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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.
SHAKEN/STIR deployment should certainly be sped up, at least giving users the option to automatically decline caller-ID spoofed calls. This will make it easier on the abuse enforcement end to shut down their access to legitimate carriers, and also disable their grey routes (e.g. SIM boxes, shady VoIP providers).
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 keep getting several DAILY Philadelphia area code calls from some clown using several different 215 numbers. Most are hang ups, but I get partial robo-call recordings in my voicemail about auto insurance. I don't even own a car.
Of course, these "Philadelphia" calls could be originating from anywhere in the world, because the even bigger, stupid, garish, and smelly clowns who designed Caller ID decided "fuck the telephone subscriber, we don't need security, there's money to be had!", and there is little or nothing the subscriber can do to take action against the rogues.
I guess we need to have very tight whitelists and hope no important call from a non-whitelisted number is missed.
All that is required is:
(1) Reverse Path Verification (That is, do not accept terminations from a network that could not be the originator)
(2) Do not permit originators to set "Caller ID" to a number they have not rented (from the provider).
Problem solved.
However, this will never happen because in case (1) the terminating network makes money from terminating incoming calls. They will not make this money if they refuse to terminate the call. Therefore, they have an interest in not verifying anything at all as that will adversely affect their revenue stream.
In case (2) the provider (call originator) makes money from originating calls. They do not care that the "caller id" is fraudulent (and they know it is fraudulent because they do know which customer to charge for the call origination). They have an interest in not preventing fraudulent "caller id" since that will adversely affect their revenue stream.
There is absolutely no need for this Stirred and Shaken crappola that will do nought whatsoever.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that dingy-doofus was interrupted on stage by a robocall SINCE HE DID NOT ANSWER THE CALL AND NO WITNESSES HEARD THE ROBOCALL. It was more likely his boyfriend calling to remind him to bring home some more lube.
I've seen a dramatic drop in robocalls to my cell phone over the past two weeks. Prior to last Monday my average was ~ 5 robocalls per day. Last week I had 2 all week. This week I've had 2 so far. I haven't changed anything - I've had the same phone number for 20+ years and same carrier for 10+ years - so I don't know what happened.
As much as I would like to think that John Oliver's move might have something to do with it, I still don't expect the FCC guys have any concern for us poor bastards on our regular consumer-grade cell phone plans.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Basically the only thing pushing back against the tide are around 2,000 nutjobs with homebrew Asterisk servers trying to robodial back against 100,000+ autodialers dumping billions of calls on the telecom network.
Thanks to robodialers being employed everywhere, they're pushing voice calls into obsolescence. My job moved to a closed SIP network off of PSTN years ago, and I only have 2 relatives left alive who send me PSTN calls, the rest text. When those 2 people die---no more need for voice service.
I've never had a robo call in my life. I don't live in America. I don't know the laws in my country, but the problem just does not exist here. I've had the occasional (like once every 2 years) have a random person call me regarding a survey or trying to sell me something.
While we are at it, how about home, office, secretary. Oh, and the same for all the other carriers, land and wireless. I sense a good Kickstarter coming.
You're just lucky. Once some asshole puts your number in the list though, you'll never be free of them. They call me 2-3 times a day now.
If only it weren't so fucking obvious. If he were frequently pestered by robocalls he'd be like the rest of us and simply never answer his phone, especially during an interview.
This is on par with that stupid Bill Gates bullshit "here's a jar of mosquitoes - see how big a threat Malaria is now?"
maybe a dialtone patent troll at work? we have the horsepower to intercept every call in the US, voice print the caller and drop the packets if they like... why not just let the FCC let the NSA do it.. packet sniffing 101... smells like a scam, looks like a scam.. quacks like scam, walks and talks like a scam.. reverse traverse to caller via packets and disconnect service to foreign call center.. uh.. took like 10 minutes to for the NSA to add the rules to their filters and then click enable... no privacy invasion, just packet inspection.. maybe? maybe not?
... the call was to ask if he was happy with his long-distance phone carrier.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
... 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.
I know you can setup asterix virtual PBX to have an automated system that makes callers answer some type of prompt to get your phone to ring. I don't think it will work on smartphones, but there must be some sort of thing that can do this.
That way anyone you know who calls you gets through automatically based on their phone number, anyone else will have to use touch tones to answer a basic question (like picking your name out of a 1-9 numbered list) or do some very easy math.
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.
This would help solve a lot of this issues.
i hear a lot of US people complain about robocalls, it seems to be a real, serious problem.
it's something i never ever hear about with my friends, colleagues, family, etc here in EU.
i'm really interested to know/hear why this seems to be a US only(?) problem, what's stopping robocallers in EU?
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I could be technical problems.
That's what I've been wondering. The coincidence of the timing is interesting though.
Facebook, Google, and Uber had technical problems recently.
I've never used Facebook or Uber in any way, shape or form. Facebook of course has been known to build profiles of non-users but they've never had my phone number or any other information that I would enter in to it in the process of starting a profile. Uber should know little to nothing of me as I've never signed up for them or installed their app on any phone I've ever owned.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
That's not a "rented phone number". By federal law that's my number. I can take it to another provider. It's like owning a static IP, vs. renting one from your ISP. You get to take it with you.
Which is good, because number lockin was a way to keep people from moving to another provider, and caused rates to go higher.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
It's literally a robocall.
Really? So you mean it's not figuratively a robocall? The pervasive unnecessary use of the word "literally" needs to stop.
I don't get many on my mobile number, but...
I recently got a new Google Voice number, which I have never given out to anyone, and it gets repeated calls from the same number(s) (different numbers, but on any given day repeated calls from the same one) almost daily. I just disable notifications from Voice, and every day or two block and report as spam all of those numbers.
Even if you own your land, then you are still renting it, in the form of land seizures if you dont pay yearly taxes (rent). ANYTHING that requires additional expendeture to not be siezed is by measure rented. Now what things ate and what call them to manipulate complacency are often quite different