I can’t imagine why anyone ever answers the phone. I get at least ten robocalls every weekday. I don’t ever look at my voicemail and I haven’t answered a call in ages.
Edit: I know I’m not alone because CNN just released a poll with no responses from people under the age of fifty, because they couldn’t reach enough of them by phone.
I feel like if FCC/Telephone providers don't fix this soon, traditional cell phones will become unreliable and we will need to adopt a new system or just use existing framework (facetime, whatsapp, etc.).
If every cell phone has LTE and internet connection, why the fuck do we need traditional cell phone number? I never use it except for calling my pharmacy, customer support or restaurants/shops. All conversations with friends and family happen over messages and Facetime Audio or Whatsapp.
While I don't wish to suggest we move to a proprietary system such as Facetime, I think there is a real need for email equivalent of a VOIP solution where there is automatic spam filtering just like emails.
Also, why can't cell phone providers use same spam filtering techniques used in email filters? I don't know the details of spoofing but I feel like telephone providers are scum of the earth and they have some kind of a reverse incentive to continue allowing spam calls.
German authorities call this 'Ping Call', and ordered telecommunications providers to make pricing transparent via voice announcements prior to calling, due to ~14.000 complaints in 1/2019 [0]
I wonder if the solution is remarkably simple: Make phone calls expensive again.
Get rid of unlimited/free/super-cheap rates and make all callers pay by the minute again. Especially inbound international calls.
Let people who want free communication use FaceTime and SMS and Email and whatnot. But make phone calls expensive enough that you know if someone is paying to call you it must be important.
I got my first document scanner in 1997. Because of that I still have all of my phone bills going back to that year. I just looked up my April 1997 Cincinnati Bell bill. A five minute call from Cincinnati to Charleston, West Virginia cost $1.45 ($2.31 in 2019 money).
If we can raise the cost of customer acquisition there will be far fewer scammers.
Incidentally, my total bill for that month was $104.34 -- almost the same as what I spend for cell service today. Except that now I'm paying for unlimited texts and minutes that I never use. The only advantage my phone has today is its mobility, which feels more like a burden than a benefit.
I believe this is one reason why spam calls are less of a problem in Europe - in Europe the caller pays the higher rate to call mobile phones (vs the north America system where the cell phone user pays for incoming "airtime"). Just looking at skypeout rates and an example, UK landlines cost 2 cents/min vs 10 cents for mobiles
I'm disinclined to damage communication to stop bad actors. And I believe that this type of solution completely ignores the largely disproportionate economic impacts that reverting to those prices would have on different socioeconomic tiers. Human communication is a good thing and largely responsible for the positive aspects of where we are today. Respectfully, diminishing it to provide relief from an inconvenience seems short sighted.
It's not about paying by the minute. It's paying by the annoyance: there should be a fixed fee for dialing someone that doubles if they hang up in some brief number of seconds. It's not about the total time I spend talking to robocallers, it's the interruption they represent and the effort to screen them out.
It's been a problem for me in Sweden the last couple of years. I've had the same company phone number since 2011 but the last 2 years I've seen strange calls from international numbers.
They seem spoofed because you can see them increment the numbers and try again. Also they come from various countries both in and out of europe.
They always ring 2-3 times then hang up.
I've blocked dozens of them by now, they just come up with new numbers.
I don't understand what the point is because nothing happens if you call back so there's nothing to keep you on the line.
Also nothing happens if you respond.
I understand that these are all things I shouldn't do but a) at one point the numbers resembled those of RedHat in the UK and b) I was curious.
Lobbying groups working on behalf of the telcos and related business interests that oppose any measures to deal with this, and most other, issues that someone is making money as a result of.
Here in France I receive these sort of calls from Tunisia quite regularly. Plus some guys declared as SPAM by the truecaller App I'm using precisely for this purpose (usually telemarketers trying to sell pay TV, insurances or some other crap I don't want). I'd say it makes for about 30% of all the incoming calls.
