It amazes me that most of you don't question the fact that you (north americans?) are paying to receive phone calls. Here (Spain, but I think it applies to all the euro zone) we just do not pay to receive calls, which seems much more sensible to me.
How would you feel if some random mailguy knocked at your door and when you opened it he threw a package at your hands and immediately charged you for (part of) the delivery? This is exactly how charging to receive phone calls feels to me!
How do telcos justify this to you? What's the reasoning behind it?
I'm not from the US, but I have worked with the US telecoms industry. The original reason for this was due to the numbering plan. In most countries a special 'area' code was chosen for mobiles, however in the US they decided to just allocate mobile numbers in the existing area codes (NPAs). At least in the early days of cellular it cost the providers more to connect a call to a cell phone and so someone has to pay it. In a numbering plan where it is possible to tell a number is mobile just by looking you can put that cost onto the caller, but if it looks like a landline then the caller would feel hardly done by getting charged extra. So that extra cost was put onto the cell phone user accepting the call.
This is hearsay from colleagues so may not be 100% accurate, but it makes sense to me.
I own a little telco provider and for some time I had a landline UK number as my primary number on my cell phone - it's definitely possible and easy. The only reason I went back to a mobile number is that some web forms insisted on entering a mobile number and wouldn't accept my "landline".
Yes UK is in Europe and I think will be for the next few million years - oh you meant the Political body - the European Union. Oh yes we're still in that and will be for a few years at least.
As to the landline number, you can keep your landline number if you don't move into an area where the phone numbers 'region' code is not applicable.
Just like I am sure that is the case for every other country in the world (or thereabouts).
I am curious to know with regard to USA phone numbers where I cannot tell a mobile from a landline by just looking at the number (e.g, UK Mobile numbers can be identified because they are 07xxx numbers) but US mobile numbers look like landlines and have the same area code.
Can you move to a different state and keep your number even if the area code for that state is completely different?
Well with BT which is the national provider in the UK you can't keep your landline number when you move if you are moving to another exchange (which is most likely).
Yes, and many people do. Hence this comic: https://xkcd.com/1129/ (the first three digits being the area code).
Edit: keeping my number when I moved also made it really easy to filter out these phone calls. Any number calling me from my old area code that I don't recognize is either a spammer or a wrong number. Any number calling me from my new area code is probably legitimate.
Well, it's supposed to be "hard done by", but that doesn't make it much better. I'm personally pleased to see a more sophisticated way to phrase something, but unfortunately it's not a common idiom these days (at least state side), so it can be a little confusing.
This isn't true anymore since pretty much all the wireless carriers in the US offer unlimited voice minutes (and often SMS as well) as their standard postpaid plan.
People on prepaid or pay as you go plans don't get unlimited minutes. You can't really just dismiss this segment of the population. It's a bit like saying "coffee is a free beverage for everyone because most offices provide coffee for employees."
I suspect people on extremely limited plans know to screen their calls or manage in some way.
If not that is unfortunate but hardly justification to upend cellular calling because a few people paid $0.10 / minute extra answering calls from spammers.
There are advantages and disadvantages to those types of plans, and that is one of the disadvantages.
Sure I can. Many pre-paid plans also offer unlimited minutes, and even in the case of those that don't, you can absolutely just choose not to answer the phone if you don't recognize the number, or just flat-out don't feel like answering.
Look, I get that the US is different in that it charges for incoming calls, and that's weird to you. That's fine. I think it's weird that Spanish people voluntarily let themselves be chased by enraged bulls, but hey, I let people choose the risks they want to take[1]. Would I prefer free things over not-free things? Sure. But that's the model that US carriers chose, and, absent government regulation to the contrary, it's absolutely their right to choose that model. And I honestly just don't care enough about it to lobby the gov't to change those regulations, and it seems that a majority of Americans feel the same way, so... so what?
[1] Modulo unethical treatment of the bulls themselves, but that's another issue.
True, but presumably your carrier is still paying for the call. If the transaction were reversed, then the robocaller or their "carrier" (or whatever the equivalent is in robocaller land) would have to pay, and the profits would crumble.
The access tandem is where long distance calls are switched into the local phone network for a given LATA. Local phone companies and long distance providers all buy into the same access tandem in order to connect into the geographically fixed market. When calls are switched across an access tandem in the US, it's the initiator of the call that is billed per minute. The receiver at the other end of the tandem switch may pay a fee to the switch operator to receive the RECORDS of which other company initiated a call in to them. That way, they know who to go after and bill for each incoming minute! Tandem operators typically don't provide this info during the call signalling, even though they could.
As you can imagine, per-minute call billing is not always settled between tandem players. They can block each other based on company ID alone, and often this requires cooperation from the tandem operator as well. Some of the per-minute rates are incredibly high. The flat-rate long distance phone providers are obscuring the fact that some areas are extremely high-cost to terminate. This system has sprung into high per-minute cost billing in high-cost areas (rural LATAs) so that people operate free dial-up (in the 90s anyways), free phone conference lines, and even "free international calls" all taking advantage of the incredibly high per-minute rate by billing the maximum rate permitted in their LATA (typically not higher than the highest per-minute tariff posted by the incumbent local monopoly).
This highly regulated old-school system seems so antiquated in the face of the Internet, but it survives because the tandem is the one place where all providers can interconnect, and this turns out to be the hardest part of the puzzle to work around. In the age of the internet, we could come up with something better :)
This is a great point - and was the primary idea behind charging for sending email by the message to combat spam. Someone years ago proposed that if we just charged 5 cents per message sent, most people would pay less than $5 a month while spammers would have to pay millions of dollars of the course of a year, making the business unprofitable.
You could probably charge 0.1c and it would still work. But maybe make companies more aware of what to send. Every Amazon order automatically causes 4 emails (ordered, dispatched, out for delivery, delivered). If fulfilled by Amazon even 5 because then the seller will ask for a review a week later.
Of course not, but they shouldn't. They let me modify my email preferences and choose which emails I receive. I am happy paying $20/year for email storage.
As others have already pointed out, carriers nowadays mostly do flat rate voice service. When cellular bandwidth is more limited cellular carriers did usually have per minute charges.
It wasn't actually receiver pays. It was each person pays their phone company for carrying their end of the call. It didn't matter if you were the receiver or the initiator.
Note that this is the same model that is used in most of the world for internet service. I've never understood why people find it weird to use that model for phone service but not for internet service.
> I've never understood why people find it weird to use that model for phone service but not for internet service.
I think its because an internet connection has to be initiated by you at which point you give your consent to be charged for it. On the other hand you can get a phone call from anyone really without you previously agreeing to paying the cost of the call.
>I think its because an internet connection has to be initiated by you at which point you give your consent to be charged for it.
This isn't true. You still get charged for random stuff scanning you over the Internet (unless you are behind NAT); or even worse, being on the receiving end of a DoS.
The converse is that in Europe the caller pays (or used to pay?) more based on whether they're calling a cell phone or a landline. Why should I care what kind of phone the person on the other end has? That seems like their burden, not mine.
