (or something) and then it will ask you if you want to take the call.
That's a hassle, you have to pick up the phone and listen to hear who is calling. Couldn't your smartphone automatically answer the call, provide a friendly voice prompt asking the caller to key in a random three-digit number sequence, upon success which it would say "please wait to be connected" and then start ringing your phone? This would only be for callers not in your contact list. I wonder if anyone has tried to implement something like this.
A big part of the problem with robocalls and spam calls is that people can use fake IDs to disguise themselves.
If there was a way to hold them accountable this would stop overnight. But as long as people can spoof caller IDs to get away with it, it will continue.
What needs to happen is one set of rules to put the burden on the spammers somehow, or failing that, the phone companies that let it happen on their watch.
And another set of rules to personally penalize, at a criminal level, anyone who uses fraudulent identification to cheat their way out of being caught by the first set of rules.
Years ago I quit answering the phone. If someone has something to say, they leave VM. If it's really really important, they send me snailmail. I'm on the gubmint DNC list, but still get ~2/3days and don't care. Smartphones ain't that smart, so I leave it on silent w/a fully black display(saves a lilbit o' battery) until/unless I want it. Sure, I can see where getting a lot of spam calls would suck, esp. if your phone controls you. Me, I'm very un-Luddite, but I refuse to submit to my phone. Heh ;)
Olphart at play. Ruck FepubliKKKans. Welcome to the Worldwide Idiocracy, y'all.