Therefore I don't reply to unknown or hidden numbers.
Might also be because the Netherlands is a small and relatively expensive country in Europe where international rates are quite high. So, it's not compelling enough for them to open an call center in NL, and placing it outside of NL would increase their phone costs.
Also, not many people on the planet speak dutch, so the addressable market is quite small.
It's all about the money. Laws are not put in place to stop this because the companies that make the money lobby to not have them or even worse, tear down the ones that are there.
I started with an experiment about a year back and now I've practically stopped answering phone calls. My phone responses are now async. Just like an email, I look up the missed calls list once a while and call back if I know someone or was expecting a call from a particular number.
The phone is kept silent at all times and is on DND mode from the first minute of the day to the last.
The only call that passes through are the ones in the favorites, which will never exceed 10. Even they won't ring but vibrate. (My wife knows how to make my phone ring via Find my Phone.)
Scammers are getting more and more sophisticated now a days. It seems like most of these scam calls are a result of the ability to spoof phone numbers.
Spoofing phone numbers does have legitimate purposes (for example a phone number from a customer service company is able to use their company phone number as the caller ID) but these scammers seem to abuse this. It's quite similar to how SMTP for emails allows the "From" field to be set to something other than your actual email. Email scammers abuse this same thing too but the difference is that in SMTP emails, you can still tap the detailed headers of the email and see what the actual "from" email is. But for phone numbers, this isn't the case.
I think, the best way to solve this phone scam issue would be by modifying the phone protocol (I am not sure of the details) to allow users to be able to see the "Real" underlying phone number.
(which seems a US focused initiative, which I guess makes sense as the problem seems much worse there than in other countries... but I wonder if that means that you guys will be getting lots of robocalls from unknown foreign numbers in the future ;)
At the very least, for calls purporting to come from within the US, it seems that telephone companies should be able to verify the actual origin of the call and cut off spammers. But perhaps there is more to this than I understand that makes it infeasible.
> I think, the best way to solve this phone scam issue would be by modifying the phone protocol (I am not sure of the details) to allow users to be able to see the "Real" underlying phone number.
In China, we call this type of scam "响一声". It was very common until phone screen softwares started marking this kind of calls[0] so people stopped calling them back.
Maybe use one of those call screen app (offline one is better) until phone companies figured out how to resolve this?
> allow users to be able to see the "Real" underlying phone number
There are many cases where people will find it unacceptable. You don't want someone to dial directly to someone's desk at a corporation rather than front desk. You don't want someone to call a doctor on their private phone (they call out via practice's number from the road). Etc.
You can't solve this issue by providing the two number. It's only solvable by making spam calls expensive for the callers, or punishing telcos for unverified spoofing.
Just like with email, that ship sailed a long time ago. In many cases, there is no "real" underlying phone number (example: VOIP... VOIP numbers may as well be disposable.)
Why do we allow pay-per-minute phone services to even exist? There's no point to them in this day and age. If someone wants one of those services, there are plenty of ways to make it pay-per-minute without the phone company acting as a broker. Just end support for it, immediately.
One pattern I noticed but haven’t tried to circumvent yet is that I noticed robocalls identify on the caller ID as having the same area code as my normal phone number and my Google Voice number.
If we were to acquire a phone number from say, some small town somewhere you have no business with, then could we block all caller ID with that area code and avoid all such robocalls?
> identify on the caller ID as having the same area code as my normal phone number and my Google Voice number.
Most of my spam calls copy my area code and the first 3 digits of my phone number. In fact, I installed an android app called Calls Blacklist solely to make any call that began with the same 6 digits as me to not even ring - and now I get about 1 spam call per month.
I sort of unintentionally did this by buying my first cell phone while briefly living in a small city I no longer have any business with. It was effective for a long time but somehow in the past few months I have started getting robocalls using the area code of the actual city I currently live in.
I retain an out of state number that was used on resumes in the past. It gets slammed with frequent robocalls from the same area code. I have no contacts there so I can easily ignore them. My in-state numbers have been kept more secure and don't get any unwanted calls.
