I once got a spoofed call from the number 666-2012. They told me I was going to hell with an obviously modulated voice. I just replied, "Finally!!" The person on the other end didn't know how to react to that. This was probably around 2009ish? After that time though, random calls were never fun like that.
They became predatory from then on out. I tried to play around at first, messing with them and such. Then it became relentless and the blocking never seemed to work. Then I just switched to letting random numbers go to VM. That seemed to have cut off about 50% of robocalls over time. Then eventually I got a pixel phone. Just the call screening alone is worth it. I may get 1 or 2 random numbers calling me a month now. And I usually don't even know they called unless I look at my call log.
I am happy that trend is starting to be picked up by other phone makers. Good on the FCC for clamping down on this stuff. It has been a long term problem and there is still a lot more of these people out there. I hope they learned a lot and can utilize this knowledge in the future to shut more people down.
> After that time though, random calls were never fun like that.
My aging father loves to play with the scammers any chance he gets. One day he got the classic "Grandpa! Oh thank god you answered, I've been arrested in Vegas and I need bail money or terrible things are going to happen!"
After a few beats of shocked silence he launches into "BILLY?!?!?! The family has been trying to find you since your mom ran off with you 15 years ago! Where is she? Where have you been? Are you well? We just want you to come back home! We've had a PI looking for you for over a decade. Give me the address of the jail and I'll send our lawyer to pick you up."
Usually they're not equipped to deal with such a plot twist and just hang up.
I really enjoyed messing with the "Microsoft tech support" calls I would frequently get. In addition to keeping them on hold for half an hour "while my computer turned on" (aka I made and ate breakfast), I liked to try to follow their directions on wholly inappropriate hardware and seeing how they responded. After telling one guy that "chrome" wasn't a recognized command, he asked me what was on my screen and got very excited when I replied, "READY."
Alas, my old Commodore 64 proved scam-proof.
(As an aside, I remain amazed by the scammers' patience.)
Kitboga on youtube is a great channel if you want to watch scammers get strung along for hours while he pretends to be a confused old man while actively getting the services used by the scammers cancelled.
In addition to the other comments here, there seems to be a significant difference in the ease of making calls from different numbers in the US vs EU, both in caller id and in the call source. I get constant spam calls to my US phone lines, never from the same numbers and now usually from geographically nearby area codes (same-area-code spam seems passé these days). I get a handful of spam calls a year to my EU phone lines, but they are usually from international, outside-EU numbers, seemingly in hard-to-pursue jurisdictions. (This ignores some of the impressive texts in the EU a few years ago that managed to come from short names of real banks; those seem to have been an unusual exception and I assume the exploit involved was fixed.)
Looking at VoIP sites, I can easily get a phone number in seconds, for cents, with almost no documentation, and any area code, in the US. Lines in the EU cost significantly more, take longer, and often require documentation, especially for geographic area codes.
I expect that the type of access used in the US for these calls simply isn't feasible in the EU, and so the calls there need to be from 'real' numbers in countries where the scammers are safe, which then makes them easy to filter out and far less effective. The access in the US just seems weirdly open.
And a stronger culture of "calling party pays" outside of North America.
VoIP rates to call a euro mobile number can be $$$. Meanwhile in Canada, it's the same cost as a landline, and available for fractions of a cent to any nobody like me.
This is complete speculation, but I imagine it is a function of the United States developing telecommunications first (+1 area code). People needed easy entry to the communication networks and screening bad actors was not a major concern. Whereas European and other regions developed their infrastructure later, when these threats were more salient.
You do get the occasional one in the UK. I get one every 2-4 weeks I'd estimate.
I imagine part of the reason it's not a bigger problem in Europe is not a lot of people speak Dutch/German/etc. in the countries where these scammers are often calling from. They all speak English though.
My goto is to speak a non-english language that most people where I live should know. If they don't understand, I hang up. It's a very simple heuristic that allows me to answer important calls while filtering out 99% of scammers.
France had quite a few spam calls for a while. They got the (en francais) "This is DHL calling and we have a package for you" from a real person...
There are a lot of French speakers in the world in poor economic conditions. Probably proportionately more than English. But it's still not as bad as English calls in North America.
(In Canada, I just respond in broken French to these calls, any official call would be able to transfer me to a French speaking (and 99.9% certainly bilingual attendant)).
American spam calls include clearly midwestern dialect (chicago, st louis, with a big distance span from there) prerecorded nonsense stories presumably by an unwitting voice actor.
