The scam and spam call problem is really bad in Germany to this day. And has been for 10 years.
A couple years ago I would sit at my desk thinking about a really hard problem in silence. The phone rings. Spam call. Every 30-180 minutes another one. If you now think turn the phone off, well not that easy as CEO of a business when people expect you to be reachable.
It creamed my corn so much that I recorded my own voice samples as a senile "Opa Denny" (german grandpa Denny), modelled after Lenny. Complete with background ducks hanging out on the couch to Opas dismay, later in the call. It works on autopilot without interaction because on Asterisk, and with the largest German SIP provider at least, you can extract the calling peer identity from the SIP header. So I wrote a scoring system based on indicated number, black and whitelist regexs for number and for calling peer, greylist for the geographically surrounding number prefixes, etc. A legit mobile call would show up as [email protected] for example, while a spam call would say [email protected].
Asterisk would record the call in wideband stereo, normalize the audio, and mail it to me as MP3 attachment. Funny for a while, but these days I just throw all such calls onto the mailbox. Since they need a real person to scam or create a sale, the call is finished right away.
It works great to this day, because I never published it.
This is cool when some independent hacker / artist does it as "Lemmy".
When a big telecom does it, the second thing they do with it is to fuck up the spam detection so bad that every third phone call I make gets answered by "Daisy".
And just think about it - why would a telecom need this tech? They can already drop the spam calls and stop routing calls from the bad actor telecoms who enable the spammers. They don't do that because they prefer to collect a few cents a call from them rather than serve their customers better. It's everyone else who needs this.
If every third call you make goes to Daisy you are using shit data and are likely part of the problem. Are you absolutely sure they are fucking up the spam detection, or are you just doing all of your cold calling with blinders on?
I love that they are weaponizing the perceived kindness of senior citizens in this way. Many of the victims of scams are some of the nicest people ever that were taken advantage of in some capacity - usually while trying to help someone. It's the digital age equivalent of staging a broken down cart and then robbing some old folks. I think most of us hate the idea of the "solution" being to not go near anyone with a broken down cart out of fear.
I'm not saying this fixes everything, but I would rather a world where scammers odds at making a living at this are so poor they won't bother versus a world where everyone has to block every number by default and live in metaphorical bunkers to never interact because you might be a scammer.
> I would rather a world where scammers odds at making a living at this are so poor they won't bother
Then what's stopping the scammers from finding another "evil" job that makes money? You have to remember that humans tend to not enjoy accomplishing thievery and the scammers most often do this out of necessity. Of course there are big call center operators who truly are terrible people, but this conclusion is true for the bulk of their workforce.
Seems like the logical endpoint of a lot of this is people getting paid directly for their attention. Want to call me? I've set a price of $5/call that I answer, and an additional $10/minute of listen time after the first 10 seconds. Want to send me an email? $1/email and $5/100 words. Anyone I have emailed is automatically on my allow-list, which I can also adjust manually.
That's EVE Online's approach to fighting ingame "email" spam [0].
Every player can configure an amount of ingame money that is levied from a sender's account to deliver a message to them. It's a currency sink, so it's themed as a "tax" levied by the NPCs and its value is destroyed rather than paid to the recipient of the message.
I thought it used to default to 5 ISK (a pittance, something you can make back by shooting a single NPC pirate ship). I see some references to the default being ~2000 ISK at the time that it was changed to 0, where it is now.
Worked pretty well, imo. Players that need to be publicly contactable (people who organize public events, for instance) can turn it off easily. People who are "space famous" can crank it up to reduce targeted spam. Even at the default setting, it's effective at keeping ingame scammers from blasting the whole player list with messages (at least, the poor ones :). Doesn't apply to people you've already exchanged messages with. I think there's also some allowlisting you can do, etc.
And maybe like a temporary hold of the money, so you get it back if I’m convinced it’s not spam. Probably would resolve 99% of spam issues in the real world and create a chain of trust. Add some temporary disabling feature as well if you’re expecting a call from a random number too, so you’re set.
