This kind of thing is why a lot of people dropped their land line. Sure it was made largely redundant with mobile, but it also became primarily a nuisance.
Facebook and others keep that in mind as you relentlessly monetize without offering value to people.
>Facebook and others keep that in mind as you relentlessly monetize without offering value to people.
Pretty much all of my communication on Facebook Messenger is with my friends, and the rest is with some groups I'm in to find local events, which I could leave hassle-free at any time with the click of a button. No communication with spammers or businesses, with the exception of someone with an obviously hacked account once every few years.
With the rare exception, my incoming calls on my phone are either my doorbell (which I answer if I'm expecting someone), or spammers (who I don't answer).
So I would say Facebook keeps this in mind much better than the phone company.
> my doorbell (which I answer if I'm expecting someone)
My would you not answer if you don't expect someone? Pranks? Sellers? I have never experienced any door knockers that are obnoxious, except one seller once. Mostly it is friends, neighbours or missionaries who are unannounced.
Even before I had door cameras, I would just not answer the door if I wasn't expecting someone. Everyone I know would know enough to call or text before coming over, and anyone in an emergency would keep knocking.
I've had plenty of obnoxious salespeople and other solicitors, especially religious ones. They even have the nerve to claim that they aren't soliciting because they're not selling anything for money. And none of them have the good sense to accept that they're bothering someone that is obviously not happy that their door was knocked on.
Unless I'm already in a really bad mood, I generally start off nice, but I turn serious as soon as they refuse to take the first 'no'. Except for the ones I argue with for a while to waste their time and energy.
Depends on the neighbourhood. I moved recently and now a salesman or charity is a 3-4x a week occurrence for me. I also get a bunch of teens selling various goods that I'm 90% sure are stolen, in order to raise money for their education.
Sure, but not in the same league compared to sellers calling over the phone in my experience.
I guess it comes down to the effective wanna answer the door to not wanna answer the door ratio. I don't want to miss someone I'd like to meet to avoid the 1/X chance of a seller. As sibling comment noted that ratio probably depends on local circumstances.
A neighbor talking to their neighbors about actual important political issues isn’t typically what people don’t like.
People they don’t know trying to convince them they should care about a political issue they don’t care about or they are terrible and bad people is what people don’t like. It’s usually the second one, even if someone thinks it’s the first one.
So you only want to talk to neighbors you already know? Isn't that a bit insular?
I think if you want to live in a community, you have to be open to having conversations with your coinhabitants about polemic issues. Anything less is unkind.
Regardless, persistent lobbying from a stranger is no more solicitation than softer lobbying from a friend.
In practice, this is rarely a problem. The civically inactive tend to congregate; communities with a strong civic sense, on the other hand, understand why organization is important. (TL; DR If you get mad about neighbors, including those you don't know, trying to talk to you about issues, you're the root cause of what you might complain about your community.)
Nice try. I’d say this manipulative BS is the real root cause.
People in battleground areas often have buses of activists brought in from neighboring states to do door to door canvassing. Among other things.
Thanks for calling everyone who wants to be able to cast their vote without active harassment from people with no stake in their community or reputation to worry about first ‘the root of the problem’ though.
> People in battleground areas often have buses of activists brought in from neighboring states to do door to door canvassing
These aren't neighbors. We're talking about neighbors.
> everyone who wants to be able to cast their vote without active harassment from people with no stake in their community
Your neighbors have a stake in your community. It's almost part and parcel with the definition. Refusing to engage with them because you assume to know better obviously impacts the community's strength, cohesiveness and civic integrity.
If by battleground areas you mean swing states, then the national popular vote could reduce that cross-state migration and canvassing that we see so much of.
Still, does someone in Georgia not have a stake in whether Florida lines their roads with radioactive agricultural waste? In our industrialized, globalized economy stakes reach much farther than a neighborhood or city level.
> Claiming that any discussion of that sort is ‘friendly neighborhood discussion’
Bit of a straw man to quote something nobody in this thread said.
Nobody said civic duty is champagne and French fries. Just that rejecting it has a cost, and the people who cause that cost have a tendency to congregate. That, in turn, frees up resources for the communities who bother organizing.
Someone literally equated folks from other states as having similar stakes as actual neighbors. This isn’t strawmanning.
And you’re the one that keeps beating ‘civic duty’ when I’m pointing out the disingenuous and manipulative nature of a lot of the current political strategies - including fake grass roots ‘neighbors’.
Which people have a right to ignore, despite your statements otherwise.
Personally, I’d argue they have an actual civic duty to ignore or even ostracize folks doing that, as that kind of manipulative lying is what poisons actual civic discussion.
I don't answer the door unless the caller knocks more than once. If it's only one knock, I assume it's someone dropping off a package or asking for money, which accounts for about 95% of cases. If I do answer the door, I'm almost never glad I did, though. My neighbors have my number, and generally text me before coming over.
My thought is that you knocking on my door does not oblige me to stop what I'm doing and answer it, any more than someone saying, "sir, do you have a minute for..." while I'm walking down the street obliges me to stop and hear their sales pitch, or seeing an unknown caller on the phone means I ought to pick it up.
If I'm not expecting someone to ring my doorbell (or call me on the phone, which is certainly rarer), my phone is on silent. So I simply wouldn't notice unless I happen to be looking at my phone.