This whole line of argument is about ten years stale, anyway.
The upside of cellphone calls being more expensive in the EU (or at least in my country) is that this makes mobile telemarketing calls much less convenient, to the point I can't remember the last telemarketing call I received, if I ever received one on the cellphone. OTOH, my land phone stays disconnected 24/7 because of telemarketers.
The only mobile telemarketing calls I receive are actually from my phone company. Whenever someone calls me and upon, answering, they say the magic words "Mobilcom-Debitel" (the company's name), I immediately hang up without saying anything else and block the number. They change numbers about once a month, though.
When I was in Europe 15 years ago it amazed me that people there asked if I had a cell phone: friends told me they were not going to call me on my cell phone (work provided with a Europe number) because they were caller pays and they didn't want to pay that much. Do you still have such a strange system where you will refuse to call someone because you pay who knows how much?
In truth caller pays makes some sense in a world where call time is expensive. However the world is different: call time is dirt cheap. Caller pay means (unless of course the government steps in) that you have no idea what you are going to pay for a call and thus don't make them.
Last I heard in the US the average person pays twice as much [per month] for their cell phone plan, but in turn they talk on their cell phone 5 times as much.
Look at this way, do you have a set of free numbers (like 0800 or some prefix)? Every country has a prefix of free numbers, prefixes for local call numbers nationally etc. Basically you know how much you're going to pay for calling someone based on the number you dial.
Yes I agree if you don't know what you are going to be charged just by calling is wrong. But that's not the system, calling a specific set of prefixes let's you know what it's going to cost. So calling a mobile you know it's going to cost more since it had a mobile prefix.
Calling international costs more because of a prefix.
I have free calls to anywhere in the US, Canada or Mexico. I can call any number in any of those 3 countries and talk as much as I want for no extra charge. (except for a few pay per call "services" but that is not a phone fee that is the caller collecting the money and easily blocked). For a small fee I can get the same for both "cell phones and land lines in 30 countries"; and land lines in 70 countries. The reason I don't get cell phones cell phones in those 70 countries is they are caller pays.
Once again, caller pays used to make sense. However now it is just a money making scheme for cell phone companies that hurts those of you who have it.
You're confusing call for free vs calls included. You're not calling people for free, your calls are included. You are paying for your calls with your monthly fee. I don't see how you can't see that and think you're actually calling for free.
If you went to a payphone for example, you could dial free call numbers (and know they are free by the prefix). The point is that you know what you will be charged based on the prefix.
You're not calling for free, you're paying a subscription and your telco has included a bunch of prefixes under that plan.
> Once again, caller pays used to make sense. However now it is just a money making scheme for cell phone companies that hurts those of you who have it.
You haven't actually put forward any argument for this statement. How does receiver pay make any sense at all? The receiver is already paying for his number by keeping his plan active (either a monthly subscription or with pay as you go you have to top it up regularly to keep the number). Caller pays makes more sense. Especially in the world we are in where people are using calls to make sales. If you call me to sell me something, why should I pay for that call. It's your call, you pay for it.
That's like saying we should pay for the gas used by door to door salesmen. We already pay for our house (which in analogy is our phone number). We shouldn't have to pay for people coming up to our door.
Here in America, we drive on the right side of the road, which is the only logical way and totally not just an arbitrary thing that seems right to me because that's what I'm accustomed to. I always wondered, in countries that do it the other way, how do the governments justify that to their people?
That's a terrible "analogy". The logic of "don't pay for events that you have no ability to control" is apparent to everyone, as is the arbitrariness of road direction.
You don't pay when the phone rings. You pay once you decide to answer it and the call is established. That requires positive action, so you certainly have control.
I could just as well say that being able to receive calls at any location is a great convenience, so the logic of paying for that is obvious. But I won't, because there are a lot of different ways to see it, and none is obviously right or wrong.
>How do telcos justify this to you? What's the reasoning behind it?
They spend big on politicians, for even bigger profits. Just look at the mess our Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is creating with Net Neutrality at the moment (and for the last few years, over-and-over).
Nearly all of the crap that consumers have to put up with in the states is due to lobbyists, and the telecom industry doesn't cut corners in that department.
If you are roaming (for example, you take your Spanish mobile to the UK) and receive a phone call (from a friend in Spain) you pay for that (because your friend can't be expected to know you're abroad).
This always seemed weird to me when texting someone. How am I to know that this will cost me a euro for 160 characters instead of being free, when it's to a national number, just because they chose to have a holiday in Bangladesh this weekend?
But as for the receiving end, paying for receiving calls and texts only applies during holidays. It's not the standard case so whatever. Apparently that's different abroad.
What kilburn is referring to is that the business model that telco's use more or less stimulate this type of calls.
If a telemarketeer has to pay for setting up a call, rather than the end-user for accepting it (no matter how small the charge is), then placing millions of automated calls all over a sudden start costing money to the marketeer.
Think of it: the caller has the will to talk to someone - why should (at least in the past) this someone pay for that? The Euro-zone does it the other way round: you want to talk, you call, you pay.
Either way, in both situations with call volumes going down and people switching to data-type connections you see the price of calling/receiving calls drop sharply and as listed above the money telco's make comes from the data plans.
> If a telemarketeer has to pay for setting up a call, rather than the end-user for accepting it (no matter how small the charge is), then placing millions of automated calls all over a sudden start costing money to the marketeer
They do have to pay money; initiating a call isn't free.
The receiver has to pay a tiny amount of money if they're not on an unlimited plan, but it's so small that it's not worth considering separately from the annoyance of receiving these calls in the first place.
Back when I didn't have any money my phone budget was $8 a month. Minutes 10 cents a piece, IIRC. People didn't really text very much back then but those were 10 cents a piece as well. Each dime mattered to me very much.
There's also people with plans that only allow X minutes a month.
what makes you think we pay to receive calls? there are different service plans but the vast majority of them are either flat-fee unlimited calling, or they bill you to make calls (prepaid minutes, for example).
I've always thought the way to battle this problem is to waste the callers time. The longer you keep them on the phone, the more expensive and less profitable their robocall operation becomes. With enough people doing this, it could slow them down.
At RoboKiller we intercept the call so it doesn't ring your phone or go to voicemail. Instead what happens is we answer the call on our end and proceed to waste the callers time by tricking them into thinking they're talking to a human. Its really funny actually. We send you the recording when we're finished.
A couple weeks ago we reached a point where the top robocallers caught on to what we were doing. It was a proud moment for all of us. You can listen for yourself...
I worked as a telemarketer for a month or so (couldn't handle it). By federal law we are required to remove you from our list if you request it. Though most don't, and management actively discourages putting people on the DNC list. You can report them to the FCC though.
Also, pressing "0" on legit telemarketers usually takes you to a rep or automatically puts you on the DNC.
Nope never. The app will ask for contacts permission so that we don't accidentally block someone in your contacts. Thats done entirely on the client side. Your contacts never leave the app.
