
FTC Offering $50,000 to Anyone Who Can Stop Robocalls - narad
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2411178,00.asp
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chime
I do not fully comprehend the problem so please correct me if I am wrong.
Every now and then I get a phone call from
<http://mrnumber.com/1-360-460-5964> on my cell that blares a ship's horn into
my ear, saying I can get a free cruise trip.

If I understand it correctly, someone out there is initiating the connection,
be it using Twilio or any of the tons of other IP-to-PSTN gateways. While
Caller ID can be spoofed, the call itself should be possible to trace back to
the initiating gateway using warrants and assistance from the intermediary
parties. Right? If so, then what's the problem following through on this and
having the gateway ban the customer and file charges against them?

Is it because the spammers are fly-by-nighters using stolen CCs to make dummy
Twilio accounts automatically? Is that what FCC's trying to catch?

~~~
dholowiski
It's not just twilio. Anyone with a direct connection (ISDN, T1/T3 etc) to a
telco can spoof caller ID. There are also thousands of SIP phone providers and
you can spoof caller ID from almost all of them- I've done it and you need
nothing more than a SIP account and Astersik. It would be trivial to build a
robodialer that could cycle through hundreds of SIP accounts using trials,
hacked accounts and stolen credit cards. You could put it on a VPS created
using a stolen credit card and be un-traceable.

Or, you could just do what everyone else does and locate yourself overseas, in
a country with weak laws.

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simonsarris
I wish the prize were larger.

I live in New Hampshire, a "swing state." This means that, unlike for most of
the U.S., my vote matters in presidential elections.[1]

I imagine this is why I get ~6 calls a day by numbers in Ohio, Tennessee,
Pennsylvania, Iowa, etc. All political as far as I can tell. I've given up on
answering my phone until after the election.

\---------------

[1] The electoral college bothers me. My presidential vote matters. If you're
reading this from California or Texas, yours simply doesn't. You're a foregone
conclusion.

I would imagine that if we abolished the electoral college we might see 80%+
turnout in smaller states, since the only way to be "represented" on the
national scale would be to have as many of your people vote as possible.

~~~
maratd
> The electoral college bothers me.

It shouldn't.

> If you're reading this from California or Texas, yours simply doesn't.

This is patently false. You only think this way because you were told to.

This is a fine opportunity for those who don't live in a "battleground" state
to really vote for the guy they want to. There are _many_ presidential
contenders, and regardless of your beliefs, you will find someone who fits
them much more closely if you simply look.

You can vote for Romney or Obama, but I know you'll walk out of that polling
place feeling dirty. I'll walk out of mine knowing that I voted for the guy I
really wanted to vote for and didn't shoot myself in the foot doing so.

If enough people realize this and do this, you'll get a much more dynamic
political system and you'll send a very clear message to both the Republican
and Democrat party.

> I would imagine that if we abolished the electoral college we might see 80%+
> turnout in smaller states

The only places that see that kind of turnout are 3rd world countries where
everything has gone to shit. They need to go out and vote or things will just
get worse for them. You will never see that kind of turnout in any Western
country.

~~~
mturmon
I fail to see why voting for someone who you already know will not win is a
satisfying experience, especially when repeated year after year.

You seem to be using extravagant rhetoric ("patently false", "send a very
clear message") to justify your ideas, rather than thinking realistically
about the presidential electoral system. The RNC and DNC are not losing sleep
over third-party presidential voters -- as we all can see, they're focusing on
spending hundreds of millions of dollars elsewhere.

Only for a very few fleeting times in the country's recent history have third
parties had influence at the presidential level other than as spoilers or
cult-of-personality gadflies (Nader, Perot). There are overwhelming structural
impediments to third party presidents.

~~~
maratd
> I fail to see why voting for someone who you already know will not win is a
> satisfying experience

Because it has lasting consequences. Those numbers _are_ counted. They are
poured over by the major parties and those votes affect the _platform_ of the
major parties in the years to come.