I have my other communication (mostly FB Messenger, but also Discord and SMS/MMS) set up to work on my computer, so I rarely look at my phone at home.
Also I live in a condo, nobody can really "knock on my door" unless it's someone who lives in my building, in which case I'll answer.
Sure, I don't think Facebook is benevolent. I hear Whatsapp (also owned by Facebook) has plenty of spam, and I don't use that, much to the dismay of some of my non-American friends.
The phone companies also owe me nothing, and they provide a worse experience and will likely continue to do so unless forced by the FCC (which seems to be getting better lately).
I do use SMS/MMS but forwarded to my web browser so I don't have to look at my phone.
At the moment, Messenger is better for both text and voice/video calls. If that changes, my friends and I will adapt.
Although even today I still have a "house phone", I haven't used a POTS land line in 15 years or more - I switched to VoIP long ago because of related nuisances.
The straw that broke the camel's back was that somebody had their fax machine to send something to a (wrong) number every night at 2am. The phone company said they had no way to just block that number for us, but that for abusive calls we could talk to the police. The police said they couldn't do anything because although it was an extreme nuisance, it didn't fit the legal definition of abusive. Since we were going to have to change our number because of this anyway, we decided to just move to a platform with which we really could manage blacklists and such.
A prior experience had a debt collection agency calling us a couple of times a week, asking for some guy we never heard of. Each time we'd tell them that this was a wrong number, but they'd just call back a couple days later anyway. I tried using logic: the person they were looking for apparently had a Florida address, while the number they were calling at was a NJ number (back when you could pretty definitively link phone numbers to geography). The guy calling us agreed that it didn't make sense, but that didn't matter. I finally told them that the guy was deceased, and oddly, they seemed to buy that.
Anyway, my experience suggests that the demise of land lines has been not just because of the nuisance itself, but also because the technology and regulatory situation didn't allow people any effective way to deal with it.
Makes me wonder what that will eventually mean to email, SMS, etc., if anything.
EDIT: my current solution for spam calls on our VoIP line is three-pronged.
1) Known abusers are blacklisted, never to be heard from again. I don't really use this, though, because they're probably just spoofing the number anyway.
2) Everybody on my contact list can freely ring our phone, no problem.
2) Otherwise, the call is intercepted by a voice response system. It just tells them that if they want to talk to us, to push "2". Bots never do that, so we're very nearly 100% free of spam calls.
Fwiw, the three-pronged approach is supported by household phones now. So if you went back to POTS, you could have the same features. Not that you should, but the tools are better now.
My grandparents had this so bad. I stayed with them a few times over the last few years, for weeks or months at a time as we dealt with some family tragedies.
One day I decided to keep track of how many telemarketer and scam/spam/Medicare/insurance/banking-fraud calls they got in one day. I lost count somewhere in the 15-20 region. It was constant.
I was at my local credit union and the lady behind the counter was asking about the money I was moving around. It was a significant amount. She apologized and said "I'm sorry but we have to ask these questions, once in a while we get some folks moving money who are being scammed." In her situation they stopped some nice older folks from "bailing out their granddaughter", of course it wasn't their granddaughter it was a scammer.
Dealing with my father-in-law's financials we found some odd "donations" to groups we never could identify, not a lot so it wasn't worth investigating further, but we also couldn't find any trace of some of these orgs either. I assume some were scammers. Thankfully we got his finances arranged so everything had to be approved later in life.
> This kind of thing is why a lot of people dropped their land line.
Really? I get just about zero spam calls (maybe 1-2/year) on my landline (which I've had since the 90s).
But I could subscribe to extended car warranties twenty times per day on my cellphone if I answered those calls.
I always answer the landline phone because it is just about guaranteed to be a real call. I absolutely never answer my cellphone because it is a lost cause.
I block all calls by default on my cellphone as well. If you want to reach me but you don't have my whatsapp/facebook/etc. then you probably shouldn't reach me anyway.
Nintendo can garnish a dude's wages to the tune of $10M for the rest of his life for IP violations but we can't put the screws on a phone scammer that steals from our grandmothers? Sheesh.
To risk veering off topic, the Nintendo thing gets a bad rep due to how it was reported on when it really is the sort of thing you'd expect HN types to be on board with. The guy stole FOSS code, tweaked it to be malicious (bricking devices that ran homebrew software that he personally did not like), closed off the source code to his tweaks, and sold it for a profit while explicitly advertising it as being used for software piracy. 10M is surely a bit much but the guy was pretty flagrantly wrong both legally and morally.
Tell that to the thousands of people locked up for inability to pay their child support. They don't imprison you for the debt, they imprison you because the court gave you a direct order and you could not fulfill that order, thus you committed contempt.
Sadly it's not that simple, although that perhaps is the way it should be because that would be a form of tax evasion.
All the people I know locked up for child support issues just couldn't work enough to afford to live and pay what the government was asking, and the government would fight to keep the level the same, even though it wasn't sane. Then the government would first punish these people by canceling their driver's licenses as an incentive to make them pay, which would often result in them losing their jobs and falling further behind. In the end, jail.
We most certainly have penalties that include jail time for not paying fines. You’re right that isn’t a debtors prison so I’m not sure why you’ve brought them into the conversation.
Implementing a challenge system could be a potential solution. In this system, each outgoing call would require the caller to pay a dime as a deposit. If the recipient marks the call as legitimate after the conversation, either through the app or website, the caller would receive the dime back.