I am at the point where I no longer answer my phone if it isn't one of my contacts. If it is important, they will leave a message. I just press the hang up button on my watch immediately, if it shows an unrecognized number, local or not.
I want this to work, but I need Do Not Disturb to silence everything when I'm actually asleep, and there's no way to have it change between those on a schedule.
It turns out to be really hard to have a medium that A: allows people you have not whitelisted in a advance to contact you and also B: prevents intelligent adversaries from abusing that.
There are numerous examples of this: The phone system, the email system, any large IM system that gets beyond a certain size, the physical mail system (reigned in by charges there, though), social networks...
It would be easy if the adversaries were not actively using their intelligence to get around whatever solution you think might work. If all the spam phone calls came from the same number, which never moved or changed, this would be easy. But even before you account for the unauthenticated nature of caller ID that allows spammers to trivially forge any number they'd like, the mere fact that they're willing and able to buy up large blocks of numbers and would switch them around a lot would make this a difficult problem. Stopping intelligent, adaptive adversaries willing to dedicate time and resources to this is a very hard problem.
You can also attack this problem by trying to hit the first clause I gave, but that creates a very different kind of system. And in general, you need some sort of system that you don't have to prewhitelist people, so that your doctor can call you even though you didn't whitelist them, etc.
I don't actually need to prevent intelligent adversaries from calling me though - I just need a legal way to go after them if they do. That means I need useful identification. Many of these calls are illegal today, but the law doesn't know how to find them so they get away with it.
Anonymous communication is useful, but it has been abused enough that I want to opt-out of it.
The only way I found to fight them requires me to get annoyed enough that I can devote a half-hour for the following:
- follow through the automated prompts
- get to the tier 1 pre-screening agent (usually some outsourced call-center) and feign interest
- get transferred to the next level and go fishing for a contact on their end
- if they require a credit card to continue, provide a test number from stripe/paypal etc.
- remain nice and pose as gullible the whole time until you get that real contact info
- once you got a direct number of a real account rep (and/or company name), set up a script and call them ~ 100 times with an auto-generated message asking them to remove your number. A variant if it's a legit company with a toll-free number: have your script call them and stay on as long as possible, to make them pay for the call.
This is fighting fire with fire and it only works one group at a time. But it does provides momentary satisfaction.
Be careful with any sort of auto-dialer, even if you script it up yourself. If the contact number you're given happens to be a cell phone, you'll run afoul of the TCPA. Those fines can add up quickly.
I was wrong to use the term 'fine'. The TCPA expressly allows individuals to sue for damages. The FCC need not get involved.
If someone auto-dials your cell phone, and you can figure out who it is, you can take them to court with a good chance of recovering money from them. If you can prove a willful violation, which isn't necessarily a high bar, you can get treble damages ($500 becomes $1,500). Multiply that by the number of calls.
The hardest part is determining who actually called you. If you can get past that hurdle, the court costs aren't terribly expensive, and you can exact a tidy sum from repeat offenders. There are actually lawyers who specialize in these kinds of cases, and because they aren't terribly expensive to pursue, they'll even take them on contingency. I learned about this through a Reddit AMA with such an attorney. Of course, a determined individual can prevail without hiring a lawyer, provided they're willing to put in the time (and can unmask the caller).
Not sure how that helps when the caller spoofs the caller ID. According to Twilio, the spam call I received earlier today came a number registered a T-Mobile customer named Sharon. Pretty sure the actual origin was a call center overseas. They just picked a random number that had the same first six digits as my own number.
I'm guessing you are not aware of how blatantly anti-consumer our current FCC leadership is. Since the transition they have gone out of their way, even lying to Congress and the people, to pander to corporations rather than serve the people as they swore to do.
Full disclosure: I work for First Orion (the company powering the analytics behind T-Mobile's "Scam-Likely" technology)
We have a couple of apps out in the wild that aren't mentioned in the article here (seems like our media relations staff isn't working too hard)!
They're on Google Play and iTunes under the banner "PrivacyStar," and I think they are worth checking out if the permissions / data accessed by other apps (e.g. Hiya) has turned you off in the past. For starters, our apps don't lift your contacts and don't strictly require your personal phone number (the majority of our apps still use your number, but we are moving away from including this data in our analytics). We collect analytic data from devices, but in general it's the minimum amount required to power our nuisance-call prevention systems. (I'm not aware of it being sold or farmed out in any way.)
Anyway, there's my elevator pitch. Just doing my part to get our name out there, we're a small tech company in AR and it's hard to get any attention down here! :)
The tips in the article don't work in my case. I do all of them and get about 3-5 robocalls per day.
One of the most prolific robo scammers that calls me just about every weekday spoofs their number to match the first 6 digits of my own phone number (area code included).
The vast majority of my robo call match the first 6 digits of my number. They try hard to look local. My number is from Google voice, so it isn't really like the normal local numbers - so I'm safe ignoring them. I have yet to have a legit call that matches the first six digits.
But what about the people who really do have a local number? Any call from a neighbor or local business is likely to look like the robo calls. Ignoring those can be a pain.
Do not call list? Any bets that it is harvested and used as a call list be companies out of the country?
Is there a reason not to block that 10,000th number? I'm having a hard time imagining circumstances under which you'd get a legitimate call from your own telephone. In fact, that seems like it might even be a good way to confuse people into picking up, at least once.
While traveling in Europe, my mom got a SIM card so she could have Internet access. It came with a phone number, which she didn't tell anybody. A couple days later she got a call from a number that matched the first 6 digits of her home number.
Therefore: The SIM card vendor in Europe shared not only her number, but additional personal data allowing the robo-caller to determine her home number in the US.
I think you might be too paranoid, and the explanation is simpler: if you dial enough numbers, eventually you'll find some idiot willing to hand over control of their computer, or their credit card number, or social security number.
Yes, she received a European number a few days prior, and then received a call from a number matching the first six digits of her US home number. It was the only call that she received on this number. I was there.
Granted you could be correct, but it was a weird coincidence, with one in a million odds. She's quite tech savvy -- taught CS in the early 80s.
Ah, if someone faking a number like hers called her on an otherwise unconnected european number, that's definitely... shady.
I'd contact her service provider for that sim card. They'd probably like to know that an employee is selling numbers, or that a retailer is, etc. (Unless they're doing it themselves.)
Or the device which the sim card slots into leaks some other type of identifying information which can be correlated to her home region. One could do an experiment where you place the sim card into another device associated with a different area...
This. Exactly. The spoofing of the first 6 numbers started about a year ago. It's been relentless. When I'm not working and angry, I will keep them on the phone for 20 minutes acting like a mark, then tell them why I did it. Sometimes they hang up, sometimes we have a short conversation, sometimes they get angry and start yelling (and I hang up). I do get less calls now, after having done this about 20 times. In fact, I just realized I only got 2 in the last week (instead of 15+).