Want to _really_ make a difference? Vote your own beliefs.

> Only for a very few fleeting times in the country's recent history have
> third parties had influence at the presidential level other than as spoilers
> or cult-of-personality gadflies (Nader, Perot).

If you're going to restrict yourself to recent history, then even a few
occurrences are significant. Regardless of what you think of Perot or Nader,
they _did_ affect the platforms of the major parties in the years after.

If you're not going to restrict yourself to recent history, you should realize
that the Republican party _was_ a third party when it got started. It had one
overriding issue it was pushing at the time, the abolition of slavery. As a
result of its success, the Whig party completely collapsed.

~~~
CWuestefeld
Certainly I can't influence this election from where I vote in New Jersey. But
maybe my vote today will influence the next one.

(I'm going to throw out the pretense of being unbiased, because it's easier to
write honestly. But feel free to replace my favorite candidate according to
your conscience.)

There are many people who believe that the GOP has turned its back on its core
principles; indeed, the Tea Party was a pretty strong demonstration of that.
Yet the party persists on playing the same old political games despite these
loud voices. So the people need to speak in even louder terms to make them
hear.

I harbor few illusions that my vote will put Gary Johnson in the White House.
But I do hope that when all the votes are counted, the GOP will say, "if all
those votes for Gary Johnson had instead gone to our candidate, we would have
won". If that were to happen, then I think there would be a strong incentive
next time around for them to choose a candidate and platform that would be
more palatable to those votes they lost to Johnson.

~~~
maratd
Ah, further evidence brilliant minds congregate in the same place.

I also live in New Jersey, I am a registered Republican, and I will be voting
for Gary Johnson as well.

I am _really_ curious about the percentage of people who will do the same.

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motiejus
This is exactly what I built SoundPatty for, but for (much) smaller scale. We
needed to capture certain robo-calls incoming to our call-centre, via GSM.
Link: <https://github.com/Motiejus/SoundPatty>

Of course, this program is only a small part of the solution. But it works
very well for matching the patterns in a sound record.

Unfortunately, I am European, and cannot participate. Feel free to use it,
though. License is MIT.

~~~
tzm
Excellent project. I noticed you released a video demo in 2010. Do you have
examples or documentation on the latest updates?

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agildehaus
They could start by banning it for politicians. There goes 50% of them for me
...

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chrisaycock
Previous discussion from this morning:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4672068>

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tvladeck
I can't resist. David Vladeck is my dad, and I'm extremely proud of the job
he's doing at the FTC.

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narcissus
Growing up in Australia, I was jealous of local, outgoing landline calls being
free in North America.

Having said that, and living here now, I wonder how many of these ridiculous
scam, spam and random calls I wouldn't get if the callers had at least a few
cents per call tacked on to the price?

I mean, I have no doubt that they probably pay some provider for some access
to the network, but if calls had essentially 'a few cents' at the bare
minimum... I know normal people would have to pay the same thing, but still.

And who knows... having not been in Australia for so long, things may be just
as awful there now too, but I do know that I never hear my mother complaining
about all the calls.

~~~
thomc
Same here, from the UK and always wished the outgoing local calls were free
like the US.

However, many of the robocalls and scam calls coming into my line these days
appear to come from overseas. I don't know how they can afford to do that but
I've seen reports that some are using spare capacity in legitimate overseas
call centres as a side-business. Otherwise you have to assume they make enough
from their scam to be worth it, or purchase the capacity on credit and do a
runner before paying the bill, or using stolen credit cards. Actually there
are many ways now that I think about it!

Point being that charging for outgoing calls won't stop the robocalls but will
cost legitimate users.

~~~
rmc
Often they would hack people's VoIP or telephone exchange and just route calls
through that.

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sahaj
I believe Google Voice has already solved this problem. Just as with email,
click report spam and the whole user-base benefits. I suppose Google could
share that phone number list with others providers.