That's similar to the idea I had for combating texting spam:
- If your number is in my address book then texts are free for you
- If this is the first time you are contacting me then you pay me $1
There are probably downsides and ways this will screw up real relationships but it will certainly increase the cost of spam.
If you have already sorted the world between people you want to take calls from and people you don't, why wouldn't you just block the people you don't want instead of charging them money?
If you use a VoIP service like Twilio and voip.ms, you can set up a very simple IVR menu that just asks unknown callers to press 1 to be connected to you. No AI involved.
For me, this has been surprisingly effective against robocalls. Obviously this isn’t going to work against scammers who call directly, but most of the spam calls I receive start with some pre-recorded message which isn’t going to pass the menu.
My Pixel 8 (not sure what other Android phones do this) can screen calls using their AI assistant. It asks what the call is about. If they answer, it displays the text to you as it rings through.
It sounds surprisingly human-like, even saying "Hello?" in a slightly annoyed tone when the other person doesn't respond in time.
Its kind of funny to think we've already had many of these services that were apparently really ahead of their time.
I remember being an outside sales rep for a local mom and pop wireless company in the late 90's, early aughts. We sold an automated "assistant" called Wildfire that would screen calls and stood as an intermediary between you can callers. She would answer, you would record your name and then it would call you on any number of devices you had entered. At one point, I had it calling three of my numbers (office and two mobile numbers) and at any time, you could just send people to voicemail. It was very similar to how many of the AI assistants work today. If I remember it was like $30/month, but as reps we got to use it for free which was really fun tinkering with it.
AT&T also had something like this where you could have a program they offered which would screen your calls and either connect you or you could send people directly to voicemail. It didn't have nearly the features that Wildfire had, but it was effective.
Obviously in the late 90's and early aughts, something like this wasn't really needed and after a few quarters, AT&T quietly stopped offering their service. Wildfire lived on until the mid aughts after being bought and then killed due to lack of adoption and use.
Kind of crazy these kinds of programs were pretty common before the AI assistant craze now.
If they ever get clever enough to automate the menu selection, it would be funny to have an infinitely deep IVR sort of like the tar pits people build on websites to trap web crawlers.
It's a great idea, and in Canada using the Koodo/Telus network you can turn on "call control" for free which does basically this, except it makes the caller enter a random number between 1-9. And you can also whitelist certain numbers like friends and family.
Very nice to see, my grandmother was recently scammed out of a large amount of money. Luckily the bank reimbursed her.
Scammers are a stain on the reputation of India. You could argue it's unfair to tar an entire country with the same brush, but quite clearly rule of law isn't properly functioning over there and there's complicity in letting them do this. Same goes for Nigeria.
Oh, believe me, Indians fucking hate the scammers, probably more than you do.
Jim Browning (the scambaiter who worked with O2 in this article) has successfully compromised several scam operations, gotten their physical address and other dox, and referred them to the police. The offices get raided, Jim gets some nice CCTV footage of the raid, the operators of the criminal enterprise get a nice perp walk... and then a month later the case is mysteriously dismissed with a bullshit reason about AI deepfakes and "IO" (influence operations, I presume).
The thing to keep in mind is that India's government is run by Modi, a Hindu ultranationalist who wants to deport all the country's Muslims to Pakistan[0]. There's a pretty straightforward pipeline from organized crime to fascism and I wouldn't be surprised if the scammers in question here are part of Modi's power base (or part of other organizations which are part of his power base).
The only thing I could think of to fix this would be to strategically suck people out of India through generous visas for migrants who want to live in a country with functioning[1] institutions. The thing about organized crime is that it relies on having a pool of suckers to continue joining the criminal enterprise - in other words, even the scammers are themselves being scammed. This is one of the less selfish reasons why I'm an open borders fanatic, but I also have to admit that such a policy in today's era has negative political capital.
[0] Which itself has money problems because it's budget gets siphoned off by their own military and they have to beg the IMF for scraps
[1] To be clear, India's institutions still exist, they're just mildly broken.
I'd imagine India will gradually crack down on it more over time. The tech industry there is growing massive and they surely aren't happy about being associated with scammers.