> spoofs their number to match the first 6 digits of my own phone number
I had one call me a few weeks ago that spoofed my wife's number. We have consecutive numbers, but I forgot about that for a bit and thought they somehow had my contact data.
Why is caller id spoofing even allowed. Do we need to legislate a technology change for this? Couldn't technology to validate with a signed certificate of ownership of a number be required from a legal standpoint?
In the United States, it is a violation of federal law for telemarketers to block or fraudulently spoof caller ID information. I emphasize 'fraudulently' because there are some legitimate reasons for spoofing, such as substituting a central callback number (e.g., a legitimate customer service number) for the desk number of the employee making the call. Those legitimate cases are why it is allowed at all. Whether this constitutes a 'good enough' reason, given the rampant abuse, is valid question.
The problem with these regulations is that they are difficult to enforce. How does one report calls with spoofed caller ID when they do not know who actually placed the call?
I don't think that feature is precluded by a technological enforcement of some ownership authentication for caller ID. On the other hand, the addition of call number ownership authentication may or may not solve the spam call problem either...
Wtf. At that point I'd just get rid of a phone number altogether. Or turn on flight mode (which I modded to be a GSM toggle, so wifi and bluetooth stay on) and turn it off when people ask (via chat) to call.
May I suggest that you guys are in some sort of bubble?
My mom's a 60 year old with a flip-phone, and her husband's nephrologist, neurologist and audiologist isn't going to ask her via chat to kindly turn on her phone.
I assume they're not on hacker news. I was speaking from a hacker's viewpoint (the person I'm responding to and myself), not for every person on the planet.
Do hackers not have doctors? Do hackers not have children? Is our daycare going to "chat" me to ask me to turn my phone on if my kid falls down and breaks her arm? Is my doctor going to "chat" me to tell me that the test came back, and that I need to go to the hospital and check myself in right now?
Your solution doesn't just not work for some small, irrelevant section of the population like "old people", "parents", or "anyone outside of SV".
For that matter, if people are chatting you and asking you to answer the phone, why not just use that app to talk?
Try answering and saying no/pressing the no button.
The article asserts that most robocallers are then somehow selling that information to other robocallers, but I doubt it (plus, uh, "pressed no" isn't a steaming hot sales lead).
As I did mention a month or so ago in a post related to robocall I decided myself to tackle a solution to help fight those calls. I am still working on it as a side project, and 90% of the backend system is done, and probably 50% of the iPhone app done (considering to add Android support later).
It will add a twist on the way to fight such calls do it has at least a feature that differentiate it from similar apps.
If anyone will want to help beta test when it is ready (require an iPhone with iOS 10 or 11), ping me! (Email info in profile)
I'm interested in helping you finish the iPhone app and potentially the android app also as a side project. I don't know how much good I'll be on the back end but I'm open to talk through ideas and help where possible. No money or really even credit needed. I just really think robocalls need a proactive easy to use cross platform solution. That and I want to get better at everything while doing as much good in the process.
I'd soon change my number before resorting to most apps. Unless it's like uBlockOrigin where I just feed blacklists into it, I'm not really okay with giving an organization besides my service provider my call history. Read Nomorobo's TOS sometime, it's a doozy.
This is how the call blocking API on iOS works. The blocker app can only provide a static, pre-set list of numbers to block to the OS, and that's it. It has no access to call history, awareness of calls being received/made, etc. The OS handles all the blocking, referring to the blacklist the app provided earlier, and provides no feedback to the app itself about this.
Of course, this means that call blocking apps have less features than on Android. For example, apps can't dynamically look up a number when a call is revived and make an on-the-fly decision. This is in keeping with iOS' philosophy of "privacy/security over features", vs. Android's "everything is completely open to developers, for better or worse".
It also means that the ultimate call blocking mechanism I've always wanted isn't available on iOS: Only allow calls from known numbers in my address book. Frustrating, because to achieve such a concept I've had to resort to DND mode in iOS which then also blocks all push notifications.
> 1.2 Data Privacy. You understand and agree that some of your call information (including, but not limited to, a log of all phone calls made to your subscribed phone line(s) and any requested additions to any customizable phone number blacklist or white list) may be viewable by you, the Company, and by any other person having a phone line subscribed to the Nomorobo Service through the same user account as you.
I don't know that that is actually possible on iOS, though, as iOS doesn't give the call log to the blacklist provider.
>1.3 Contact. From time to time, the Company may need to send e-mails, in-app messages, and/or push notifications to you and automated voice calls and/or text messages to all phone lines that are subscribed to or otherwise using the Nomorobo Service.
Could be innocuous now and be much more annoying later if they decide to change their business model.
>Binding Arbitration. If the parties to the Agreements do not reach a solution through the informal resolution process described in Paragraph 6.3(ii), then any controversy or claim arising out of or relating to the Agreements, shall be settled by arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (the "AAA") in accordance with its Commercial Arbitration Rules, and judgment on the award rendered by the arbitrator(s) may be entered in any court having jurisdiction thereof or having jurisdiction over the relevant party or its assets.
Must go to arbitration if anything goes wrong and you want to sue.
Overall, not the worst I've seen. There was another one that you had to grant permission to post to your Facebook wall and/or Twitter account. I don't recall which one it was, though.
I'd say do not put your number on a do not call list. That just lets the robocallers know its a real number, and they are likely outside the jurisdicition of enforcement for these laws.
I like to pick up so I can decide for myself if it's a spam call. If it is, it gets blocked and reported (Android). Not sure if Google does anything with the report but at least it is tagged on the next call in.
For the past few years the odd spam call I get has been my number with one digit changed. This came as a surprise when my ex-wife's phone number popped up. I didn't realize it was spam until I listened to the voicemail re: the cruise I won.
Because there are some good reasons for spoofing Caller ID (e.g. providing a master extension for a call made from a company) and, historically, it was hard/expensive to do. That difficulty pretty much went away with VoIP and other technology changes.
I noticed I end up with a pretty high hit-rate; maybe 1/2 of calls come in already tagged. Maybe I'm just lucky the volume is low enough to answer the calls; if they happened more often it wouldn't be practical.
Some sort of "law" probably comes into play with respect to junk phone calls. If there were a lot more, the phone system would simply become untenable. Instead, between legal, economic, and technology limitations, junk calls (including those that are actually legal) have seemed to hover in the annoying but not a lot worse than that rate for pretty much as long as I can remember.
I would add, if you do answer the phone, don't say "Hello" or anything like that. The automated callers are looking for hints that someone is on the other side of the line and give up easily to get to the next number, where a person would usually spend a couple of seconds to check if someone answered the phone properly.
Nowadays if I pick up to a silent line I usually just hang up.
Yeah, I usually answer and put the mic on mute to see if there's anyone on the other end. Usually it's a robot waiting for audio from the other side to proceed, so it hangs up after several seconds without ever saying anything.
That's kind of a dick move to normal people that are calling you because making the caller say "hello?" first is the complete opposite of the normal flow.