I imagine that voice actors in German would be less useful because answering often yields a clearly non North American accent person clearly complicit in whatever scam is being attempted
My experience with Robocalls (I get 25-30 per day) has been that the overwhelming majority are trying to run a scam against Medicair (the US government's health program for older people) by fetching some personal information from the victim, which they then use to send fraudulent bills to Medicair.
So I assume that the ease of scamming the US government in this regard contributes to us being the victims here.
Edit: I hadn't RTFA and now I see this fine was about auto warranty scams. Second theory: lots of Americans are living below the poverty line, public transit sucks here so most people need cars to get to work, and it can get risky/expensive relying on an older vehicle to be able to get to work, so it makes an easy target to offer somebody what looks like coverage for a likely expensive auto failure for a few hundred dollars.
Signing people up for private Medicare plans is not fraudulent. Making robocalls to hawk them like is. Thus the whole product category becomes shady by association (car warranties, solar leases, debt consolidation loans, timeshares).
Typical scam looks more like this: They try to get information from your Medicare card. Then with your info they bill Medicare for $6000 custom back braces while sending you a $30 Chinese generic one (some physician who wittingly or unwittingly accepted a "work from home" job may be signing off on prescriptions for these). Despite Medicare policy, they don't care about collecting any copay from you, they just want to bill Medicare. The elderly person doesn't lose anything but Medicare does obviously. See https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flmd.36... for a particularly advanced formulation of this scheme.
It's incredibly lucrative and has cost this country tens of billions of dollars a year for at least a couple decades. I wish more was done about it.
English language. A large pool of marks to robocall, and English speaking call center workers make spamming and scamming economical. Compared if you needed to find French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, etc speakers.
It's expensive to call EU cellphones. In the US people are billed to receive calls (of course these days people usually have unmetered calling but the legacy of cellphone numbers not costing any more to call than a landline continues).
They are rampant in RU and UA. One of the craziest stories is how Ukrainian phoine spammers weaponized their skills to coax Russians into setting fire to government offices
> What makes this a problem in the U.S., but not in Europe?
Setting up a business in Europe (for example in the Netherlands) requires significant paperwork. In the US, it's done in a few seconds. In the US, it requires years of court proceedings or (in this case) government agency investigation to shut down a business. (No idea how long that takes in Europe, but I hope your governments are more powerful than this.)
I can assure you, people running robocall scams out of Nigeria and Morocco could care less about the ease-of-incorporation in the territories where their victims are located.
They still need a way to accept payments and ultimately funnel money out of those territories, and when moving lots of money, a corporation is very convenient.
You can work around it of course but this ultimately reduces the profitability of the scams, so better due diligence around companies still fights scams by making it less profitable.
who makes phone switches and software in the Netherlands?
I ask because I wonder if the US has unmaintained 20 year old hardware and software builds on it, since Lucent seems to have vanished around then. I mean that I wonder if spammers are taking advantage of unmaintained software, or naive antiquated laws, or both.
According to yesterday's article on the same case, the FCC is claiming to also have done just that:
> “Armed with the facts [the FCC] gave phone companies permission to cut off this traffic before going one step further and directing them to block it outright. We got results. Following our action, the number of auto warranty calls fell by 99 percent,” she [FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel] wrote.
It was interesting what Singapore did. Basically all numbers need to be registered, otherwise the default caller ID is "Likely SCAM".
The government gave companies a heads up, but even Singapore Airlines and a few major banks had to send out emails apologizing for their texts being labelled as "Likely Scam" right after the change.
Suffice to say legitimate companies got registered really quickly.
Is it harder to spoof a number in Singapore than in the U.S.?
In the U.S., it's trivially easy to make your call look like it's coming from whatever number you want, so scammers just have caller ID display the real phone number for the bank they're pretending to call from.
The main measure pushed by the FCC under Ajit Pai (so he was not a total waste of oxygen) was SHAKEN/STIR, which is basically cryptographically signed Caller ID. Deploying this went amazingly rapidly by the standards of the telco industry, and specially considering how much legacy there is in the landline phone business where the switch makers Lucent and Nortel went bust 2 decades ago and obviously their software has not seen any updates in that long.
I thought shaken/stir was going to do just this. Does anyone have inside knowledge as to why this hasn't fixed things yet?
It isn't a hard problem. Once we can trace where the call originates, blacklists should be able to snuff this out pretty quickly. Once phone operators start getting penalized for this sort of thing, the problem will get much better.
S/S is working as advertised; it's how the FCC can identify robocall carriers and how telecoms can block their traffic. S/S doesn't have a magic "caller is a robot" bit that would allow for automatic blocking.