Similarly, I don't understand why people answer the front door when they can hear or see (through peephole or Ring) that it's a stranger. I don't need your magazines, your house-painting services, your church, or whatever else. If you're lost and looking for your friend's house you're supposed to be at, sorry I'm not gonna be able to help you anyway.
Sometimes a neighbor you haven't met is the one ringing the doorbell.
I recently had to leave my car parked in front of a stranger's house, so I rang the doorbell to let them know, but they didn't answer even though they were clearly home. Capitalism might be great and all, but door-to-door marketing and phone spamming have killed reasonable methods of communication.
I refuse to let these things die, so I still open the door if I don't know the person (I have a hotel-like door latch now to help prevent someone from kicking in the door or shooting an arrow at me). You just have to learn to be aggressive and say "I'm not interested" if it's a salesman or Jehovah's Witness.
I have a Seattle area code and for the last year or so I've been getting daily calls from various 206 numbers that also match the first 3 digits of my number. I answered the first one and there is no one on the line. After that I block each new number but they keep calling. I guess it'll eventually end as there are only 9998 possible numbers.
In the last few years, my phone has steadily become more and more a pocket (textual) communicator and less a telephone. The amount of spam calls I get at the peak numbered about 20-30 per day and that is with my being on the do not call list. I spent some time wasting telemarketers time and that seemed, somewhat ironically to get me blacklisted from some of them and things trailed off.
From what I gathered, it seemed that none of the tele marketers were really all that interested in really landing a sale. Most of them are quick to hang up at the first sign of a troll, even if its minor. There are no hard sell tactics that Ive encountered. It makes me wonder who is spending the money to make these things profitable. Seems to me that its really just a vetting to see if the number is active so they can sell your contact info to another spamorg.
Note the ANI check. There are a couple extremely aggressive callers that I’ve had to blacklist their exchange to keep them from leaving weekly voicemail. The most recent is a company who calls monthly insisting I won a car, that this is their final attempt to reach me, that they aren’t a telemarketer, and that they are aware of the Do Not Call list.
For my cell, Google Voice seems to be working well enough for now. I do wish iOS had a voip app that was worth a damn, and that iOS would let you choose a custom app for outbound dialing. The Google Voice iOS app frankly stinks.
Funny thing is, I got hit by a flood of these calls on Saturday. Funny seeing it here right after it happened.
Unfortunately, I called one of them back before I realized it was an international number (Android's dialer, for some reason, seems to record everything as an unbroken string of numbers before updating them several minutes after the missed call, so I just thought it was a US number with area code 232. It wasn't until after the callback that it resolved to a Sierra Leone number, so I asked about it on Facebook, and I got a link to an article on the scam.
I immediately felt like a heel, and then I blocked the number, just in case I forget to never call it back. When my statement comes in at the end of the month, I think I'm going to try to contact my carrier and dispute the charge. Though I'm not holding my breath: I'm on Fi, and Google's customer support is notorious for being virtually nonexistent.
It occurred to me just last week that land line phones have caller ID as I was helping my parents port their land line into a VOIP service. How is it that cell phones, a nominally more advanced technology, lack this function which was retrofitted into the analog phone system? I'd love to read or hear more about how that came about.
Imagine if the web didn't have SSL certificates. That's what the legacy phone networks are foisting on the public. It's a garbage service and if the caller identity problem can't be solved, we should shut the whole thing down as it's actively harmful.
I have received dozens of phone calls a day that almost-but-not-quite match the 'One Ring' scam.
I get calls from international numbers, 'private numbers' and 'unknown numbers', (I'm not sure the difference between private and unkown, it's what android displays in caller id). The calls ring once and hang up. I've managed to answer it a few times but they usually disconnect before I can. When I answer I hear a few sentences in a language I don't recognize then they hang up.
The unknown and private numbers don't match the 'One Ring' scam because you cannot call back a private or unknown number.