A great observation by tacostakohashi a year ago was that "peak telephone" was the mid-1990s and its success is what kills it, following the same pattern as postal mail, fax, email, usenet, and facebook:
Now you can often get so much more done talking to online chat for whatever utility or organization. I guess it's only a matter of time before you're talking to a robot there too (or is it happening already?) So have we perhaps reached "peak communication"?
At least until the direct neural implant, when we can express or receive the information we need by joining minds. But then will there be frustrating computer minds that we have to interface with?
You think emailing or chatting your common utility will get your change order processed in a reasonable timeframe? I've got bad news for you, knowing a few people who work at local utilities, those emails you send in get to sit for months in some cases before being processed, meanwhile an order put in when you call in gets processed within days.
Many utilities just opened up the floodgates to email and other forms of customer service, without adding any staff to handle said workload, hence the severe backlog at many of these utilities. Same deal with meter readers, most utilities have stopped hiring them because within 2 to 3 years, the utility will have a new smart meter system implemented across the board, and they'd rather not fire a whole team outright. Letting the employees churn without replacing them is much less dramatic.
One of the sad things that broke when number porting became a thing was there was no definitive answer of which phones were cell phones and which were land lines. This was unfortunate because if you were called on your cell phone for a long time it would cost you money, and if someone called in an unsolicited way, you had 'damages' that you could sue for on the theory that they knew it was a cell phone and they called it anyway. Now however they have reasonable doubt and so they call whenever.
I wrote the FCC once and suggested that a good use of some of those fees I pay would be to create a service that would instantly back trace and log a complaint on a number using telemetry from inside the phone system. That combined with a federal criminal statute which allowed for jail time for masking the origin of a phone call and I think you could make to fairly costly for the owners and enablers of this stuff.
Then existing 07x numbers would be made 071x numbers, and repeat.
But the existing 07x range is effectively 9 digits long, (with a few chunks out of it)
so we're probably good for a while.
We've not started 072 and barely touched 076 (and 071 is currently unused but that's sensible if the existing might ever be bumped to start 071).
Our population count is a good way way away from being 9 digits.
Already (because of number porting) you have numbers from networks now home in the middle of number ranges of their competitors.
But I think we're more likely to see a separation of number/device before that 071x happens. Devices or SIMs will have an IPv6 address and your number is separate but accessible. Time will tell.
Surely you can just add more digits? Once 07XXX XXX XXX is exhausted, you could start issuing 071XXX XXX XXX numbers. It's been done with POTS numbers before (e.g. Sheffield - transitioned to 6-digits in 1965, 7-digits in 1995)
Both Android and iOS have "Do Not Disturb" features which almost accomplish this. On my Android phone, the "Priority only" setting will silence any calls from outside your contacts list. It would be ideal to be able to send directly to VM, but this option definitely minimizes the distraction. I have it enabled 24/7, except when I know I'm expecting a call from an unknown number.
I use the "Mr. Number" app on Android to accomplish this. I have found that straight to VM instead of silencing the phone actually reduces the number of calls I get.
Because there are too many legitimate callers who you don't have in your contacts. I don't have the lab my doctor uses in my contacts. My doctor may not even use the same lab for different procedures.
Fun fact about Aaron Foss, who started Nomorobo: In 2014 he was invited to testify to the FCC on his efforts to fight robocalling. To drive home the magnitude of the issue, he printed the anonymized call logs for the 15M calls blocked by NomoRobo, and bought the 25 boxes of printouts with him to the floor.
Nomorobo is $1.99 per-month per-device! Why should I have to pay for the phone company not being able to screen out caller ID spoofers. This is a failure of the phone company and the technology.
I agree, it is a little pricy. Cost comes down over time. I don't know of any other service that is doing this at the moment. I hope within a year or so, we find an open source solution to this.
Nice to see fellow TechStars Alum, Aaron's company Nomorobo mentioned.
Aaron and his team work hard to have a strong service for those bothered enough to want a solution.
I have had the same phone number for 15 years, and I have been getting A LOT of robocalls lately.
I tried stopping them with NoMoRobo on iOS. It worked OK, but it can't match "Unknown caller" or blocked numbers, which made it kind of worthless for me. Sigh.
Nomorobo has been hit/miss for me. 75% on catching robocalls, and I've had a false positive that belonged to a caller I wanted to talk to. I'm not enthusiastic about the results, but will be continuing to use it.
I was just poking around in the settings for my new Android phone and found Settings > Applications > Phone > Call blocking > Block list > Block anonymous calls. Would that be helpful at all? I haven't tested it myself.
I have slightly different way of dealing with them. I pick up, and either ask them to hold on because I'm outside/on the other line/doing something etc.. or if it's a robot I select option they want me to press to connect to the operator. Next I put them on hold and wait to see how long it takes them to disconnect. Record holder was 7 min 51 sec.
When I have time I will also talk to them, feed them incorrect information, put them multiple times on hold etc.
This wastes their time and money. Maybe if more people started doing that they it would no longer be profitable. :)
Aren't unsolicited, electronic commercial messages illegal, or is calling somehow different from email?
As a Dutchman I've never received a call like that. Only once a text message (about 7 months ago), and I highly suspect that one was just sent by my ISP on the advertiser's behalf.
It's more complicated than that, but yes, automated calls to cell phones are generally illegal in the US. They're also very hard to prosecute and most of the people running them are based outside the country.
You can't find them. They spoof their Caller-ID so that every time you get a call from "Rachel with Cardholder Services" or the "Student Loan Forgiveness Program" it's from a different number.
The loan forgiveness people are especially annoying as they'll also text you, and don't respect their own "Text STOP to stop" message. When you talk to them, they refuse to give their street address, so you can't send them a cease & desist letter.
So how can the phone company not backtrack to figure out where the call originated? They know that at a specific time they connected a call to your number. If the call didn't originate on their network, don't they know whose network they're forwarding it from? If so, couldn't they then contact that network and see where it originated from (possibly going to other networks, maybe outside the country) and still trace it back to some originating phone line somewhere in the world? I mean, I can guess that they wouldn't keep these logs for very long because they'd get big very quickly, but even keeping it for 15 minutes and allowing you to call a number and say, "Hey this was a junk call" would help.
In fact, I once got a new phone number that was previously owned by someone who owed a lot of people money. I was getting regular harassing calls from debt collectors who didn't believe that I was the new owner of the number. So I called the police and filed a report. I then called the phone company and gave them the number of the police report, and they gave me a phone number to call a few minutes after each time the debt collectors would call me. After 2 or 3 calls, they had the contact info of the debt collectors, gave it to the police who contacted the debt collectors and I never heard from them again.
Why can't this approach work for scam calls? I mean if they're outside the country, it would involve more work, but if thousands or millions of people are reporting calls that originate from the same place, then it seems like it would rise to the level of being worth it to do something about it.
Obviously the phone company knows everything. Whether they'll act on your call is the question. Not sure if dialing *57 (Malicious call reporting [0]) will work on a cell phone, but there's probably a fee.
