

FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest - klous
http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/08/ftc-announces-winners-zapping-rachel-robocall-contest

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bkruse
I work in the telecom space. I was previously over the carrier network at
MagicJack and oversaw about 600 million minutes a month of telecom "traffic".
I can say that the awareness is a step in the right direction, but these
"solutions" are anything but a solution.

I don't think it's as simple as people think - for example, simply make sure
the person owns the CallerID. At what point in the call stream would that be
validated? You have to think that, when a call is made through a typical VoIP
provider, it is most likely passed through 10 carriers (through arbitrage
long-distance, then IXCs, then tandem/CLLI/POI CLLI).

I believe a good step would be to simply let the FTC trace using the CIC code
that all carriers send over the PSTN/traditional telecom network. That way,
the FTC could track a particular call or number through all the carriers until
it reaches the originating information. The FTC has the capability to do that
now, and based on the number of subpoena requests I've received (about
10/day), they actively do it.

The problem is that the companies doing the "illegal" robocalling (business to
consumer/DNC or TSR violations) are overseas. There is no way, IMHO, that it
can be stopped as long as long-distance providers exist.

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MichaelGG
Yeah, if these were real solutions, I'd pay a lot more than $3K to get the
details on them. I've spent far more than that on the problem.

At one point we were doing around a billion calls a day by a customer that
swore they had nothing to do with dialer. They mixed the traffic very
skillfully, so they always kept their overall statistics just at the
contractual limit.

Blocking repeated source numbers just means people start making up numbers. At
that point, you can't really block things. You could perhaps get a score of
the likelihood of a call being legit, and perhaps retroactively you could
determine a bunch of calls had a high amount of dialer. But I don't think it's
possible to find an algorithm that has a good-enough accuracy rate to do real-
time blocking.

Of course, from a telecom perspective, I don't really care about the content
of the call. I just want the avg duration to not be so low that other carriers
get upset. To that end, simply making sure dialer customers don't hangup
immediately seems to suffice.

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bkruse
Michael,

You are exactly right. All the traditional means (like blocking a callerID) is
far past it's useful time. The dialer companies are getting smarter as well.
It's BIG business for them, so it's worth the money to figure out solutions.

Also, it's very difficult to error on the side of caution - you do not want to
block a normal phone call, or your upstream will stop sending you calls and
you lose money.

Typically, a dialer customer will hangup once an answering machine is detected
(usually around 2 seconds into the call) - causing lots of short duration
calls. What the dialer customer's are doing now, is simply holding the call
open for longer, to raise their overall ACD. It's a tough game. The moment
telecom carriers start caring about what the call is (call types, information
in the call, etc) - they become liable.

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MichaelGG
That's the thing I don't get - if a dialer customer doesn't immediately hangup
on answering machines, and gets past the 6-second mark, "magically", everyone
stops considering it dialer. Their rates then drop dramatically. That is, the
dialer people are literally costing themselves more money by aggressively
hanging up.

OTOH, it seems like a lot of people in telecom can't do simple math. For
instance, the desire of customers wanting to buy flat rate for a very non-flat
area. It's trivial to show that they'll never end up paying less on a flat
rate, but they still insist.

If the stats are good, then why would any carrier care about the content? A
lot of dialer is legal (like political dialer).

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bkruse
You got it! Political surveys as well as B2B. It makes no sense that it's
magically non-dialer since 75% of the calls are now 12 seconds instead of 6
seconds :P

People don't understand that flat-rate in this day in age means "I will send
you all of my calls that are above the flat-rate, to your flat-rate" \- aka
LCR'ing the flat-rate. The whole industry has changed so much in the last 4
years. I am excited to see if the $0.0007 flat intercarrier FTC ruling will
ever go through.

You are right - if the stats are good, the carrier doesn't care. The stats are
the ONLY thing the carrier can control, and should control, imo.

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js2
My home phone routes callers not on a white list to a message to "press 1 to
ring the line", then drops them into voice mail if they don't do so. A
blacklist requires callers to "press 1 to leave a message." Voice mails are
transcribed and e-mailed to both me and my wife.

Since implementing this about a year ago, I've had zero robocalls actually
ring my home line. Previously I was getting 7-10 per week.

Implemented using Anveo call flow.

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akeck
I personally find the following low tech method effective for me:

o All home calls go to voicemail without exception. We pick up if we recognize
the voice or the caller. No one seems to mind except my mother-in-law. She's
gotten used to it though. I've also noticed everyone below a certain age
rarely uses voice.

o I've added every number with which I regularly interact to my cell address
book. If a call comes in from an unknown number, it goes to voicemail without
exception.

YMMV.

Being both a math and a tech person, I would like to do a cost and
effectiveness study comparing the purely technical solutions from the contest
with solutions like the above.

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aetch
Interesting prize money amount of $3,133.70. I assume this is supposed to
reference leet?

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mey
The ease at which caller id is spoofed could be solved by the carriers. If
sent called id information doesn't match line termination information (geo
location and owned phone numbers) block the call.

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devicenull
This, just like IP spoofing is something that should be straightforward to
correct. However, the carrier in both cases has incentives to continue
allowing it (getting to charge for minutes, or bandwidth).

~~~
bkruse
I wouldn't say that carrier's have a large incentive. Dialer or robocall
traffic is normally frowned upon in the telecom community. We charge per
minute, and dialer traffic is the worst offender or taking up large amounts of
resources, while providing very little minutes. To give you an idea, a typical
robodialer user may have 30% of their calls answered, and an average call
length of 16 seconds. Whereas a "retail" or normal long-distance customer has
an 85% answer ratio (ASR) and a 2+ minute average call length/duration (ACD).
All of the tier-1 telecom carriers have strict rules AGAINST this type of
traffic. From a business perspective, a single T1 (23/24 channels), I can get
~200-300k minutes/month worth of usage. With a dialer customer, I can expect
about 40k minutes/month