This problem (and telemarketing in general) is incredibly easy to solve, especially if you are Google or Apple. In fact it's almost a disgrace that they don't.
Back in the day, did this with the apps for local.ch in Switzerland ( some fluffy details here: https://tel.local.ch/en/advertising-calls ) which something like 40-50% of the Swiss population have installed on their phones.
As a Yellow pages phonebook app we provided an "Incoming Call" lookup service against our search engine of Swiss business phone numbers, so we could see who you received calls from (data which we treated as strictly private).
These types of robocallers (and telemarketers in general) were really easy to spot in logs - you see a number that's been calling many different people but _wasn't_ in our official database of businesses (we had good coverage of all businesses in Switzerland), we'd flag it our users with "We don't know this number but we suspect telemarketing" leaving the user to decide whether they wanted to call back or not. The Google Places API or the Yelp API ( https://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/v3/business_se... ) would probably suffice for the same purpose.
The only way to get round this is for robocallers to rotate the numbers they're using with a very high frequency so they don't "peak" in the logs but that can get expensive for them.
What's nice is this approach is also dynamic - you don't need an official database of blacklisted numbers. You just need a big enough sample of users with your app installed and you'll catch Robocallers as soon as they start peaking in any logs.
Apple and Google have way more insights into who's calling who than this (e.g. number of rings, email signatures, the users address books, which numbers have been blocked and a ton of analytics) which could be used to kill telemarketing for good. Given the solution is so simple, it really surprises me they don't.
[+] [-] anonu|6 years ago|reply
How to avoid this scam: Don't answer or return any calls from numbers you don't recognize.
If the FCC is recommending we don't pick up our phones, isn't something really wrong with the system?
[+] [-] shereadsthenews|6 years ago|reply
Edit: I know I’m not alone because CNN just released a poll with no responses from people under the age of fifty, because they couldn’t reach enough of them by phone.
[+] [-] spectramax|6 years ago|reply
If every cell phone has LTE and internet connection, why the fuck do we need traditional cell phone number? I never use it except for calling my pharmacy, customer support or restaurants/shops. All conversations with friends and family happen over messages and Facetime Audio or Whatsapp.
While I don't wish to suggest we move to a proprietary system such as Facetime, I think there is a real need for email equivalent of a VOIP solution where there is automatic spam filtering just like emails.
Also, why can't cell phone providers use same spam filtering techniques used in email filters? I don't know the details of spoofing but I feel like telephone providers are scum of the earth and they have some kind of a reverse incentive to continue allowing spam calls.
[+] [-] dropmann|6 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...
[+] [-] reaperducer|6 years ago|reply
Get rid of unlimited/free/super-cheap rates and make all callers pay by the minute again. Especially inbound international calls.
Let people who want free communication use FaceTime and SMS and Email and whatnot. But make phone calls expensive enough that you know if someone is paying to call you it must be important.
I got my first document scanner in 1997. Because of that I still have all of my phone bills going back to that year. I just looked up my April 1997 Cincinnati Bell bill. A five minute call from Cincinnati to Charleston, West Virginia cost $1.45 ($2.31 in 2019 money).
If we can raise the cost of customer acquisition there will be far fewer scammers.
Incidentally, my total bill for that month was $104.34 -- almost the same as what I spend for cell service today. Except that now I'm paying for unlimited texts and minutes that I never use. The only advantage my phone has today is its mobility, which feels more like a burden than a benefit.
[+] [-] kalleboo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgowdy|6 years ago|reply
Your thoughts in light of that?
[+] [-] daniel-cussen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kumarharsh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nightcracker|6 years ago|reply
What about your system is so bad that allows this to go on? It's not a problem here at all.
[+] [-] INTPenis|6 years ago|reply
They seem spoofed because you can see them increment the numbers and try again. Also they come from various countries both in and out of europe.
They always ring 2-3 times then hang up.
I've blocked dozens of them by now, they just come up with new numbers.
I don't understand what the point is because nothing happens if you call back so there's nothing to keep you on the line.