To ensure customer convenience, inbound business numbers could have the option to opt out of the challenge deposit requirement, allowing customers to call in without any deposit.
While requiring all outgoing calls to be charged might be more effective, it might not be a popular direction, especially in the United States. Thus, the challenge system with a deposit and the optional opt-out for inbound business numbers appears to be a more balanced and acceptable approach, considering both the need for legitimacy verification and user satisfaction.
The recipient of the call would have zero incentive to mark any call as legitimate, so this system would not work due to sheer apathy. All calls would automatically be considered illegitimate.
Unless you're proposing to also fine people 10 cents for every call that they receive that they don't mark as legitimate or illegitimate? That's not going to be popular either.
Under the challenge system, your friend pays a dime for the call, providing an incentive for you to return that money unless you want to be inconsiderate.
For other callers, like businesses, if the recipient does not mark the call as legitimate, they have the option to discontinue offering calls to that customer in the future or absorb the associated cost.
To strike a balance, the cost for the challenge should be small enough for typical calling cases, allowing users to accept the occasional expense if necessary. However, as the calling volume becomes excessive, the cost should increase significantly, serving as a deterrent against excessive or spammy calling behavior. This way, the system encourages genuine calls while discouraging misuse of the service.
> Under the challenge system, your friend pays a dime for the call, providing an incentive for you to return that money unless you want to be inconsiderate.
At most, this "consideration" would extend to a handful of people. In reality, no, most people would not care to mark calls as legitimate, even from friends.
> For other callers, like businesses, if the recipient does not mark the call as legitimate, they have the option to discontinue offering calls to that customer in the future or absorb the associated cost.
Yes, it would just be part of the cost of doing business. It would be a tax on all phone calls. No one would mark these calls as legit.
> This way, the system encourages genuine calls while discouraging misuse of the service.
Again, the incentives aren't aligned. It would not work.
If you had proposed the opposite, your idea would have a much greater chance of working, but you didn't. If more than a handful of people mark a particular number as having called them illegitimately, then yes, fine that number a large sum of money. That would work. People are incentivized to complain when they receive spam calls and texts. People are not incentivized to confirm that normal calls are normal.
Imagine applying this idea to credit card fraud instead of phone calls, so you had to mark every single credit card transaction as legitimate, or else the business gets charged an extra 10 cents. The customer faces no consequences for "forgetting" to mark the charges as legitimate. The people who empathize enough with the business to do that for every single charge would just be faced with a major hassle, and the credit card companies would have a null signal where most "illegitimate" (by default) charges are actually legitimate. People can already contest illegitimate credit card charges, and that system works much better than a default-illegitimate system.
Personally, I will never call you again if I don't get that dime back. However, it is also possible to design the system in a way that it actually comes with some disadvantages if calls are not marked in a reasonable timeframe. For instance, all the incoming call from that number is blocked if it is not marked within three days.
I'm just providing a broad idea, and I'm pretty sure there are different types of details that can make it more workable.
Also, if anything like this were to be implemented, it would probably be through some sort of SaaS where payment is consolidated, perhaps as a phone bill, etc., instead of charging a credit card for each transaction.
While that would be a solution, it appears to be a solved problem. Neither my Portugese, nor my Danish number receives any robocalls. Frinds with US numbers get a lot of robocalls, though.
Aren't most retired people's money locked up in gov pension and social programs as opposed to the USA where you're expected to mostly self-fund retirement with 401k, IRA, and savings?
So older US people have more control of their retirement funds than Europeans?
I don't know how this related to robocall, but I like the question!
I can only answer for Denmark, but there we have a thing called "ratepension" which I think is similar to a 401k. Retirement age in Denmark is 73 and the public pensions do only cover the bare minimums – you also need at private pension.
In the US, the robocalls typically target seniors that aren't able to identify the scam.
In the US, we have 3 "pillars" of retirement income that we are told to keep roughly the same size: Gov plans (Social Security), personal savings, employer sponsor plans (401k).
I had always assumed in Europe, most people expected the gov to fund most of their retirement (70%?). Whereas the expectation in the US is social security only covers ~33% (although for many people its 100%).
I don’t see how that’s the only dimension to look at when identifying addressable markets. Actually I don’t even see how it’s any dimension at all since you just can’t target “Europe” as a whole with a single solution that doesn’t have dozens of bespoke per-country exceptions. France is just about as different from Germany as any North American country.
I never got any in the UK either. Are you saying that 67 million people is too small of a market? Even the 10 and 6 million of Portugal and Denmark seems plenty large enough to make these type of things viable.
> Are you saying that 67 million people is too small of a market?
Yes. If I'm a scammer, I'm going to target the most profitable single market that I understand. Building an international capability on top of that is a fairly large leap.
Having worked on GTM strategies for nearly a dozen new technology products at an international company and seen countless more, I have more than reason to believe that targeting the entire world at once is almost never done. You do your market research and make the best decision you can, scamming is no different. Scamming’s addressable market is dictated by many factors other than population: mean income by cohort, regularity climate, normal liquidity situations, bank policies, etc..
They're not robocalls, but since my mobile number was ported to O2 I have received multiple calls a week of scammers wanting to access my account to order phones.
I got a lot of calls here in Germany from people with indian accent, pretending to work for Microsoft. At some point I wouldn’t pick up the phone if I did not know the caller.