> The USPS straight up sells your phone number when you move just by filling out the change of address form online. There is no opt out.
Just because they ask for it (phone number) does not mean they actually need it. Does USPS ever call anyone? Just enter a fake number (xxx-555-1212 often works if their web programmer was not trying to be smart).
I have moved twice recently for a job. The first move was temporary and opted for the online change of address. Due to the rush of everything I didn't really pay much attention to the immediate increase in robocalls. 8-10 calls a day.
Granted that is anecdotal.
On the final move I went back to the USPS website and noticed I was required to agree to the terms that they can sell my new address and phone number. I emailed the USPS regarding those terms on a Saturday afternoon and the next morning received a response that it is not really possible.
Long story short: On a Sunday, the USPS emailed me that I would have to visit a post office to fill out a change of address form just to "opt out" of the selling of my info.
That says nothing about phone numbers, just addresses.
Selling an address updating service to parties that already have your address is not the same as "straight up sell[ing] your phone number when you move."
From the horses mouth:
"The information you supply will be used to provide you with the requested mail forwarding and related services. Please be aware that this service is voluntary, and that requested information is required to provide the service. Collection of information for this service is authorized by 39 U.S.C. §403 and 404. We do not disclose your personal information to anyone, except in accordance with the Privacy Act. Authorized disclosures include limited circumstances such as the following ... to mailers, if already in possession of your name and old mailing address, as an address correction service. Information will also be provided to licensed service providers of the USPS to perform mailing list correction service of lists containing your name and old address. A list of these licensed service providers can be obtained at the following URL: http://ribbs.usps.gov/ncoalink /documents/tech_guides/CERTIFIED_LICENSEES"
They imply they only provide the new address but saying "the information you supply" leaves it open to for them to provide your phone number along with your new address.
Therein lie the problem. The caller ID system was not designed with the thought that callers might spoof numbers. I think it's time to revise the signaling protocols to make this not possible. If it is a world wide problem and the parties outside the US (my area of concern) choose not to support this, then make the companies that refuse to support this responsible for any fines that accrue from illegal calls. I think this might motivate them to help solve the problem.
And FWIW I'm also in the group that doesn't answer calls that are not linked to my contacts. I have also noticed that the spoofed numbers use my area code, exchange and even a jumble of the last 4 digits to get my attention.
What's particularly infuriating about this is that the phone company knows which numbers it owns. It can tell if a call coming in from another provider is spoofed to a number it owns and block it, but they don't currently do that. If every phone company did this, it would significantly cut down on the number of bogus calls because you could only spoof calls on the same network that you're on.
Exactly. We need some kind of better information than just a trivially faked phone number to be passed to the end user devices.
If nothing else I want some sort of non-forgeable identifier for the telcom provider of the calling party. Then we can work on blacklisting those that cater to spammers.
We don't even have to worry about overseas. Get the US and Canada on board (likely easy to get Canada on board) and at least all spoofed numbers will be from obviously foreign locations (or Mexico?). Those calls can be safely ignored for most people.
Google Fi provides this service out of the box. It shows you a red call screen if they think the call is a spam call and it'll ask you if you want to block that number. It's lowered my annoyance level a lot.
Somewhat related: if you want to stop receiving a ton of trash on your mailbox, you can ask all credit agencies to stop sending you "pre-approved" credit card offers. It's easily cut my trash mail in half: https://www.optoutprescreen.com
Ah, maybe. I have been using Android all the way back to 2011, but this is my first non-Samsung phone. I have used "stockish" Android before (CyanogenMod) but I guess those don't come with the actual default app as shipped by Google.
These are great bits of advice - for people with smartphones. What's my mom supposed to do? She visited here for a week, owns a flip phone, and gets - at minimum - a dozen calls a day. We spent a whole day together, I counted.
The majority of them come from a single number, and apparently Verizon refuses to block it permanently without being paid a fee.
The only advice mentioned that is smartphone specific is the app suggestion. The rest are things like don't answer and register on the donotcall list which can be done with a rotary phone.
As for Verizon not blocking the number without charging you. Why not just switch?
Plausible, and kind of works, except when you get regular phone calls from real people whose numbers you don't yet have in your phone. Luckily, this would likely work okay for my mom.
> register on the donotcall list
Which I'm sure Indian call-centers respect.
(Sorry to keep harping on the Indian call-center thing, by the way; I don't mean to show any disrespect to any Indians, but these things do seem to operate largely out of India, much like the 419 scams seem to be forever embedded in the cultural mindset with Nigeria.)
> Why not just switch?
Two year contract that's expensive to get out of.
My advice to her was to report the calls as harassment to Verizon every time; I believe they can't charge you to block harassing calls.
It doesn't work, but you should register anyway and report all instances. The people who maintain that list and abuses of it need to know how badly it is ignored. They need data on how big the problem really is. If they get only a few reports of it not working, well that is statistical noise and can be ignored. If everyone on the list constantly reports unwanted calls that is data that it isn't working and a sign they need to do something about it.
One obvious thing they can do about it is pressure the phone companies to stop allowing caller id spoofing. It isn't hard, if the number is from North America, then the phone companies verify it (if it is from a cell phone overseas they have verified the phone and should have verified the owner of the phone), otherwise it is fraud.
Caller id spoofing exists so companies with a private switch can have a bunch of different phones have the same number- but the phone company knows what numbers the company is allowed to use so the rest can be filtered.
Mind you the above will take a few years to implement. However nobody is working on it because if even one party that needs to do work doesn't the whole thing falls apart.
So is there an easy way to do it? I've reported repeat callers a number of times, and they just keep calling so I get weary of filling out forms online and stop. I want a big ol' button on my phone that I can slap whenever I'm dumb enough to answer.
I have had pretty good luck answering the phone and not saying anything. The call just ends without any recording. My volume has dropped from 2+ a day to 1 a week.
>One recent scheme involves getting consumers to say “yes” and later using a recording of the response to allow unauthorized charges on the person’s credit card account, the F.C.C. warned in March.
I doubt banks are using voice recognition on the single word "yes" to verify charges. Does this make any sense?
That's a case where it has happened a small number of times, complaints were filed, the FCC & Co. picked up on the scam, and they view it as their responsibility to keep the public safe so they generalize. Although I suppose given the speed at which AI is improving, the roboscammers will be utilizing more and more advanced methods soon when it comes to voice sample manipulation.
Most of this criminal activity is coming from outside the US, courtesy of Twilio & Co. having turned the phone number system into an API such that it's now easy to rapidly buy and ditch numbers for cheap. The only practical solution for the end-user point is to insert greater intelligence into the system at the carrier level or at the phone level.
We're facing a problem where very large numbers of phone numbers will be black listed given enough time, unless we insert a greater cost into the system to make the spamming unprofitable (or make it much harder to get a phone number via services like Twilio). The US could try targeting the criminal organizations and individuals operating these scams on the other end; of course that's expensive and slow, and those people will just keep popping up so long as it's easy to do and profitable. The improving and cheapening AI will make it more and more profitable, as the scammers learn to snake into new, more lucrative financial outlets using authentications / identities they steal.
