
'One Ring' Phone Scam - daegloe
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/one-ring-phone-scam
======
anonu
From the website:

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?

~~~
Waterluvian
Absolutely. The phone system is totally broken. A few years ago I disabled the
incoming call part of my phone to everyone except a few family members and my
wife. So far it's been great. Everyone who needs me emails me. I've yet to run
into a situation where someone I _needed_ to hear from would _only_ call me.

~~~
SomeHacker44
Just not willing to do this. I never want to miss a call from someone talking
about an emergency with a family member, the FAA calling about an unclosed
flight plan, a recruiter (if job hunting), a delivery person, etc. I answer
virtually all unknown numbers except the ones T-Mobile puts in as “Scam
Likely.”

What I do not understand is, given that the phone is a computer, why there is
not an on-phone IVR which can solicit a brief intro. I mean, I had tech that
could do that for a landline 25 years ago.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> why there is not an on-phone IVR which can solicit a brief intro.

Google has that, but I'm not sure if it's on-phone.

I'd wager someone could write an app to do this.

I would probably pay $50 for an on-phone version of Lenny; basically a voice-
based chat-bot that keeps spammers occupied, without having to conference
another number in.

( [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3b7na/the-story-of-
lenny...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3b7na/the-story-of-lenny-the-
internets-favorite-telemarketing-troll) )

~~~
ChrisArchitect
heard a review of this app a few days ago that reminded me of Lenny
[https://www.robokiller.com/](https://www.robokiller.com/) \- apparently the
conversations it spews out are pretty hilarious also. Annoyingly I can't
figure out what the subscription rate is, but can try it for a week for free

~~~
ibarrac
I've been using this for the last 3 weeks and it works really well. It has
blocked 21 spam calls up to now. After the free week they charge $30 yearly or
$4 monthly.

You can set the spam calls to be answered with selected funny time-wasting
recordings, but since that would be embarrassing if I get a call from a
professional contact, I set them to be answered with a plain fax tone.

Now I am back to being able to pick up all calls that ring.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Can you toggle over to the "funny recording" on demand? I want to be able to
say "ok, let me get my dad", and push the button to waste their time.

------
shereadsthenews
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.

~~~
thefounder
What's your phone for if not to answer when people call you?

~~~
inflatableDodo
This question reminds me of Kraftwerk's method of using a phone. I'd love a
mobile phone that did this;

>When the German electronic band Kraftwerk were in the studio, they refused to
be disturbed. Working for hours on end, patiently perfecting their sonic
arrangements, required zero interruptions. So much so that they even took the
ringer out of the only telephone in the studio. So what happened when someone
wanted to call them? Simple. If someone wanted to speak to them when they were
working in the studio, the band would instruct that person to call at a
precise time - not 2 minutes before and not a couple of minutes after, but
exactly at that time. Then, at that precise time, a member of the band would
stop what they were doing, walk across the studio, pick up the none ringing
phone and say ‘Hello’ and the call would begin. That’s the only way you could
get to speak to them. You made an agreement. You said what you were going to
do and then you did it.

[http://www.youneedstandout.com/blog/2014/10/20/how-to-
call-k...](http://www.youneedstandout.com/blog/2014/10/20/how-to-call-
kraftwerk)

~~~
dingaling
Intriguing, but in order to lift the phone at the precise time they'd need to
have some form of alarm or notification. At which point, their concentration
would be interrupted.

So really I don't see the point.

~~~
inflatableDodo
You mean that musicians would have to be keeping track of time? How very
distracting for them.

~~~
ptaipale
For me, when playing/recording, it would really distract me (more than e.g.
having a phone in silent mode so that when flow mode ends, I notice I'm hungry
and need to wake up to the outside world, I can see who has tried to call).

The Kraftwerk description sounds a bit eccentric to me. Their business model
is about being eccentric, so no surprise there.

~~~
inflatableDodo
>For me, when playing/recording, it would really distract me

I think this might be easier if you are working as a group and have a big
clock on the wall. I am a rubbish instrumentalist, but do hang around with a
hell of a lot of musicians, and 'how long was that' does seem to be one of the
most commonly asked questions of each other when they are in a studio. Also,
if paying for a studio, they generally become very good at estimating the
current time.

~~~
ptaipale
Sure, but I think things like "we can now do one take and then it's phone call
o'clock" would set an unnecessary pressure to the performance. That's just me
of course.

------
spectramax
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.