Well, given that there are people in this very discussion from Europe discussing the robocalls they get, I'd guess you are seeing only what you want to see. Can't help you with that.
Sibling comment of the root reply this is on. Everyone else can see it and it was posted before you made this comment so no idea why you can't see it but everyone else can.
> I got a lot of calls here in Germany from people with indian accent, pretending to work for Microsoft. At some point I wouldn’t pick up the phone if I did not know the caller.
The person is clearly not talking about robocalls, but a spam/scam caller.
Not to say that those are the same but they often go hand in hand. The purpose of a robocall is typically just to cast the line, and if they get a bite then a human scam caller will take over.
STIR/SHAKEN is a mechanism that validates the origination of calls but doesn't verify the legitimacy of the call, which can only be determined by the recipient. While it is a good starting point to protect against spoofing, what we truly need is an end-to-end deterrent to prevent these annoying calls altogether. I believe that imposing a potential financial burden on the caller could be the only effective solution to counter these calls.
There was a proposal for this in the 90s called Hashcash. Senders would have to brute force some random data to append onto email headers until they found some such that the first n bits of the hashed header were 0s. Sending emails would be computationally expensive, but not to a point that it would impact non-bulk users.
The proof-of-work email use case never took really took off, but if you're acquainted with cryptocurrencies some parts of the implementation might sound familiar :)
> each outgoing call would require the caller to pay a dime as a deposit
This means the single mom whose account is overdrawn, with only a debit card, can't call their bank to have the overdraft fee waived. For lack of ten cents.
> it could be handled more like a postpaid phone bill
There is still a strong predatory incentive for people with limited choices. Who wants to guess, for example, what cheque-cashing establishments will do? Or asshat landlords?
That's why I suggested (also in another thread) that the amount charged should be modest. I'm merely suggesting the concept and not the specifics. Perhaps businesses should be subjected to different types of regulations on how they can charge their clients under such a system, just like businesses are excluded from the National Do-Not-Call Registry.
I haven't answered the phone in years. All calls from unknown numbers go straight to silent, and anyone in my contacts knows not to call me anyway. What kind of real person uses the phone nowadays? It's literally scams, customer support, billing departments, credit collection agencies, and generally people you don't talk to as long as you can avoid it. Normal people use FaceTime, WhatsApp, Messenger, Zoom, etc.
There's basically zero upside to phone calls, and frankly nor is there much for SMS either. I would suggest that phone companies completely deprecate their telecom networks and go all-in on internet, but then the spam would migrate to the apps (it's already begun with whatsapp), so I don't want to give them any ideas.
I’m not trying to sound snide, but maybe you’ve not had many major life events during a few years?
If you move to a new house or apartment for example, you might quickly find that the luxury of not taking any calls quickly leads to missed appointments and extra paperwork. I know this because when I moved last time, phone calls started pouring in from electricians, movers, landlords and who knows what else. The entire project would have been impossible without answering a regular phone call.
This seems like either a regional and/or phase of life difference. As a homeowner in Canada for example, I often have need to find contractors for home items for example, like I just replaced a few windows.
Most of those businesses do not operate primarily (or at all) over email or sms so leaving phone messages and receiving calls from unknown numbers is normal. Investment firms also generally need occasional contact etc.
So I guess all I’m saying (as someone who would rather use text whenever possible) is that there is still many legitimate use cases for receiving phone calls.
> What kind of real person uses the phone nowadays?
Tell me you have no kids without telling me you have no kids.
> Normal people use FaceTime, WhatsApp, Messenger, Zoom, etc.
What? No. Just call me on my phone. The actual phone, landline. You can call me on my cellphone but I'm not answering, leave a message. I might check it someday.
You will never reach me on these proprietary third party walled-garden apps. I don't do proprietary.
I barely use my phone, yet calls is 99% of what I do. I get less than 5 unsolicited calls per year. Don't use any of the things your imaginary "normal people" use. What a weird thought process. I guess the world does revolve around you
What do you mean calls is 99% of what you do? For work? Doesn't that just prove my point? You're not using the phone system for personal calls. You must work somewhere doing outbound calls for some reason or receiving them for another. And yes, I would include sales in this classification.
I have a lot of somewhat tech illiterate family which I communicate with regulaly who pretty much only care to SMS and regular phone calls. Before Signal dropped SMS support I had managed to get a number of them on Signal, but dropping SMS really confused most of them so they dropped it.
I also participate in a lot of local groups where the least common denominator is usually phone/SMS for quick comms.
I refuse to use Meta products outside a privacy container on my computer so no Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp on my phone.
Relax. There'd be no need for presumptions if you wrote more clearly than "phone calls is 99% of what I do," unless you're suggesting it's a reasonable presumption that you spend 99% of your personal time on the phone, or that "what I do" doesn't colloquially mean "for work."
I'm with you. My Phone app is probably the least-used app on my phone, because pretty much all inbound calls are unwanted. I occasionally need to make an outbound call so my Phone app usage is not quite zero.
I don't even try to stop the scams anymore for the most part. I just assume that anything incoming is a scam until I am able to verify it. It is kind of crazy making, but maybe not as crazy making as trying to stop the flood.
Someone has figured out how to break it. I have it enabled yet I still receive one call a week from a Chinese speaking robo caller. Everyone I know gets these calls, some daily on their cell phones. Must be a very profitable product they're selling to afford making 600 calls to reach one person who understands Mandarin.