I'm imagining this is just a publicity stunt, and I'll say it's a very good one. However I can't see it being very practical. There are lots of scam calls to keep up with and LLMs and text-to-speech models are expensive to run. If they do run this in production, the costs of running hundreds of 'Daisies' will inevitably be passed onto the consumer, and worse still, if the scammers are calling in through PSTN lines or cellular this will use up our already scarce bandwidth. I've frequently had difficulty connecting through trunk lines from Belgium and Germany to numbers in Britain, and that's without a legion of AI grannies sitting on the phone!
This reminds me of “shadow banning” - instead of letting the misbehaving user know they’ve been banned, and let them find a way around it, you make them believe they’re not banned and let them waste their time interacting with the system (without actually interacting with others), this makes them spend less time on actual misuse and it makes the penalty for it more expensive. Good strategy. Cruel too.
So I don’t think that this is just entertaining PR, I can see why it’s better than simply banning the scammers. Still a question of cost though.
So it's just an AI re-implementation of the Telecrapper 2000 [1]? The original site is down but there are plenty of YouTube videos [2] of it still available.
That's pretty hilarious. Amazing what you can do with just a well-crafted pre-recorded script.
There are some other Youtube videos where a guy writes these ChatGPT personalities, but those aren't as entertaining because the AI is basically just blurting out random thoughts rather than engaging in an actual conversation.
I applied for a mortgage today through my bank. Before the automated “next steps” email could hit my inbox my phone was already ringing and ringing and ringing. About 10 minutes straight of automated spam callers that are watching who knows what public ledger on now.
I guess it pretty much means retiring this number next year. I’ve inly had the number a little over a year and the spam has slowly crept up despite best efforts to give fake numbers where possible.
We accidentally registered a domain once without the privacy setting enabled and proceeded to get dozens of spam/scam calls about it over the next few months.
Great PR move, but surely better to invest in more basic security measures supported by their app (chain of trust, verified callers/messaging etc). Instead their app is primarily a react native sales tool. Part of the reason that o2 was so affected by scammers calling from south Asian call centres with “the latest offers” was because they used to do exactly this with their customers.
I was a little surprise to read that they're using speech-to-text and text-to-speech rather than an end-to-end speech model. Won't that horrible latency? (I guess the old-person persona disguises it a little...)
Another solution - drop numeric phone numbers all together and switch to alphanumeric or verified contact only. With numeric, sequential phone numbers you can just robocall all the numbers until you find a victim. Making the search space significantly larger should solve that attack vector. Of course, this will effectively be the same as transitioning from IPv4 to v6 - with all the same associated pain
It'll help with so many things:
- in contact syncing systems you can't rainbow table your way to decrypting numbers
- numbers can be permanently burned once they're released or deemed as spam. This means every service could ban spammers safely without fear of burning a real user.
- people could more easily have alt numbers, non-voip numbers for untrusted services.
Instating an AI model as "Head of Scammer Relations" is hilarious. I think the point here is to collect the phone numbers of scam call centers and have Daisy call them so that scammers waste time talking to it rather than a victim.
> and one in five (22%) experiencing a fraud attempt every single week
That seems low. I guess they mean phone calls only.
I get -no exaggeration- several hundred spam mails a day (and these are the ones that made it past the first line defense). I also get 10 or more scam texts.
Some of the phising emails that I get, are frighteningly realistic (but invariably seem to have at least one speling eror in them).
If folks live in a normal suburban development, they are highly unlikely to get several hundred crooks, knocking on their door, every day, but being on the Internet, means exactly that.
The crooks only need to land you once, you have to have a perfect record, avoiding them.
[+] [-] bsdice|1 year ago|reply
A couple years ago I would sit at my desk thinking about a really hard problem in silence. The phone rings. Spam call. Every 30-180 minutes another one. If you now think turn the phone off, well not that easy as CEO of a business when people expect you to be reachable.
It creamed my corn so much that I recorded my own voice samples as a senile "Opa Denny" (german grandpa Denny), modelled after Lenny. Complete with background ducks hanging out on the couch to Opas dismay, later in the call. It works on autopilot without interaction because on Asterisk, and with the largest German SIP provider at least, you can extract the calling peer identity from the SIP header. So I wrote a scoring system based on indicated number, black and whitelist regexs for number and for calling peer, greylist for the geographically surrounding number prefixes, etc. A legit mobile call would show up as [email protected] for example, while a spam call would say [email protected].
