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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
Readit News
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?
This was a tricky bit of grammar but I believe it's 100% correct.
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 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.
This whole line of argument is about ten years stale, anyway.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Most North Americans are not paying to receive calls.
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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi-qtTuO9rY
Also, pressing "0" on legit telemarketers usually takes you to a rep or automatically puts you on the DNC.
Honest question : Will it upload my personal details to be shared publicly if I install this app (somewhat like truecaller) ?
Do Not Disturb + allow calls only from contacts = whitelist of callers.
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.
- 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.
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! :)
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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).
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?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scam-calls-spoofing-your-own-...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
I block numbers on my Android and my landline phone has a one button screening function.
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)
Summary:
- yes there are more robocalls
- Don't pick up
- Put your number on do not call list
- Get an app to block them
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.
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".
The numbers are often spoofed, so you'll end up blocking some random local numbers instead.
Nowadays if I pick up to a silent line I usually just hang up.