Those calls threaten their Mandarin-speaking target that US Immigration services are going to kick them out of the country. But the scammers (who might be dressed up as immigration lawyers) will take care of the problem in exchange for a bunch of money.
Been using this for what seems like years. Initially Google Asst screening would throw some legit callers off base, but I haven't had a false-positive or scam calls for years. Google Asst also manages the call when put on-hold. Would be more fun if it could emulate Its Lenny
Curious if this has worked where a valid caller with a valid reason made it through the screen and how you could catch false positives. Sounds like a great idea if it works so that's why I am asking.
I think if they say anything, it rings and shows a transcript of what they said. At least, that's what happened the few times I've received a legitimate call from an unknown number (think calls like a contractor or a doctor's office).
Yeah. I ragequit Android when they went back on photo storage promises but wowza I did not think that Apple would be so bad at handling spam. Unless they get their act together I am ragequitting the Apple ecosystem back to Android for my next phone.
The phone changed but the carrier and phone number didn't. Pixel's robocall screening was evidently like that meme with the soldier blocking the arrows.
It decreases user availability to non-Google advertising vectors. I would also assume that if Google can figure out who's trying to sell what to you, they can use that to better funnel ads your way on their own platform.
Tmobile and others have some ot-in feature that prevent most of the scam calls from getting to your phone. I went from a couple a day to a couple a week after turning it on.
Previously the FCC has collected $0. The most they ever collected was a few thousand. They have to ask another agency to enforce these and by then Shady Telecom LLC has been shutdown by the owners without any forwarding address.
they've collected considerably more than that, but you're right that it's not likely to be anywhere near $300M. but it's up to justice to collect, something the fcc wants to change (as Rosenworcel says ITA).
Because it would kill cold sales calls, which I think have a ton more value than you probably think they do (when ethically done).
For reference for a business I previously owned:
- Per 100 cold calls based on leads we qualified…
- We actually spoke to about 30 people…
- Of which about 10 were actually interested…
- Of which about 3 became customers.
- Customers paid on a monthly basis for an average of well over two years for our service.
For loosely qualified cold calls, this was a pretty big success, imho.
Yes, we mildly bothered 70 people (unanswered call), and we bothered 20 more with an unwanted sales pitch (usually less than one minute), but we had good conversations with 10 of them. Whether they became a customer or not, I think that we at least helped them understand clearly what their options were in our product market.
You have provided a great example of how worthless cold calling is to society.
Ten percent of your interactions were even close to being considered not a nuisance (more like 3 percent were actually not a nuisance, someone listing to an advertisement willingly is still being interrupted and annoyed)
Fuck that man, come on. If you are bothering 100 people to POSSIBLY help a couple people possibly find a service that might help them, you are spam.
Cold Calls aren't the problem though. Getting one random call a month or whatever never was an issue in the past.
The issue is getting 10 completely silent calls per day, sometimes with an additional "your car warranty is expired" call. That's the issue everyone has a problem with - it's made answering your phone nearly useless.
> You have provided a great example of how worthless cold calling is to society.
I think you are missing the big picture.
Assuming that we waste 1 minute of time for 90 people, and everything else is productive, it’s:
- 90 minutes of aggregate inefficiency…
- to benefit 7 folks who have a much better understanding of the market for their current and future needs…
- and 3 people who are scaling their business for years via delegating something they are not good at to folks who are.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had many many dud 90-minute encounters (much less one minute encounters) that were all worth it for the one encounter that moved the needle. This could be sales leads, training, dates, finding new restaurants… there are many domains for which this is true.
Frankly, I think that this is a fairly efficient ratio compared to most value-seeking activities in the world.
Edit: Note that the close rate was close to 40% live (versus 10% calls) with a non-significant n, so I think the medium itself was one source of inefficiency. The product was clearly needed by our leads, but trust-building was tougher over the phone.
From your point of view, it's great--there's no downside. A little "Aggregate inefficiency" as you put it.
From the point of view of the victims (or leads, as you might describe them), 70% deftly avoided you and 20% were annoyed that you intruded on their lives, albeit briefly. Or put another way, for every new customer you got, you actively annoyed ~7 of them, and confirmed the problem of unsolicited phone calls for a further ~23 of them.
> Assuming that we waste 1 minute of time for 90 people, and everything else is productive
Most people aren't interested in being tricked into opening their wallet, sorry. If I want your services, I'll seek them out. You're not entitled to even a second of my time.
> Most people aren't interested in being tricked into opening their wallet, sorry.
I’m very curious about why “sales” automatically equates to “trickery” for you.
Ethical, high quality sales is the efficient matching of goods and/or services with folks who want them.
These types of sales exist and are not as uncommon as some HNers seem to think that they are.
> If I want your services, I'll seek them out.
You seem to assume that most people are good at finding services they need. In general, I have found this not to be the case both for me and many of my customers (at least not initially).
For me personally, I spend a shit ton of time on discovery, and I still find that random ads and sales pitches introduce me to things that I was not aware of.
FWIW, my service was a tech service, and my market was decidedly not tech savvy. One of the challenges of the sales process was getting them to understand and believe that we weren’t trying to bamboozle them (as many competitors were). We couldn’t sell them with technical explanations of why we were good or why some other option was not as good — we had to use non-technical explanations and an onboarding process that minimized the friction.