~~~
saalweachter
I occasionally contemplate trying to find a data-only plan for my cell phone,
with no associated cell number.

~~~
mey
That may be impossible under current cell designs. WiFi hotspots even have
assigned phone numbers.

~~~
kalleboo
You'll always have a phone number, but on an SMS- or Data-only plan it will
never ring (MVNOs in my country offer these types of plans at a discount
because reserving a voice phone number here is subject to ID verification and
higher fees)

------
dropmann
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]

[0]
[https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...](https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2019/20190208_PingAnrufe.html)

------
reaperducer
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.

~~~
kalleboo
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

~~~
gruez
>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").

So in Europe, is receiving calls on a mobile phones free? Or do you still have
to pay for minutes?

~~~
kalleboo
Yes, receiving calls (and text messages) is free. (unless you are roaming and
then you pay the international sector of the call)

As far as I know this is true not just in Europe but everywhere outside of
North America. It's certainly been true in the Asian countries I've been to (I
get prepaid SIM cards everywhere I visit). It comes down to the numbering
plans - in the NANP (north american numbering plan), landline and mobile phone
numbers are mixed together and you can't distinguish them without a database.
In other countries, mobile phones have their own "mobile phones" area code
which is non-geographic and applies to all mobile phones. This means that
callers beforehand know if they're calling a mobile phone or a landline.

~~~
cesarb
> In other countries, mobile phones have their own "mobile phones" area code
> which is non-geographic and applies to all mobile phones.

Here in Brazil it's slightly different. The area codes are the same for fixed
and cell phones, but if the first digit of the local part of the phone number
is in the 7-9 range, it's a cell phone (if it's in the 2-6 range, it's a fixed
phone; 1 is reserved for special services like emergency, 0 is the
interurban/international/toll-free/etc prefix). So a number like +55-11-9xxxx-
xxxx is a cell phone in the São Paulo region (area code 11), while a number
like +55-11-2xxx-xxxx is a fixed phone in the same region.

~~~
kalleboo
It's interesting that they've managed to merge the numbering systems in that
way! Who pays the extra cost for a call to a mobile phone, the caller or the
receiver? I've yet to visit any South/Central American countries, they seem to
have inherited a lot of North American phone operator customs (like 850/1900
radio bands and CDMA).

In the European country I used to live in, they even had different mobile area
codes per-operator, so you knew which mobile operator the person you were
calling to was on. They would have deals where calling someone on the same
operator was free. This got complicated when number portability was added (and
the number of mobile phones increased)

~~~
cesarb
> Who pays the extra cost for a call to a mobile phone, the caller or the
> receiver?

The caller. You don't pay to receive normal calls unless you're roaming (since
the caller can't know you're roaming, it wouldn't be fair to make the caller
pay the roaming charges).

> they seem to have inherited a lot of North American phone operator customs
> (like 850/1900 radio bands and CDMA).

The radio bands make sense, since the whole American continent is a single ITU
region. As for CDMA, here on Brazil initially it was only Vivo on CDMA and the
rest on GSM, but then Vivo also switched to GSM some time ago.

> They would have deals where calling someone on the same operator was free.

We also have these deals here. And also here, number portability muddled
things: while before for instance 95xx to 99xx was Vivo and 90xx to 94xx was
Claro, nowadays you can't be sure (and that's before they added an extra "9"
digit before all cell phone numbers, making them 9 digits instead of 8).

------
nightcracker
I'm from europe (the Netherlands). Everytime I see these american robocall
threads it blows my mind.

What about your system is so bad that allows this to go on? It's not a problem
here at all.

~~~
LeonM
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.

~~~
wongarsu
Germany is very big (4th largest economy in the world) and we have no problems
with robocalls at all. I don't think I've ever experienced a robocall.

~~~
dcbadacd
I've had the same number for like 14 years now and I haven't gotten a
single(!) robocall. So I share your experience.

~~~
kaybe
Same here.

The landline gets a few scam callers and surveys a year though, always real
people.

------
Brajeshwar
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.)

This is my No Phone Life - [https://no.phone.wtf/](https://no.phone.wtf/)

~~~
baroffoos
That only works if others don't do it however because they won't get your call
back.

~~~
blotter_paper
Nah, it just degrades into voice mail.