My phone can identify spam callers and has been doing so for nearly a year now. Why can't the telco's block them more quickly? I think we all know the answer to this. They aren't going to unless the FCC makes them.
The telcos are killing their own product. I'm using my phone less and less. Most days, it sits in do not disturb mode because 99% of the time, the call isn't relevant.
To those complaining about getting constant calls. This is fixable if you want to fix it.
1. Set up voicemail
2. Set to ignore all calls from numbers not in your phone book.
3. Resist the FOMO that they count on you being suckered into.
This is just a form of “you may have already won!” The Ned Flanders moment of “but what if it’s an emergency?” Emergencies don’t come from random numbers. Random numbers with legit calls will leave messages.
Take back control of your time. You aren’t thrall to your phone.
This is an absolute that just plain isn't true. For instance, out-of-state PD calling my sister-in-law from an unrecognized number to inform her that her sibling had died suddenly. There are numerous instances where an unrecognized number may need to contact someone for an emergency. I don't say this to disagree with the general sentiment of your post, but I do disagree with that particular statement.
In that example, would the person not have just left a message, “Hi it’s Name, please call me back right away”?
I just don’t understand how we got to a place where the way things worked for decades suddenly doesn’t work anymore. We would leave our homes and not be reachable. Most urgent calls aren’t actually “emergencies.”
Doctors refuse to acknowledge the existence of voice mail. It might be some perceived legal/liability thing or maybe it's just a manifestation of their arrogance, but in my experience no doctor will ever leave a voice mail ever. I fully expect that if one of my relatives ends up incapacitated in the hospital and I'm their first contact, the hospital phonecall will go unanswered (not in my contacts list, so my phone won't ring) and I'll receive no voice mail or SMS.
If your relative ends up incapacitated, it won’t be a doctor who calls, it will be a social worker. They will leave a message. There are other situations that result in a person not being able to answer their phone: being asleep, being in a movie theater, being on an airplane, being in a tunnel, being on a camping trip, having a cell phone that malfunctioned, having a cell phone with a dead battery, being on another call when the call was received, being out of the country and using a local
SIM…
Some doctors offices interpret HIPAA's privacy rule as not letting them release any information until they've verified the far end of the phone call by asking for your name and DOB. So VM is out. I've seen others let you specify on the intake form: Full voicemail OK? Y/N. Brief voicemail OK? Y/N.
> I just don’t understand how we got to a place where the way things worked for decades suddenly doesn’t work anymore.
You're making up a past that didn't exist. During the entire period where caller ID existed in the U.S., I can only think of a single person who screened their calls in the way you've outlined. (And that person also happened to screen calls from known numbers, too, so it doesn't really count.) Everyone else would screen obvious calls coming from toll free numbers (1-800, etc.), and just take a chance on the remaining unknown numbers. An answering machine/ringer could be turned off for special occasions, but that's no different than putting a cell in airplane mode or whatever.
In fact, there was an entire genre of comedy albums devoted to messing with incoming telemarketer calls during this period. Those albums wouldn't have resonated like they did if most people had been screening all unknown numbers.
Your second point is very interesting to me as someone born in 2000 who's only really known a world where this is true. It seems so distant and novel from where we are today.
That's partly true, but also sometimes that was a problem.
In the same way mobile phones shouldn't have to worry about working with emergency services numbers as before we had mobile phones we were still calling them. In other words: it is sometimes better to do things that weren't done in the past.
How would picking up the phone made any difference here? The sibling is still dead. Finding out whenever you checked your voicemail isn’t going to change that.
The same goes for “But what if my kid is throwing up at school?” They’ll deal with it, or someone from your contacts will probably text you.
As a sibling comment said, this was our lives for the decades between when the telephone was invented and when cell phones became ubiquitous. I promise it’ll be okay if you don’t leap to answer every unknown call that lights up your screen.
>How would picking up the phone made any difference here? The sibling is still dead. Finding out whenever you checked your voicemail isn’t going to change that.
Sure, in that specific instance. But it doesn't have to be strictly for a death. Spouse gets into a car crash, or has some kind of medical emergency, where they're still alive but they're trying to get in touch with someone from the family to notify them of their whereabouts and current condition.
>I promise it’ll be okay if you don’t leap to answer every unknown call that lights up your screen.
I think you missed the part where I said I agreed with the general sentiment but disagreed with that specific absolute, but thanks for being a touch condescending.
> The sibling is still dead. Finding out whenever you checked your voicemail isn’t going to change that.
