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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.
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.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Someone you care about has an emergency where they can't use their cellphone. So they borrow someone else's. They call you, you assume it's a scam, and don't answer.
These assholes have made phones useless, and the only people that can stop it are the telcos. So make the telcos pay for the spam/scam call, problem goes away overnight.
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
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.
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