Ultimately, the proof of the pudding was in the eating, so we retained customers for much longer than industry average, with most of our churn being due to businesses being sold, closing, or moving beyond what we offered (at which point we referred them to an ethical provider that was appropriate for their newfound needs).
> You're not entitled to even a second of my time.
Honestly, I think you’re living a lesser life (especially professionally) if you are not willing to defer seconds, minutes, or even hours to speculative engagements.
It doesn’t take long to qualify a sales call for fit — the good sales people will know how to what itches they are good at scratching and whether you might have those itches.
Fingers crossed the FTC finds and fines you. If it’s big enough maybe you’ll have some empathy for your victims, or at least the calculus will change in society’s favor.
If the law is so far divorced from what everyday people see as a scourge, then perhaps it is the law that has a poor understanding of reality. Just because bothering people is legal doesn't mean it's ethical.
I think you might be projecting a wee bit too much.
I guess you missed the following quote in the article I linked to (emphasis mine):
“Only 2% of cold calls convert. But 69% of buyers are willing to take a cold call, and 57% of C-level buyers want sales reps to contact them first.”
Most savvy business people are willing to take speculative engagements (within reason) — it’s just +ev to do so.
Let me be charitable and say that I think that a lot of tech sales is low quality (e.g., trying to force fit when there isn’t much/any) or downright scams (e.g., the alleged yelp “protection money” gambit), so I can understand that a tech-oriented community may be a bit jaded. That said, low quality sales interactions are not the norm in large swathes of the economy — it’s just as much or more of a waste of time for the sales person as it is for the potential buyer.
1. I don't trust the biased source of that number.
2. I want to know exactly how they asked the question, and how "contact them first" was interpreted by the people being surveyed.
3. Were your cold calls going directly to C-level buyers?
4. If 69% of buyers are willing to take a cold call, why do you think only 30% of people answered the phone, of which only a third were willing to listen to a pitch?
1. Fair enough. Do you think it’s far from directionally correct?
2. Very good question. I go back to, do you think it’s far from directionally correct? I think it’s close.
3. Small business owners ($1-10 million annual revenue).
4. Great question. First, many of these folks do like I do and send non-contacts to voicemail (they’re busy). Second, I clearly stated who I was, what my company did, and the specific problem of theirs that I wanted to solve. I’m guessing that a healthy chunk of that delta was just folks for whom my offering was not a hair on fire problem, so they didn’t call back (few people answered directly, most were call backs). There was probably a small percentage of wrong number, closed/closing business, etc.
Note that I was selling a technical service to a mostly non-technical crowd, so they really had no desire to do research. Most of the folks really seemed to appreciate talking to someone who could answer their questions in a way they could understand (e.g., saying something “loads slowly” rather than “is bloatware”). My goal was always to do a few things: 1) help them understand what they needed and tell them the verbiage they needed to use to ask for it, 2) to determine if we offered what they needed, and 3) if we were not a good fit, let them know what I thought were good fits. I also tried to give some free advice on easy wins like how to get good GBP reviews (with a cheat sheet if they wanted it).
I got a not small number of referrals from folks who didn’t sign up with us but referred their acquaintances to us due to the positive, but not closed, sales experience they had with me/us.
1-2, I don't know enough about small business owners to have a firm guess, but I'm definitely suspicious and I treat this as very weak information.
As for the rest I'm at least glad you're finding a good number of people you're making happy. But it doesn't sound like your experience would be an outlier in getting fewer listeners compared to other legitimate sales, so that still suggests to me that those survey numbers are wrong or very misleading.
The problem with this point of view that all businesses seem to have is you're not the only ones doing this. Those same 90 people you're providing negative value and nuisance to are getting it from hundreds of businesses a day, gradually driving the signal to noise ratio of all communications channels down to zero. It's entirely possible one of the hundreds of real estate investment companies calling me every day trying to buy one of my houses was going to make a terrific offer that would have provided me with value. But I'll never know, because if I answered the phone and actually talked to them, I'd have to answer all of these calls, and doing that would leave me with no time to do anything at all except answer phone calls and listen to sales pitches all day every day.
> Those same 90 people you're providing negative value and nuisance to are getting it from hundreds of businesses a day, gradually driving the signal to noise ratio of all communications channels down to zero
It’s more likely that they find a good match with about 2% of them, and those 2% help grow their business.
I really get the sense that the people complaining the most about cold calling (different than robo-calling) are folks who:
- have little or no business experience
- have never had a good sales experience
- work in tech where the default sales experience sucks
Successful business people know what their hair-on-fire problems are, and they are willing to take on speculative engagements that may help them solve those problems. This is not rocket science.
> Annoying 90 people to make a marginal profit from 3 seems bad for society, and I would fully support a ban.
I mean, that’s easy to say in a glib way on a site like HN, but are factoring in the full consequences of the knock-on effects of a high-friction economy?
Oh, ads are annoying? Ok, everything that is ad supported ceases to exist. Little or no TV, no social media (ok, this sort of seems like a win), no newspapers, no magazines, no radio, much smaller movie scene (since they can’t advertise), etc.
I’m all for having healthy boundaries and being able to set healthy boundaries, but your solution seems like overkill.
Fwiw, I set my phone on do not disturb for numbers not in my address book. That’s an easy way to not be bothered if that’s your jam (I just check messages if/when I want to).