Why would they need Twillio et all to give them new numbers, if as everyone (including in this thread) says they can spoof the number, even showing as the receiver's number itself?
Google android phones appear to be crowdsourcing countermeasures against spam calls. For instance, I have a Google nexus phone. Often, spam calls are indicated as such in android as I'm receiving a call. For calls that aren't indicated as spam and manage to receive my answer, I hang up and hold my finger down on the number until a menu appears where I can mark a number as spam.
I started using the robokiller app and it's made a huge difference for me. I get at least a few telemarketer calls every day and I had stopped answering any phone calls. I've been using the app for a few months and now only get calls that I want. Definitely worth the money for me.
The article recommends "Hiya" as an app among others. I have it on my phone, but I've had horrible luck with it. The app will correctly identify fraudulent or scam calls, but the program has prevented the call from reaching my phone exactly 0% of the time. In practice, what ends up happening is that my phone rings on the normal Android Dialer app, I decline the call, and then Hiya shows up about 20 seconds later to tell me that the call was from a suspected scam caller, which I already figured out when I decided to decline it.
Even after installing the thing, I'm forced to still do what I was doing before, which is looking at the number and trying to quickly google it on my PC before the ringing stops to figure out whether to answer or not.
My Google Nexus 6P phone has something like this built-in, I get a warning when the number is ringing that it's a suspected spam call. If I answer, it will ask me to confirm afterwards that it was indeed a Spam call (it always is) allow me to block it in the future.
I'm assuming this is built into the stock Android dialer.
I use Mr. Number on my Android phone. If the calling phone number is marked as Spam in it's database, it'll display that as the call is ringing. It can also be configured to "block" Spam calls, but that means ring once and send it voicemail. Apparently Android's permission model doesn't allow non-root apps to simply hang up on calls.
I have never once had an unsolicited call on my cell phone number. I suspected it was because I simply never use it as a phone (data and text only) and therefore somehow stayed off the radar. This seems to validate that thought.
It's been an interesting decade, that's for sure. The whole world kind of expects you to have a phone number if you want to do business. Some people are confused, but more often than not it's their software or processes that insist I give a phone number. I leased a car recently and not giving out a number was perplexing to the sales Dept. I explained that I simply don't have one. They ultimately still wanted my business. I wasn't so lucky with getting a credit card.
Your suspicion is correct. Your number gets out there because you give it out, and then 10 years later the company goes under and liquidates their assets which includes a load of customer phone numbers; or because you give it out when you open a credit card or buy a mortgage or car, and you legally can't limit the sharing of your personal info to third parties, who can share your personal info as widely as they want... point is, not having a phone number will be tantamount to not having a social security number in many situations.
> point is, not having a phone number will be tantamount to not having a social security number in many situations.
I think a phone number is shifting to be a replacement for social security numbers in customer databases.
My grocery store/gas station relationship, Guitar Center, jewelry store, and oil/lube service station. And that's just the last week-or-so interactions. They don't know my social, but they're using my phone as a primary key for their rewards/lookup.
For a while, a membership card number would have sufficed, but since no one carries that around, the retailers are assigning your phone number to your identity. Much like social security numbers did for the government back in its inception.
The only time spammers leave me voicemail, it's an automated recording, I doubt any human spammer is evening listening to your "law offices of..." voicemail recording.
Just a note of caution about Jolly Roger (http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/), I used to love forwarding spam calls to them. However, since you have to pick up the call to loop Jolly Roger in - the automated system might mark you for repeat calls. For instance I answered a call about student debt repayment or whatever to forward the call and since then I've been getting at least a few calls a week from different numbers about it as well as text messages.
I use Jolly Rodger as well and love it. I think you're correct about picking up the call getting you added to a list. When that happens I just go on the offensive. I call them back and forward the call over to Jolly Rodger multiple times. I have been blacklisted by every call center that I've done this with.
It should not be possible to spoof caller ID. This hole is what allows all of this. Nobody would do this if you could reliably report them or call them back.
There's only a few people that I want to have the ability to have real-time interrupt-driven access to me. My phone is pretty much always set on do-not-disturb, and those folks are whitelisted through. The only time it's off do-not-disturb is if I'm expecting a call. Otherwise, leave a message or use some other asynchronous way to contact me.
484 273 0091 calls multiple times such as 5 within one minute. When answered, there's no one there. I've blocked, and sent a text message threatening to report as harassing calls. So, how do I go about making such a report?
Has anyone been getting calls from numbers that are oddly similar to your own? As in (xxx)xxx-abcd, where x is the same numbers as my own. Both my coworker and I seem to get these calls. We have different area codes too. Both are on the FCC DNC list. I frequently report these numbers too.
I get these all the time, like 3-4 a day. I'm pretty sure they are spoofed. I suspect, they are meant to look like your number so you might for a second think 'hey i recognize that number' and pick up
I had a feeling that was the intention, but I was surprised at the tactic. Because that does mean they are likely spoofing real numbers. But it does seem that that is something the FCC should crack down on.
I have been out of the loop for awhile, however in the nineties we had a dial in system at work we used for guards to report when on site and when leaving a site from work. We relied on ANI data from the phone company which contained the actual number the call was placed from.
Surely the phone company has this data and could compare it in flight to what is being passed along as the caller id information which I was under the impression is wholly separate data. If anything do so smart phones could see both entries and flag suspicious calls
I just answer the call and don't say anything. After a few seconds the robot makes a few beeps and hangs up. Presumably the software waits to hear the recipient say something before starting the recording.
I hope it marks the number as bad when this happens. I will say that I have received fewer calls since I started doing this.
If it is a real person calling you, they'll sense the silence and say "hello? Anyone there?" or something.
>The scam begins when a consumer answers a call and the person at the end of the line asks, “Can you
hear me?” The caller then records the consumer's "Yes" response and thus obtains a voice signature. This signature can later be used by the scammers to pretend to be the consumer and authorize fraudulent charges via telephone.
In other words they splice together "do you want to authorize these charges?" And your "Yes" and present this as "proof" to the credit card company you authorized the charges you are disputing.
I should have added a caveat, I actually agree with you and I, too, was skeptical of the fact this has been happening. However, since the FCC released an official document about it I figured it was worth mentioning as a theoretical possibility. I am unaware of many cases where the FCC spread urban legends without getting actual complaints, so people presumably have actually been complaining about this happening to them to the FCC, or at least them believing it's happened to them.
The "can you hear me" call would have to take place AFTER a scammer had already charged your card for a dubious service. They would (probably?) have to have a merchant account with a payment processor for that.
It's a whack-a-mole problem. You could never move quickly enough in the banking world to squash how this thing works. The methods are going to get more and more advanced, as AI tech gets better very rapidly in the next few years. The carriers, FCC, and banking system are entirely unprepared for what's coming next.