Maybe so, but my cousin passed away suddenly nearly 10 years ago and I was the one who received the call because his family was out of town.
The thought of missing that call because I had to disable unknown numbers because we live in a society that doesn't value privacy enough to leave people alone is really depressing.
The power of technology means anyone in the world can initiate contact with anyone else. Without a method to moderate initial contact, spam filters, ignore buttons, social etiquette, etc. our phones would ring continuously, our inboxes would get 10,000 emails per day, and our phones would chime continuously with push notifications. Spam is 99% of raw email traffic, and robocalls are a significant fraction of total call count. Nomorobo estimated 1/3.
>This is just a form of “you may have already won!"
If someone contacts you claiming you have won a prize, and it appears to be from a real but shady business (e.g. a car dealership), consider falling for it. The scam is most likely illegal and you may be able to collect. Your local government should have a consumer protection agency that can help you do so. Just keep your cool and document everything.
I've taken two car dealerships to court for this. It was fun and profitable.
Also, it appears the scam is illegal at the federal level.
How "profitable" are we talking about here? The time expense of going to court can be pretty high, but for a high enough reward, I'd consider "falling for" many things!
I got settlement offers of $500 and $1000, the amounts of the advertised prizes, before going to court. In the first case I got the offer as soon as the consumer protection agency e-mailed the dealership. In the second case I got the offer as soon as they received formal notice of suit. Filing the reports took me about fifteen minutes. Filling out the notice of suit took me about an hour, most of which was research.
I took them to court because the settlement offers contained clauses I didn't like. I could have recovered the money with less work. Going to court took an afternoon, most of which was spent sitting in a waiting room.
I own a business. What you propose isn’t really a option. People leave a voicemail, telling me to call them back. Even if I do so right away I almost always get voicemail. Even calling back 10 minutes later and then 30 results in…voicemail. If I leave them a message or text to call me back again the universe often chances it to be when I’m in the bathroom or driving.
I can't speak for your customer base but, personally, I despise being called.
95% of calls from businesses are announcements rather than conversations. There is zero need to interrupt me in real-time to tell me my car is ready; it is not going to make me come any quicker.
As one of the people who calls with information like that, I would love to go to all sms. However, there are still a lot of people who never check their text messages. I've started asking all the customers if it's ok to text instead of call, and probably a third of them say not to text. These do tend to be older people.
I'm a photographer, and I largely agree. It can be annoying dealing with people who send short replies or who don't fully respond to whatever you emailed them though, so there is that. It's incredibly awkward sending a question twice in a row.
Very fixable but something about reading strategies for proper use of the phone makes me really angry. It’s on me to be on guard and suspicious at all times instead of using the phone to make calls and not thinking about it besides that. Every way I can communicate is out to get me!
Biggest problem I see is if you’re checking your voicemail, you have to at least start to listen to every one of the scammer call voicemails if you’re going to catch the real ones. It’s tedious.
I have been doing this for years and it creates a steady stream of problems when people change numbers without telling me. The spam situation is so apocalyptic that I deal with these problems as the lesser evil, but it seems very weird to present this as a "fix" rather than a steep tradeoff that might work for some people.
Of course, but the interrupt semantics are lost, which is the problem. I'm not convinced that you actually live this, because if you did you would know this.
I wonder if it depends on the pause in the voicemail automated reply. Their systems detect if someone is talking before connecting I believe, I pause before talking to unknown numbers and you usually get some white noise then it hangs up. Versus a real person who would probably say "Hello?!"
I don't know if it's still the case but Verizon used to charge you to block spam calls - so if you didn't pay and they knew you were being called by a spam number, they would still let it go through. Absolutely insane. It was something like $4 a month.
This is very similar to advice on the internet given to people, "Just block the number that you got a spam call from."
Unfortunately, spam calls come from a new random number every time, ensuring that blocking the number doesn't work. Also, the number is spoofed, I even got a call from my own number once.
My understanding is they can easily just setup a new route/new ip/new account and start making calls again.
This would be less like setting up a new IP address and more like setting up a whole new AS. Sure, it can be done, but it costs the scammer a lot more than a simple blocked number.
$300M is a big fine, but if they are saying this scam ring made over 500m calls did they really make anything close to this much? It would seem surprising to me if you could make anything close to $0.60/call with cold calling even if there are whales it just seems like a stunt number.
I'm not sure what your point is. Even if they made just $10mil, fining them out of existence (and giving precedent for such a big fine later) is still a good thing.
It's a fine, not a compensation order. The robocalls were criminal offences, not just attempts at unfair enrichment. The purpose of the fine is to punish the offender and to deter others.