Also nothing happens if you respond.
I understand that these are all things I shouldn't do but a) at one point the numbers resembled those of RedHat in the UK and b) I was curious.
[+] [-] blihp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wazoox|6 years ago|reply
Therefore I don't reply to unknown or hidden numbers.
[+] [-] LeonM|6 years ago|reply
Also, not many people on the planet speak dutch, so the addressable market is quite small.
[+] [-] duiker101|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brajeshwar|6 years ago|reply
The phone is kept silent at all times and is on DND mode from the first minute of the day to the last.
The only call that passes through are the ones in the favorites, which will never exceed 10. Even they won't ring but vibrate. (My wife knows how to make my phone ring via Find my Phone.)
This is my No Phone Life - https://no.phone.wtf/
[+] [-] baroffoos|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zarath|6 years ago|reply
* If it isn't from someone I don't have whitelisted, don't answer it, unless I am expecting a call
* If I am not expecting a call and it is from my area code, answer it if I feel like it
* Otherwise, if it is not important enough to leave a voice mail, then it is not important enough for me to call back.
[+] [-] gandutraveler|6 years ago|reply
During emergency I am not be the best person to call for help. There is 911 for that.
[+] [-] eastWestMath|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinus_hn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayjava|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nimchimpsky|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] busymom0|6 years ago|reply
Spoofing phone numbers does have legitimate purposes (for example a phone number from a customer service company is able to use their company phone number as the caller ID) but these scammers seem to abuse this. It's quite similar to how SMTP for emails allows the "From" field to be set to something other than your actual email. Email scammers abuse this same thing too but the difference is that in SMTP emails, you can still tap the detailed headers of the email and see what the actual "from" email is. But for phone numbers, this isn't the case.
I think, the best way to solve this phone scam issue would be by modifying the phone protocol (I am not sure of the details) to allow users to be able to see the "Real" underlying phone number.
[+] [-] warp|6 years ago|reply
(which seems a US focused initiative, which I guess makes sense as the problem seems much worse there than in other countries... but I wonder if that means that you guys will be getting lots of robocalls from unknown foreign numbers in the future ;)
[+] [-] wildmusings|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rqs|6 years ago|reply
In China, we call this type of scam "响一声". It was very common until phone screen softwares started marking this kind of calls[0] so people stopped calling them back.
Maybe use one of those call screen app (offline one is better) until phone companies figured out how to resolve this?
[0] https://i.imgur.com/vkzbqhc
[+] [-] viraptor|6 years ago|reply
There are many cases where people will find it unacceptable. You don't want someone to dial directly to someone's desk at a corporation rather than front desk. You don't want someone to call a doctor on their private phone (they call out via practice's number from the road). Etc.
You can't solve this issue by providing the two number. It's only solvable by making spam calls expensive for the callers, or punishing telcos for unverified spoofing.
[+] [-] dcbadacd|6 years ago|reply
However, Microsoft has a patent that stops a few additional measures from being taken against certain spoofings (SPFv2), you can thank them for that.
[+] [-] icedchai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peeters|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mpolichette|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eatbitseveryday|6 years ago|reply
If we were to acquire a phone number from say, some small town somewhere you have no business with, then could we block all caller ID with that area code and avoid all such robocalls?
[+] [-] knodi123|6 years ago|reply
Most of my spam calls copy my area code and the first 3 digits of my phone number. In fact, I installed an android app called Calls Blacklist solely to make any call that began with the same 6 digits as me to not even ring - and now I get about 1 spam call per month.
YMMV.
[+] [-] opencl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paul7986|6 years ago|reply
The phone system we once knew needs to be obliterated!
[+] [-] khazhoux|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] copperx|6 years ago|reply
I recently had to leave my car parked in front of a stranger's house, so I rang the doorbell to let them know, but they didn't answer even though they were clearly home. Capitalism might be great and all, but door-to-door marketing and phone spamming have killed reasonable methods of communication.
