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AT&T CEO Interrupted By a Robocall During a Live Interview (theverge.com)
At an Economic Club event in Washington, DC today, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was interrupted on stage by a robocall, pausing an interview in front of dozens of people and driving home that absolutely no one is safe from the spam epidemic. From a report: Over the past few months, regulators at the Federal Communications Commission have been feeling the pressure from lawmakers and consumers who are urging them to put an end to the relentless onslaught of robocalls people receive every day. Last year, consumers received over 26.3 billion of these scammy calls and the problem only appears to be getting worse. "I'm getting a robocall, too," Stephenson said during the Economic Club event, ultimately declining the call on his Apple Watch. "It's literally a robocall."
There is almost NO security whatsoever, and even a total moron can install an app on his phone to spoof somebody's #, potentally ruining the victim's life.
To not even have the most basic security in place when it was rolled out decades ago is criminal.
I'm calling it. Who wouldn't shut off their phone ringer while doing an interview? BS, pure unadulterated BS.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
They make far too much money from people answering spam calls.
I have had none this year and one last year. Unsolicited commercial call, that is. Robo-calls I never had a single one in my life. Of course, here the robo-caller pays a $50'000 fine per incident and repeat offenders may go to prison. Europe is a bit ahead of the US in these matters.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
... says only country where this regularly happens.
You just gotta get over the idea that everyone has a god given right to advertise to anyone anywhere. But getting that particular meme out of the US consciousness is going to be difficult.
We're always told - don't pick up, don't engage. But the truth is, if we want to stop these robocalls, then if you can you *should* answer, you *should* engage, and you should try to keep a live person on the line with you for as long as possible. This will cost the scammers money... after all, talking to a human isn't free; that human is getting paid. Or if they aren't paid by the hour, then if they are busy with you who (presumably) knows its a scam, then they are unavailable to be scamming others.
If we as a culture decided to waste a few minutes of the scammers' time with every phone call, then they would quickly lose their value, and many scammers would go out of business.