It makes sense that you feel a more positive about it than the average person, but you should be aware that the other 90% that are "annoyed" also have an opinion with which you will never interact
I wouldn't place cold calling on the same level as regular ads, ostensibly I care for whatever I get from the place showing the ads, which might or might not be the case on cold calling (I get that you said that you only called relevant people, but based on the general sentiment, I think we can reasonably say that you're an outlier, and even then ~10% cared enough to answer)
As someone that receives plenty of calls from numbers not on their contact list, it feels wrong that I have to actively distrust, instead of dealing with the problem from the source
, some countries (Like Germany) do ban cold calling, which seems the sane option to me, but I personally don't think America cares enough about privacy to even consider it
> Fwiw, I set my phone on do not disturb for numbers not in my address book. That’s an easy way to not be bothered if that’s your jam (I just check messages if/when I want to).
And this is the cost of spam. There are people who may not be in your phonebook who are legitimately trying to call you about someone in your family being e.g. in hospital.
Yet this is completely absent your analysis on the ethics of cold calling.
> Little or no TV, no social media (ok, this sort of seems like a win), no newspapers, no magazines, no radio, much smaller movie scene (since they can’t advertise), etc.
I'm sure cable fees (much of which go to broadcast stations) could pay for plenty of TV.
And social media could survive fine if it had to charge enough to cover servers.
Newspapers would be in more trouble but they're already in deep trouble.
You hit the nail on the head. The US could have stopped robocalls years ago, by enforcing accurate caller ID and maybe policing who got to hook up to the SS7 network, and aggressively enforcing whatever laws could be used against the scammers.
But instead, the phone companies probably decided they could make extra cash off the robocallers, not realizing they were killing the golden goose. I'm also 100% certain that both phone companies and members of Congress received bribes i mean sizeable campaign contributions and cushy think tank jobs over this.
So maybe 50-100 people made money, and absolutely ruined a working communication system. I hope it was worth inconveniencing the entire US population to make a little money, you shameless wieners.
Looks like most everyone got a lot of inconvenience due to the inefficiencies due to a bunch of stupid phone calls, with a lot of money being made by a few jerks, largely at the expense of senior citizens who weren't prepared to deal with a rapid shift in the way the world worked.
> In the period from August 2009 until April 2010 we received more than 57,000 written complaints about unsolicited sales calls alone...
That's just reported complaints. Ya... this law is practically un-enforceable. A couple example cases doesn't mean Germany banned cold calling when apparently thousands and thousands and thousands go un-prosecuted.
> So far, the Federal Network Agency has terminated eleven administrative offences proceedings involving cold calling with the issue of administrative orders imposing a fine and has imposed fines totalling about EUR 694,000
Also i just don't get cold calls, and know no one else that gets these... it works!
TIL... despite nearly two decades here! I knew it was illegal for businesses to use contact information you gave them for some other reason to later market to you without your permission (especially after GDPR went into effect), but not that it was also illegal for them to simply sit down with the phone book or an autodialer.
It's insane that this is not a solved problem. Here's a thought: if I could collect $100 from my carrier for each spam call they put through, this problem would be solved overnight.
You can collect $$ for spam calls already in the United States, with laws on the books today- see the [TCPA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_Consumer_Protection_...). Problem is that you have to track down the individual/company that's doing it. That's become dramatically more difficult over the past 15 years.
Time for my usual comment. No, it's not difficult. Every Telco knows where the call comes from and where it's routed to. Sure, the end-user doesn't necessarily know the origin, but there's regulation that would trivially solve this. "For each spam report, you're responsible unless you point out where you got the call from" if enforced would sort out the problem almost immediately.
Telco can't say how the call happened? Fine them. Telco can't sort out their spammy customer? Fine them. "Oh, but international calls!" - they can drop the spammy international peer - the US is large enough that nobody serious would risk getting disconnected.
First, telcos are not permitted to refuse calls from other telcos unless they receive permission from the FCC. This is what it means to be a "common carrier," an old regulatory regime intended to prevent larger telcos using carriage as a negotiating tool over small telcos. The internet has this problem to a degree, which has lead to years of conflict over "net neutrality." Part of the new regulatory regime intended to address spam calls is that the FCC now regularly grants such permission when they determine that a particular telco is failing to uphold its obligations.
Second, telcos do not necessarily know the origin of calls. Virtually all spam/scam calls originate from the internet via a VoIP gateway. There are numerous VoIP gateways, they often obtain their traffic from yet other VoIP gateways, and they often introduce traffic into the US PSTN through a foreign telco. At each of these steps, the origin of the call is usually lost. Telephone circuits are always established in the "forward" direction and there is no need for reverse routing information, so historically it was never provided. At the extreme, some calls are introduced into the TDM telephone system by boxes with multiple SIM cards that relay calls from IP to a cellular carrier (this is not very common in the US because cellular carriers aggressively monitor for it, but it's very common in for example Africa---where this method is often used to carry legitimate traffic at a cost savings!). All of this means that tracing the origin of calls can be surprisingly complex, which is why USTelecom (an industry association) funds a consortium to perform tracing for the FCC.