~~~
elliottcarlson
With the ease of obtaining phone numbers there probably needs to be a
different approach as well. Blocking a set of their outbound numbers would
prove nothing more than a brief annoyance - not to mention CID spoofing still
being a possibility from VOIP companies that allow it.

~~~
ffk
Furthering this argument, if a robocaller uses a phone number briefly and
discards the number after it is banned, the next user attempting to make a
legitimate emergency call using the banned number may not get through.

~~~
elliottcarlson
Excellent point - it seems that tightening up the ease of getting a new number
would be important - yet that just causes other issues, people just don't want
to have to jump through hoops.

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dsr_
Require all telcos to provide this service: After a robocaller hangs up, the
complainee dials *555 (or something similar). The switch notes all the details
of the previous inbound call to the complainee and the complainee's phone
number. This information is sent to an FTC database. When an originating
number gets a threshold of complaints, a sample of recent complainees is
called by a human to get a quick interview as to what happened.

That's the end of the technical requirements. After that, policies and
prosecution.

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thebooktocome
Probably not enough; the economic incentive to robocall is a couple orders of
magnitude higher.

~~~
mamamia
Are providers getting paid off by robocalling services? You would think that
this would be treated the same way that spam is.

~~~
jlgreco
They are getting paid off in the sense that robocallers probably have sizable
phone-bills. The economics of sending emails and making phonecalls are
different.

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sjg007
How about an audio captcha service? Seems simple enough with voice recognition
so widely available? Might confuse my grandparents though..

~~~
thomc
I'm in the UK and mostly work from my home office so robocalls and the like
became really annoying. I installed a "trueCall"[1] device and it completely
stopped robocallers, those "I'm calling from Windows" scammers (which were
actually funny) and others. I just use the basic setting where it tells the
caller "Press 3 to be connected. If you are a cold caller please hang up and
do not call again". I'm actually a little surprised how effective it is.

If the robocall were to blast DTMF tones down the phone it could automatically
bypass and I'd need a more advanced setting (of which there are many). But I
haven't needed to do that in over a year of operation. Only downside so far is
my bank has recently taken to calling me up to verify transactions, using a
robocaller, so I may need to give them my mobile.

I considered setting up asterisk to do something similar since the device was
a little pricey, but decided the time saving was worth it. It also records my
calls to a SD card if needed. Now my land line is the disposable one I give
out and my mobile number is the one I'm careful with.

Not affiliated with them, just a satisfied user.

[1] <http://www.truecall.co.uk/>

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michael_h
I make sure to hold on the line for the entire call. If it says 'Press 4 to
speak to a representative', I press 4. When they come on the line, I keep them
occupied for as long as I possibly can. Every minute on the phone with me is a
minute that they aren't trying to scam my grandmother.

If enough people would do this, I would hope that the ecomonics of it would
shift.

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Xcelerate
Couldn't you apply some kind of hash function to the first few seconds of each
phone conversation? Then when you get multiple matching hashes, you analyze
where these calls are coming from, perform some kind of statistics magic, and
determine what numbers to block?

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rwallace
E-mail spam is a problem because sending e-mail is basically free. It costs
money to make a telephone call; why doesn't that wipe out the economic
incentive? Are telephone calls too cheap? If so, why isn't a simple price
increase the solution?

~~~
dholowiski
At volume, it's really close to free to make a phone call. Just like sending
email - there is a cost (electricity, data, infrastructure), it's just
extremely close to nothing.

~~~
rwallace
How? Do American phone companies give bulk discounts on call charges or
something?

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lucb1e
I didn't even know what Robocalls were until looking them up on Wikipedia just
now. This is common in Canada it seems? And I assume it's a bad problem (worth
50 grand) because they're simply spam, only without available spamfilters?

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tomjen3
That is easy. Just make the punishment high enough. It is an economic activity
- nobody would do it if it was a capital offense.

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rorrr
Increase the fines. Where can I have my $50K?

