
The Case of the Phantom Caller - escapologybb
https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/104-case-phantom-caller
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zaksoup
This was some fantastic investigating by Alex in this episode. Reply-All has
done some really great journalism and reporting, including their episode on
the fake tech support phone scam[0] and a more recent episode on the effect of
the Backpage laws on sex work in general[1].

Tangential but related: I've been getting spam phone calls from local-to-my-
number area codes (760, 619, and 858) at a rate of about 2-3 a day for more
than a year now. It's funny because I don't live in San Diego anymore, so
they're not actually local calls for me. VZW seems unwilling or unable to stop
it. Robokiller, which promises incredible results catches 1-2 calls a week,
but because the spammers are using SIP spoofing they never actually call from
the same number, making it hard to compile a consistent and relevant
blacklist.

Frankly, if I didn't have a chronic medical condition, and the specialist I
see for it didn't require that I be able to receive phone calls to deal with
scheduling, I would have insisted all of my regular contacts switch to
FaceTime Audio, Signal, Telegram, etc and just disabled incoming telephone
calls to my phone entirely.

[0] [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/long-
distance](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/long-distance) [1]
[https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/119-no-more-safe-
harbo...](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/119-no-more-safe-harbor)

~~~
zeveb
> Robokiller, which promises incredible results catches 1-2 calls a week, but
> because the spammers are using SIP spoofing they never actually call from
> the same number, making it hard to compile a consistent and relevant
> blacklist.

Note too that the spammers are using _valid_ phone numbers belonging to other
people, which means that a blacklist will start to block real people.

I know because someone else was getting constant spams from someone who was
using _my_ number! AFAICT there's nothing I can do about it

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lowlevel
I just want to say that I really enjoyed this particular episode and thought
Alex did an amazing job of figuring out what was going on. Where ever there is
a system tied to payments there will be someone trying to game the system for
profit.

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lainga
Since this was from September, I am really interested now as to how the FBI
investigation has gone. I'm just imagining some AT&T greybeard in suspenders
putting his hands up and slyly saying "you've got me".

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rotexo
Kind of reminds me of the footage in William Gibson‘s ‘Pattern Recognition.’
Hearing this also made me more curious about phone scams than anxious, which
is a nice change.