The underlying reason is simple: nothing in the telephone system requires calls to identify their origin. There are two (and in many cases more) different concepts of "originating number" on a telephone call, CID and ANI, and neither are required or even expected to correspond to the origin point of the call. The purpose of STIR/SHAKEN is to introduce such a requirement for the first time, standardizing a header (in the case of VoIP) or SS7 message (in the case of TDM) that declares the carrier with which a call originated. This will vastly simplify tracing and blocking of calls from problematic carriers, which is the motivation behind the mandatory rollout that is currently in progress. One of the broader goals of the STIR/SHAKEN program is to introduce a degree of liability at all points in the process, as every carrier is responsible for ensuring appropriate attestations on calls they hand off to customers. This seems to be having a positive impact, although as with most spam mitigation efforts, it does have the downside of making it more expensive and complex to get access to the telephone network, mostly to the financial advantage of Twilio.
> telcos are not permitted to refuse calls from other telcos unless they receive permission from the FCC
Yes, that's exactly the part that could've been changed long time ago to solve this problem. That's what I'm describing.
> telcos do not necessarily know the origin of calls. Virtually all spam/scam calls originate from the internet via a VoIP gateway
They know the next hop though. Knowing the ultimate origin doesn't matter. You can iterate until a) you find the origin, or b) you find someone who doesn't keep records - in either case, they're the problem to deal with. It doesn't matter that someone uses a VoIP gateway - now it should be the gateway operator's problem to point out the origin or pay up.
I worked at a VoIP provider. We had full records already available for billing purposes. This is why I'm so angry about this every time it comes up, all this technical talk is true and completely irrelevant. Let FCC fine the first entity in chain which cannot say "we got it from X", or "we got it internationally, here's the fine payment from our side, they've been warned/disconnected".
The shaken/stir provided a small tool which avoids addressing the actual issue. It's a fun tool which would make the above slightly easier - but doesn't actually enable it.
Well, it’s not quite that simple- especially for an end user. I don’t have the ability to trace it- and even if I did most of the scam calls I get these days are from overseas voip providers. So I have to invest a lot of time to get to a U.S. based business that benefits from the calls. Even then, the tcpa may not allow you to collect (some state laws do)
It is difficult enough that there is a full on coalition dedicated to this (the trace back working group that’s mentioned by the fcc in this order)
You don't have to trace it yourself. The simple solution is: a online portal, you report a spam call to your number with time and origin as you see it, your telco is required to act on that, FCC or someone else gets to audit and assign fines. From there it would be each telco's responsibility to do the same from their end.
Trivial for the user, and likely apps would be created to automate it. As I mentioned, international VoIP providers are not an issue if you make it a local telco problem: whether they forward the cost of the fines, drop the peer, or pay the fine themselves. Any serious telco abroad will solve the outbound spam to the US rather than get dropped.
This is the way to do this. If more of these scam calls & texts are found to be coming through certain pipes, fine those parties, jail those parties so that there is an incentive to stop it. I don't know why its taking them this long to figure this out.
couldn’t disagree more. this is pointless and useless. jail time is required, not an uncollectable fine from the perps. a more palatable solution would be fining telcos (because it’s collectible and damaging) for allowing it. we’ll then see good blocking measures in place.
Not even sure why telecoms are allowed to allow spoofing. Should be absolutely illegal both in their own network and they should be disallowed from peering with networks where it is allowed.
Actually, I do know: it's profitable to them and they lobby a lot.
Telcos actually don't have that much leeway in whether they can allow this stuff on the network. That's part and parcel of the whole "common carrier" thing that some people wish would be required of internet service providers; as a common carrier, they can't block legitimate, legal use of the service until some authority tells them it's not legitimate or legal, and that's a (due) process.
So not to go to bat for Ma Bell and her li'l babies here, but fining the telcos for following the law would be counter-productive and unfair.
i understand that but that rule is actually imposed by the same agency (FCC) imposing the fine. AIUI. so that is changeable. correct though, under the current rules this is not possible
A hack someone introduced me to that I cannot recommend enough if you still, for some God-unfortunate reason, have a landline:
Record the audio for the "We're sorry, this number has been disconnected" message from Verizon or whoever. Keep it on your phone. If you get a lot of telemarketers, queue it up before you answer an unknown number. Hit 'em with it if it sounds like a robocall.
Robocalls still cost time even if they're functionally free money-wise, so a lot of systems will key on that message and will yank your number off their call list.
the telco industry failed terribly to innovate around the phone-line and the mobile-line.
phone line: hoisted for internet services, then customers dumped it
mobile line: being hoisted for internet services, customers will soon dump them too
I've noticed an influx of robocalls that get through my pixel 4 spam call filter. Recently when I get these, unless I'm in a hurry, I play nice with the robot and they connect me to a real person. Either I'll waste their time by acting sincere but stupid, or I'll tell them a sob story, eg, sorry, I don't need your home insurance because I got fired from my job, so my wife divorced me, and now I'm homeless and living out of my car.
What I'm really hoping for is a real-time AI app that can (a) understand what they are saying and generate plausible time wasting responses.
FCC the regulator agency charged with regulating telecom companies once again fails to regulate telecom companies. Despite a trivial and permanent remedy beeing available, e.g. fine the telecom companies in significant excess of what they made from providing the robocalling companies with the services required to make the robocalls, they instead place a ineffectual and unenforceable fine on a couple of soon to be chapter 11 LLC. Yay for telecom lobbying....
Facebook and others keep that in mind as you relentlessly monetize without offering value to people.