------
busymom0
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.

~~~
warp
This is apparently being implemented as we speak ( SHAKEN/STIR,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHAKEN/STIR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHAKEN/STIR)
).

(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 ;)

~~~
rsync
"This is apparently being implemented as we speak ( SHAKEN/STIR,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHAKEN/STIR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHAKEN/STIR)
)."

I see twilio at least mentioning shaken/stir:

[https://www.twilio.com/blog/your-phone-your-call-
eliminating...](https://www.twilio.com/blog/your-phone-your-call-eliminating-
robocalls)

... but I am curious if anyone knows: can this be interacted with, currently,
with either twiml or twilio functions ?

------
peeters
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.

~~~
mpolichette
I agree. If not this, then the phone company should at least require
acknowledgment of the extra cost of the call.

------
eatbitseveryday
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?

~~~
knodi123
> 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.

YMMV.

~~~
brewdad
Ooh, I need to look into that. I acquired my mobile number about 15 years ago
in a town 20 minutes away where I know practically no one. I get plenty of
calls that have the first 6 digits pattern and it is virtually certain that
those calls will not be from someone I know. It would be great to have them
never even ring.

------
paul7986
Another trick these spammers are pulling is prompting you to search the number
on Google and you clicking thru to a malware infested site.

The phone system we once knew needs to be obliterated!

------
khazhoux
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.

~~~
copperx
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.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
> learn to be aggressive and say "I'm not interested"

That's not aggressive, actually you're helping both parties.

~~~
Kliment
Sometimes you have to be very persistent, and that gets interpreted as
aggression. For religious cults, diffuse charity collectors and similar it's
usually sufficient to politely tell them they've come to the wrong person, and
to leave the building and never come back. The electricity and internet
salespeople otoh are extremely aggressive and I have often had to shout at
them or physically chase them out of the building, and threaten with law
enforcement. They shout back that they're trying to do their job but I don't
see why that should make a difference. I'm in Germany, for reference.

------
kyleblarson
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.

~~~
frogpelt
Maybe phones should have a whitelist feature.

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
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.

------
js2
This is my solution for my home line:

[https://imgur.com/eLFvavS](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
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.

------
mike_hollinger
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.

~~~
jgowdy
Caller ID is an untrusted advisory best effort service. It has absolutely no
integrity of any kind today. There's an American law against spoofing it in
theory, but it's not very enforcable at the moment. Understand it's literally
a string that you can set to any value, including complete nonsense, and calls
will often work.

Heck, we constantly receive calls with invalid phone numbers. And it's not
always on purpose, sometimes it's just crummy or small-time carriers in rural
areas (no disrespect intended, this is just an honest statement from
experience). If we ingress filtered all invalid numbers, it would almost
certainly be devistating to our customers.

This is like with email. First we need an integrity mechanism, then we can
start doing reputation and identifying bad actors.

------
mullingitover
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.

------
seniorsassycat
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.

------
harryf
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](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...](https://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/v3/business_search_phone)
) 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.

~~~
endorphone
This would be entirely predicated on callerid being trustworthy. But it isn’t.
At all. Some scammers who have call lists based upon surreptitiously stolen
contact lists now call people ‘from’ their own contacts.

~~~
harryf
True but I’d assume (at least right now) faked calledid makes up < 1% of
telemarketing / scam calls.

Plus the type of robocalling described in the article where they ring once and
hang up wouldn’t work if you fake the callerid - you’d just get them to call
back someone from their contacts

------
nebulous1
I've never understood why we allow telephone operators provide unwanted
premium rate call services to their clients without any opt out. These scams
will just keep coming until it's no longer a matter of simply calling a number
to spend a large per minute premium rate.

I'm guessing the average hacker news user is unlikely to get scammed by this
one, but it's a common one and it works.

------
gandutraveler
This happened to my gf few weeks back. Number came from some eastern European
country. We thought it could be one of our friend who was traveling in eastern
europe I'm that week. Luckily we saw her online on WhatsApp to make sure she
wasn't the one calling. Quick Google search I did that time confirmed our
hunch.

------
bredren
I take phone calls now—but I expect them. Either from people in my address
book, or from customers I set up a call with in advance.

Recently, I had a payment service call me on behalf one of my customers—from
my area code. I nearly told them to beat it. I was sure they were spammers.

Anon Phone calls are approaching completely spam bucket status. I doubt they
will recover.

------
vpzom
What does someone gain by doing this? Wouldn't the charges just go toward the
caller's phone company?