"Two of the central players of the operation, Roy M. Cox and Aaron Michael Jones, were under lifetime bans against making telemarketing calls following lawsuits by the Federal Trade Commission and State of Texas."
We can hope that the size of the fine will set the stage for some significant jail time, as it seems unlikely that anything else will work.
> Last year, to stop this then-ongoing telemarketing campaign in its tracks, the FCC directed all U.S.-based voice service providers to cease carrying traffic associated with certain members of the enterprise.
I thought it was not permitted (under ITU rules) to refuse to carry selected traffic.
Years ago, I was getting robocalls from overseas; at least, the voices seemed to be overseas. I asked $SOMEONE[0] to put a stop to it, and they said that was illegal. But perhaps ITU rules only apply to international calls; or perhaps the ITU[1] has finally got off it's ass and done something useful, for a change.
[0] It was years ago; I imagine I asked my landline provider, which was probably BT.
[1] The ITU, as far as I can tell, is essentially a body to which governments that are members send representatives. They're supposed to be engineers; but they're there to represent their government's interests, not to improve the global telecom network.
Me, too. I’ve noticed a weird trend. Voicemail that is 20 seconds of silence. I can hear the sound of breathing. No hello or anything. Once I picked up and got the same thing. I even said “I can hear you breathing” and got the hang up after 20 seconds. They’re all from different numbers so I don’t think I have a stalker.
My main phone is a (non-smart) VOIP phone. It gets zero spam.
I have a mobile, but it's old, and the battery no longer holds much charge, so despite being mobile, it never moves; it sits on my desk plugged into power. I only have it so I can receive and respond to SMS challenges.
Judging by the following part, it seems they'll at least try:
> That enforcement action was taken in coordination with the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, which brought a lawsuit under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act against several entities and individuals associated with the enterprise. The Commission also proposed a fine and offered the parties a chance to respond, which they did not do, resulting in today’s unprecedented fine. Should the parties not pay the fine promptly, this matter will be referred to the U.S. Department of Justice for collection.
But maybe the legal/justice system is so broken in the US that they'll just ignore it? Hard to imagine, but I don't live there so who knows.
What makes you so confident? The discussion in the original post was for a TechCrunch URL, not the FCC url used here, so HN wasn't going to flag the dupe when OP posted this. Not only that, but the thread for the TechCrunch article is currently post #98, all the way back on page four[1] at the time of this comment. HN doesn't have a search feature either. This[2] is all one needs to do, rather than wasn't energy chastising someone based on an assumption.
Edit: What an odd account. It looks like this user, by and large, just points out duplicate threads, rather than diving into discussions.
Not odd, recently pointing out dupes because they have been getting out of control lately....
The TechCrunch article is way down page 4 at time of comment because it's old news already! Want to talk about it? Great! Go there!
The point of the dupe calling out is to stop conversations from repeating and being split up across multiple threads. When the discussion consolidates around one thread (whether it's the official post or not) that's where it should stay. OP could share the post and then comment with a link to the main discussion thread.
Guessing the OP was up on the story because of an earlier post about the FCC thing a day or so ago.
HN doesn't have a search? what are you talking about? The HN search powered by Algolia is excellent. Bottom of the site.
No point in giving someone grief for not noticing something that they have to go digging for and might miss along the way.
>The point of the dupe calling out...
I know what the point is, but there's a better way to do it - in fact, I linked to an example of someone doing just that. Your comment goes above and beyond that in a negative way and doesn't "assume good faith"[1].
>HN doesn't have a search? what are you talking about? The HN search powered by Algolia is excellent. Bottom of the site.
I've been here long enough and have never noticed it, so I'll again give OP a pass there, too.
I think you need to find something better to do with your time. The fact that you do this so often and that you've escalated to attacking someone for it demonstrates that you might be letting duplicate posts on an internet forum bother you just a bit too much.
They became predatory from then on out. I tried to play around at first, messing with them and such. Then it became relentless and the blocking never seemed to work. Then I just switched to letting random numbers go to VM. That seemed to have cut off about 50% of robocalls over time. Then eventually I got a pixel phone. Just the call screening alone is worth it. I may get 1 or 2 random numbers calling me a month now. And I usually don't even know they called unless I look at my call log.
I am happy that trend is starting to be picked up by other phone makers. Good on the FCC for clamping down on this stuff. It has been a long term problem and there is still a lot more of these people out there. I hope they learned a lot and can utilize this knowledge in the future to shut more people down.