If you really wanted to smash it, make it harder for the roboscammers to abuse the relatively new API systems of inexpensively buying phone numbers in the US market. That either has to occur at Twilio & Co's level or it will have to be government action.
If Twilio & Co are smart, they'll get on this soon rather than allowing their business to be destroyed by heavy handed or inept government moves. There are few things more ripe for bad and unintended outcomes than the US government moving rapidly into something they don't understand in the name of safe guarding the people.
Oh the joys of government systems. I received this when verifying my number is on the do not call list.
"Due to system difficulties, your request was not processed. Please try your request again later or call 1-888-382-1222 to submit your request by phone. We are sorry that we are unable to process your request at this time."
I get at least one call a week now. Always from the same area code, often one a few digits off from my number.
I wonder how long it will take for the goverment to start enforcing the do not call registry laws. What’s the threshold of annoyance before it’s worth spending taxpayer money to enforce?
The carriers could do something about it. I'd consider switching service to a carrier that demonstrated they block these kinds of calls. Just like a big part of gmail's popularity is how effectively they block spam.
They (Samsung) appear to have some kind of crowdsourced database of spam callers in the default phone app (there is an option built in to report). It works amazingly well and was a surprise when I got this phone, coming from a Nexus 4. It seems to work very well indeed.
The difference may be the t-mobile account instead of the phone. IIRC, they are rolling the "Scam Likely" feature out starting with t-mobile one plans.
If you are seeing spoofed numbers from your area code/prefix, there is also a good chance that others in that area code/prefix might be getting calls with your number as the spoofed number.
I talked to someone who received such a call when he star-69'ed it.
Right. And then, if the carrier pursues really aggressive enforcement, they end up making false positive mistakes with no way for the affected individual to remediate them.
it baffles me that people answer to unknown phone number. If you want to contact me, and I do not know you yet, you'll have to contact me through an asynchronous way. Voicemail, SMS, e-mail, whatever. Synchronous communication takes way to much time.
This. The only time I answer a call from an unknown number is if I'm expecting a food delivery, and it might be the restaurant or delivery person calling. Otherwise, I mash the 'decline' button, and it goes to voicemail.
Why is robocall and telemarketing spam legal? It is surprising that in a modern world where everything is regulated and monitored such a simple problem cannot be solved with fines and jail.
Calls and text messages to cell phones that use any sort of auto-dialer are illegal without express written consent (and the term 'auto-dialer' is applied rather broadly). The same goes for calls that deliver a pre-recorded message. Fines for violations can range from $500 to $1,500 per violation, but you'll have to figure out who's actually calling you in order to file for damages. Almost all of these calls spoof their caller ID, so good luck with that.
If you're in the Do Not Call registry, there are another set of fines on top of those imposed by the TCPA. They start out around the same range, but for excessive violators the fines can now reach up to $40,000 per call (as of August 2016).
Do Not Call registry means that by default spammers are allowed to call anyone not on the list. I guess they paid a lot to politicians to have it this way.
I suppose it had the effect of legitimizing telemarketing at the time, but the effect diminishes as more and more people abandon landlines. Spammers can't legally call a cell phone without express written consent unless they dial the number manually, which of course they never do. That's a protection of the TCPA. Same goes for text messages.
The insane thing about this app is it still allows some numbers through that they have identified as "severe threats". So AT&T are allowing known severe threats to go through.
The app works pretty well most of the time. I just can't wrap my head around this decision unless maybe there is lag between their identification of a number as a threat and their ability to block it.
They might be playing it safe letting the calls still ring your phone, instead of auto blocking. I've had a call show up labeled Telemarketer, but I actually was expecting that call (from Dish TV billing), so I just let them go to voicemail and if they do leave me a message then I know it was a legit call.
I had been receiving many spam calls and downloaded the Truecaller app. It crowdsources spam caller information and does a good job of notifying you if a call is spam.
TL;DR Don't pick up calls from unfamiliar numbers.
It did help confirm a sneaking suspicion I've had, which is that robocalls spoof a caller ID number with your area code and prefix, to make it seem more familiar.
Stories about people who manipulate telemarketers are amusing, and mobile minutes are mostly no longer scarce, but who has the time? Time and attention are the scarcest resources.
"robocalls spoof a caller ID number with your area code and prefix, to make it seem more familiar"
I discovered this pattern from robocalls on my cell phone. But it has exactly the opposite effect as intended: since I don't know anyone who has the same area code and prefix I do[1], I have 100% confidence that any call with a number like that is spam.
And if I don't recognize the area code, or it's from a toll-free area code, it's also spam with 100% confidence.
Fortunately, it's very rare for the spammers to leave a voicemail when I don't answer.
[1] My city has 7 area codes and thousands of cellular prefixes - the odds of meeting someone with the same area+prefix are slim.
Same for me, since my phone number is more than a decade old and I haven't lived in the city where I obtained the number since 2012.
I know people with numbers in the same area code, but definitely not with the same prefix. That said, just about every actual person I know texts before calling, if at least to check when might be a good time to call. Almost nobody calls outright, and if they do and I don't answer, there's always a follow-up text.
The same code and prefix thing really seems to have picked up significantly in the last couple months. I have an app that catches most known spam calls, but tends to let these through, which I assume is one of the the underlying reasons for this type of spoofing.
So this is what was happening... I have a "desirable" prefix and had been getting tons of calls from numbers with the same prefix - was wondering why the heck they would be calling me.
One thing that this doesn't mention, but which I heard somewhere, is don't call that number back and ask "Why did you call me?" In case it isn't obvious, the caller IDs are spoofed using random numbers, and the person who has the number listed doesn't know their number is being used this way.
One amusing anecdote from the NPR piece is the person who received a call with a caller ID of ... their own phone number!
Surely telcos can do something to block calls coming from sources that don't own the number they are providing as caller id. Internet provides started doing this years ago with alien packets.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons why a call from a number isn't coming from where you would be directing the call, so it's hard to fix it with a simple policy. What would be useful though is requiring something analogous to email received headers, combined with a real time method to report calls as spam/unwanted.
If spam volume from an interconnecting carrier is too high, cut them off.
Telco routing is a lot of twisty passages, but there are many fewer players than internet routing, so it should be easier to get bad apples off the network, as long as there is desire and some users are willing to provide feedback on calls.
They often can't. A call can come in from any number of sources. Not to mention call forwarding and all that stuff. Telcos would love to kill robo dialing, but they usually do it by requiring a certain percentage of calls to complete and last longer than 6 seconds. If you want to hurt them, answer and hangup immediately.
I think a simple way to fix it would be to charge someone an extra fee the first time they dial a number, and transfer most of that money as a debit on the callees bill. It wouldn't take much to make robocalls unprofitable.
How would you feel if some random mailguy knocked at your door and when you opened it he threw a package at your hands and immediately charged you for (part of) the delivery? This is exactly how charging to receive phone calls feels to me!
How do telcos justify this to you? What's the reasoning behind it?