~~~
probably_wrong
If they make you call a premium-rate phone number[1], they get to charge you
more for the call and keep a percentage of it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium-
rate_telephone_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium-
rate_telephone_number)

------
abtinf
What baffles me about this is that getting people to dial these numbers has
been a known scam for many years. The fix seems stupidly trivial: break up the
North American Numbering Plan to move them out of the +1 zone. They just don’t
belong there. Frankly, Canada should be moved out the +1 zone too.

~~~
Marsymars
> Frankly, Canada should be moved out the +1 zone too.

Why? Who does that benefit? It's pretty common for phone plans in both the US
and Canada to treat the US/Canada as a single region for the purpose of long
distance calls and texts.

~~~
jgowdy
Good point. The purpose of my comment you replied to above was that there
should be _either_ pricing normalization such that callers aren't surprised,
OR split the +1 country code.

Its not just "kick everyone out of the US country code", it's protect
consumers by principle of least surprise sorta. But again, this only protects
against toll fraud and not all of the other "Appear to be in a nation you
aren't" scams.

------
mattnewport
I thought this was going to be some new Tolkein themed phone scam, I might
actually fall for that.

------
anovikov
For the U.S., where most people rarely need to make international calls, an
easy solution would be to use an option (which i am sure is provided by every
operator), to just disable any international calls. Sounds like an easy fix.

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mgalka
I just got a bunch of these yesterday, all from Sierra Leone

~~~
aeorgnoieang
Me too; weird!

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aryehof
I have received a lot of these one rings from international numbers, and
always wondered what they were about. I'm grateful to now know why.

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basicplus2
And the "you missed a call message" without ever ringing

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knicholes
"you can file a complaint with the FCC at not cost."

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jgowdy
As someone who has worked in the telecom space for nearly 20 years, I really
think we need to remove other countries from country code +1. People in any
country should have confidence when they dial a number that it isn't
unexpectedly billing them for international calls. This applies to people in
any of the +1 nations, not just the United States.

Otherwise, we need to set the rules and pricing conditional for being a part
of +1 to mitigate this issue.

No disrespect to Canadians, but I wonder if most Canadians are aware of how
much fraud operates out of Canada and takes advantage of the +1 area code plus
the protections of being in another nation. This isn't just Carribean Island
nations as people tend to stereotype.

(Please miss me with the whataboutism, I'm not throwing stones simply sharing
information and experience.)

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Marsymars
If it's done for their own benefit, probably easier for the US to remove
themselves from the +1 area code than to remove other countries.

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jgowdy
I tried to be clear that I believe the principle should apply to all callers.
No on planet earth should second guess whether they're calling a different
nation or not. That principle includes other +1 nations.

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Marsymars
Sure, but as a Canadian, I'm not bothered by it. My phone and VoIP plans all
include US calling/texting. I'd prefer to keep the +1 prefix. The US is free
to change theirs.

~~~
jgowdy
I'm just going to nit on your phrasing here. NANP and the associated +1
country code originated from the United States. Technically I am talking about
"changing theirs." The fact that it's very reasonably shared with other North
American countries in a manner that allows for plenary power on the part of
each other member nation is the source of this issue. I'm suggesting the US
revise NANP and put more conditions on sharing the +1 country code, although
most preferably with a consensus of the other members.

Bad actors in different nations than consumers shouldn't be able to leverage
sovereignty or agreements like NANP to be bad actors with impunity.

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Grustaf
OK, so if someone calls me from Turks and Caicos about a lottery I never
entered, I shouldn’t call back?

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drp
"at not cost." A scam warning with a typo.

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unityByFreedom
Great work FCC. Now that all our communications are done over the internet,
and ISPs are effectively no longer common carriers [1], you've enabled those
internet fast lanes and we'll all get rich.

Just kidding, we will pay more for slower internet. But hey, you alerted us
about robocalls, so not your fault right?

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2017/12/14...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2017/12/14/the-fcc-is-expected-to-repeal-its-net-neutrality-rules-
today-in-a-sweeping-act-of-deregulation/)

EDIT: Please explain downvotes. You feel the current FCC are saints and would
never think such things?