Asterisk would record the call in wideband stereo, normalize the audio, and mail it to me as MP3 attachment. Funny for a while, but these days I just throw all such calls onto the mailbox. Since they need a real person to scam or create a sale, the call is finished right away.
It works great to this day, because I never published it.
[+] [-] dmurray|1 year ago|reply
When a big telecom does it, the second thing they do with it is to fuck up the spam detection so bad that every third phone call I make gets answered by "Daisy".
And just think about it - why would a telecom need this tech? They can already drop the spam calls and stop routing calls from the bad actor telecoms who enable the spammers. They don't do that because they prefer to collect a few cents a call from them rather than serve their customers better. It's everyone else who needs this.
[+] [-] waiwai933|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Lio|1 year ago|reply
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy
[+] [-] averageRoyalty|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gorkish|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] barbazoo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ddtaylor|1 year ago|reply
I'm not saying this fixes everything, but I would rather a world where scammers odds at making a living at this are so poor they won't bother versus a world where everyone has to block every number by default and live in metaphorical bunkers to never interact because you might be a scammer.
[+] [-] e-khadem|1 year ago|reply
Then what's stopping the scammers from finding another "evil" job that makes money? You have to remember that humans tend to not enjoy accomplishing thievery and the scammers most often do this out of necessity. Of course there are big call center operators who truly are terrible people, but this conclusion is true for the bulk of their workforce.
[+] [-] xnx|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mos_basik|1 year ago|reply
Every player can configure an amount of ingame money that is levied from a sender's account to deliver a message to them. It's a currency sink, so it's themed as a "tax" levied by the NPCs and its value is destroyed rather than paid to the recipient of the message.
I thought it used to default to 5 ISK (a pittance, something you can make back by shooting a single NPC pirate ship). I see some references to the default being ~2000 ISK at the time that it was changed to 0, where it is now.
Worked pretty well, imo. Players that need to be publicly contactable (people who organize public events, for instance) can turn it off easily. People who are "space famous" can crank it up to reduce targeted spam. Even at the default setting, it's effective at keeping ingame scammers from blasting the whole player list with messages (at least, the poor ones :). Doesn't apply to people you've already exchanged messages with. I think there's also some allowlisting you can do, etc.
0. https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/EVE_Mail#CONCORD_Spam_Prevent...
[+] [-] tokioyoyo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] speerer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] guidoism|1 year ago|reply
There are probably downsides and ways this will screw up real relationships but it will certainly increase the cost of spam.
[+] [-] wzsddtc|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bawolff|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] carlosjobim|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] j2kun|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] janalsncm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] IshKebab|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zahlman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] edelbitter|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] watusername|1 year ago|reply
For me, this has been surprisingly effective against robocalls. Obviously this isn’t going to work against scammers who call directly, but most of the spam calls I receive start with some pre-recorded message which isn’t going to pass the menu.
Edit: s/auto/pre
[+] [-] Ronnie76er|1 year ago|reply
It sounds surprisingly human-like, even saying "Hello?" in a slightly annoyed tone when the other person doesn't respond in time.
[+] [-] burningChrome|1 year ago|reply
I remember being an outside sales rep for a local mom and pop wireless company in the late 90's, early aughts. We sold an automated "assistant" called Wildfire that would screen calls and stood as an intermediary between you can callers. She would answer, you would record your name and then it would call you on any number of devices you had entered. At one point, I had it calling three of my numbers (office and two mobile numbers) and at any time, you could just send people to voicemail. It was very similar to how many of the AI assistants work today. If I remember it was like $30/month, but as reps we got to use it for free which was really fun tinkering with it.
AT&T also had something like this where you could have a program they offered which would screen your calls and either connect you or you could send people directly to voicemail. It didn't have nearly the features that Wildfire had, but it was effective.