I refuse to let these things die, so I still open the door if I don't know the person (I have a hotel-like door latch now to help prevent someone from kicking in the door or shooting an arrow at me). You just have to learn to be aggressive and say "I'm not interested" if it's a salesman or Jehovah's Witness.
[+] [-] Dirlewanger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Marsymars|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyleblarson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frogpelt|6 years ago|reply
Only allow my contacts to call me and anyone else hears a message saying they must text me first to be added to the whitelist.
[+] [-] S_A_P|6 years ago|reply
From what I gathered, it seemed that none of the tele marketers were really all that interested in really landing a sale. Most of them are quick to hang up at the first sign of a troll, even if its minor. There are no hard sell tactics that Ive encountered. It makes me wonder who is spending the money to make these things profitable. Seems to me that its really just a vetting to see if the number is active so they can sell your contact info to another spamorg.
[+] [-] js2|6 years ago|reply
https://imgur.com/eLFvavS
Note the ANI check. There are a couple extremely aggressive callers that I’ve had to blacklist their exchange to keep them from leaving weekly voicemail. The most recent is a company who calls monthly insisting I won a car, that this is their final attempt to reach me, that they aren’t a telemarketer, and that they are aware of the Do Not Call list.
For my cell, Google Voice seems to be working well enough for now. I do wish iOS had a voip app that was worth a damn, and that iOS would let you choose a custom app for outbound dialing. The Google Voice iOS app frankly stinks.
[+] [-] amyjess|6 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, I called one of them back before I realized it was an international number (Android's dialer, for some reason, seems to record everything as an unbroken string of numbers before updating them several minutes after the missed call, so I just thought it was a US number with area code 232. It wasn't until after the callback that it resolved to a Sierra Leone number, so I asked about it on Facebook, and I got a link to an article on the scam.
I immediately felt like a heel, and then I blocked the number, just in case I forget to never call it back. When my statement comes in at the end of the month, I think I'm going to try to contact my carrier and dispute the charge. Though I'm not holding my breath: I'm on Fi, and Google's customer support is notorious for being virtually nonexistent.
[+] [-] mike_hollinger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mullingitover|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seniorsassycat|6 years ago|reply
I get calls from international numbers, 'private numbers' and 'unknown numbers', (I'm not sure the difference between private and unkown, it's what android displays in caller id). The calls ring once and hang up. I've managed to answer it a few times but they usually disconnect before I can. When I answer I hear a few sentences in a language I don't recognize then they hang up.
The unknown and private numbers don't match the 'One Ring' scam because you cannot call back a private or unknown number.
[+] [-] harryf|6 years ago|reply
Back in the day, did this with the apps for local.ch in Switzerland ( some fluffy details here: https://tel.local.ch/en/advertising-calls ) which something like 40-50% of the Swiss population have installed on their phones.
As a Yellow pages phonebook app we provided an "Incoming Call" lookup service against our search engine of Swiss business phone numbers, so we could see who you received calls from (data which we treated as strictly private).
These types of robocallers (and telemarketers in general) were really easy to spot in logs - you see a number that's been calling many different people but _wasn't_ in our official database of businesses (we had good coverage of all businesses in Switzerland), we'd flag it our users with "We don't know this number but we suspect telemarketing" leaving the user to decide whether they wanted to call back or not. The Google Places API or the Yelp API ( https://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/v3/business_se... ) would probably suffice for the same purpose.
The only way to get round this is for robocallers to rotate the numbers they're using with a very high frequency so they don't "peak" in the logs but that can get expensive for them.
What's nice is this approach is also dynamic - you don't need an official database of blacklisted numbers. You just need a big enough sample of users with your app installed and you'll catch Robocallers as soon as they start peaking in any logs.
Apple and Google have way more insights into who's calling who than this (e.g. number of rings, email signatures, the users address books, which numbers have been blocked and a ton of analytics) which could be used to kill telemarketing for good. Given the solution is so simple, it really surprises me they don't.