Obviously in the late 90's and early aughts, something like this wasn't really needed and after a few quarters, AT&T quietly stopped offering their service. Wildfire lived on until the mid aughts after being bought and then killed due to lack of adoption and use.
Kind of crazy these kinds of programs were pretty common before the AI assistant craze now.
Details about Wildfire here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildfire_Communications
[+] [-] morkalork|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] clutch89|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thfuran|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cedws|1 year ago|reply
Scammers are a stain on the reputation of India. You could argue it's unfair to tar an entire country with the same brush, but quite clearly rule of law isn't properly functioning over there and there's complicity in letting them do this. Same goes for Nigeria.
[+] [-] kmeisthax|1 year ago|reply
Jim Browning (the scambaiter who worked with O2 in this article) has successfully compromised several scam operations, gotten their physical address and other dox, and referred them to the police. The offices get raided, Jim gets some nice CCTV footage of the raid, the operators of the criminal enterprise get a nice perp walk... and then a month later the case is mysteriously dismissed with a bullshit reason about AI deepfakes and "IO" (influence operations, I presume).
The thing to keep in mind is that India's government is run by Modi, a Hindu ultranationalist who wants to deport all the country's Muslims to Pakistan[0]. There's a pretty straightforward pipeline from organized crime to fascism and I wouldn't be surprised if the scammers in question here are part of Modi's power base (or part of other organizations which are part of his power base).
The only thing I could think of to fix this would be to strategically suck people out of India through generous visas for migrants who want to live in a country with functioning[1] institutions. The thing about organized crime is that it relies on having a pool of suckers to continue joining the criminal enterprise - in other words, even the scammers are themselves being scammed. This is one of the less selfish reasons why I'm an open borders fanatic, but I also have to admit that such a policy in today's era has negative political capital.
[0] Which itself has money problems because it's budget gets siphoned off by their own military and they have to beg the IMF for scraps
[1] To be clear, India's institutions still exist, they're just mildly broken.
[+] [-] Pikamander2|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|1 year ago|reply
It's like corporate avatars for hiring or cold call bots for sales.
I'd say stick to white listed numbers, but pro phones can't do that, and they are the most prone to spam.
[+] [-] seabass-labrax|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] brap|1 year ago|reply
So I don’t think that this is just entertaining PR, I can see why it’s better than simply banning the scammers. Still a question of cost though.
[+] [-] alexjplant|1 year ago|reply
[1] https://hackaday.com/2005/09/08/telecrapper-2000/
[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QlK_zHisT_A
[+] [-] bityard|1 year ago|reply
There are some other Youtube videos where a guy writes these ChatGPT personalities, but those aren't as entertaining because the AI is basically just blurting out random thoughts rather than engaging in an actual conversation.
[+] [-] milleramp|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] markgoho|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] burger_moon|1 year ago|reply
I guess it pretty much means retiring this number next year. I’ve inly had the number a little over a year and the spam has slowly crept up despite best efforts to give fake numbers where possible.
[+] [-] Pikamander2|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] darkr|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rickcarlino|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] scoot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] robust-cactus|1 year ago|reply
It'll help with so many things: - in contact syncing systems you can't rainbow table your way to decrypting numbers - numbers can be permanently burned once they're released or deemed as spam. This means every service could ban spammers safely without fear of burning a real user. - people could more easily have alt numbers, non-voip numbers for untrusted services.
[+] [-] hannofcart|1 year ago|reply
Your suggestion won't help circumvent that. I think.
[+] [-] LlamaTrauma|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Veen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|1 year ago|reply
> and one in five (22%) experiencing a fraud attempt every single week
That seems low. I guess they mean phone calls only.
I get -no exaggeration- several hundred spam mails a day (and these are the ones that made it past the first line defense). I also get 10 or more scam texts.
Some of the phising emails that I get, are frighteningly realistic (but invariably seem to have at least one speling eror in them).
If folks live in a normal suburban development, they are highly unlikely to get several hundred crooks, knocking on their door, every day, but being on the Internet, means exactly that.
The crooks only need to land you once, you have to have a perfect record, avoiding them.
[+] [-] random3|1 year ago|reply