Robocalls. That said, they're likely "virtual" providers, which are in turn enabled by "Mobile Virtual Network Providers", companies that sell telco-provider-as-a-service, so that a virtual provider only needs to focus on sales, marketing, first call customer support, and legal liability but not the technical nitty gritty. I hope the FCC goes after these MVNOs enabling them next.
(source: wikipedia and I worked in a small segment of the mobile network operator market for a short while)
Many of these small voip providers the voip service is a small portion of their overall business. They may be a small ISP, reselling voip as an add on to internet services. Or they may be a small MSP marketing services to businesses in their area, and VOIP is just one small part of their overall package. If you are already marketing to the customer, providing customer service, billing, and even onsite support, why not add an additional service like VOIP, even if it alone isn't all that profitable? Even if you are only breaking even, having the service in house can save you time and money troubleshooting when a customer call you up and says they are having problems making phone calls and their third party VoIP service support is blaming the network...
I have some questions 1) are these telcos effectively pass-thru operators for actual spammers ? in other words, just a paper entity working with 1-2 customers ?
2) Do these VOIP providers act as resellers for the big telcos ? If yes, how does the telco contracting/onboarding fail so hard at screening for bad actors as potential customers (is there a law like KYC for them at all ?)
3) Finally, once onboarded don't the big telcos have some incentive to boot bad actors from their busy networks ?
You can become one yourself this week if you install Asterisk on an obsolete PC in your closet and plug one or more phone lines into a "telephony interface card". You don't have to stay in business.
By pushing new lines on you even if you don't need them, creating very low expectations for technical service, and automating away customer service at every turn.
I feel like there is a shadow cartel where all telcos agree to suck as much as possible so there's no real incentive to switch. Also aggregators love re-bills where you pay them for another provider's invoice but they can't do anything service-wise on it.
At my work (in charge of 140 Windows laptops/iPhones) the only way T-Mobile would give me a deal on 30 new iPhones was by selling me 50 new SIMs for lines I told them I absolutely didn't need. I'm turning those off now. Don't even get me started on Granite or Telepacific, each of which make Comcast and AT&T look like shining examples of greatness.
For a long time the area was serviced by AT&T, who probably started with phone lines and then progressed over time to dial up and then more modern cable / broadband. They probably bundled in home phone service for many years.
When the local ISP built out all their gigabit fiber infrastructure they probably felt they had to offer some kind of phone service to compete, and went with VOIP since they weren't going to build out a whole telephone network infrastructure. I'd bet most people don't use it, but they need to offer it to be viable for certain older customers that don't want to give up their home phones.
I briefly set up a home phone on the provided VOIP, just for fun and nostalgia, but it was pretty annoying with sometimes getting disconnected and needing a manual power cycle to reconnect so I stopped using it.
And mine is on the list .. and it's the only phone number I have for all my banks and other accounts. Looks like I'm frakd. And no, I'm not a robocaller, in fact I never used this phone to call or text anything, just to receive texts.
The US has number portability - you should be able to switch now and keep your number
However having said that, I'm not sure it will keep working if the original provider goes bust. If it's the same as in the UK, under the hood the implementation requires the original owner of the number range to do forwarding. So it's worth checking if the owner of the range of numbers containing your number - often a different company - is on the list
I'm in Northern Europe and lately spam calls, and especially spoofing from random peoples numbers have become so bad i know multiple who stopped taking any calls, or even changed their phone numbers because they got too many calls, or angry people called them because their number was spoofed.
To me the whole system is archaic - i know gen z would never ever take a call from someone they don't know, or even call each other - it's simply not something you do - it would be like reading your spam mails.
And i'm coming to the same conclusion, answering random people is naive.
Phone calls now produce JSON Web Tokens that identify users with cryptographic signatures. This was codified around 2018 by the IETF, SIP Forum, and ATIS.
So the public phone system now supports it, but the problem is that not all providers support it yet, which fundamentally weakens the system. Of course, you can’t just add a new “protocol version” to an over-100 year old phone system with zero time to do a migration.*
But now that it’s been a few years, we are reaching a point where, at least for the US, the FCC wants to ban any provider who hasn’t added support.
Are the signatures available to the end user? I would love to set up a call screener that only accepts verified calls, as most spam uses spoofed numbers. I'm assuming that the major players implement the protocol at least .. I'm ok if the filter rejects things that aren't real land lines or cell phones.
This is only possible if the call transits through all IP networks. If the call at any point goes over TDM, and out of band shaken is not implemented, then the signature is lost.
End to end authenticated calls is the ideal state, but I don't think we're fully there yet.
I get at least 10 calls a day lol. They are all from India. Insurance scams, life insurance scams, you name it. I had to switch to only accept calls from known numbers. The rest are just sent to voicemail. I will probably miss on something important, but I have had it.
I pick them up on purpose, bate them, waste their time, call them back, waste more time. It can be fun sometimes, had one hanging on me the other day, I was laughing so hard. "Stop calling us!", "Stop calling you?! Bro stop calling and scamming people!" lol... Im also always looking out for AI phone systems as well. It's real fun messing with those, specially when you can get them off the rails.
I recently did the same thing, as 95% of my incoming call volume in a week was spam calls. It's been great. The friction I feel is when interacting with ephemeral contacts like contractors, etc. I've had to try to be diligent about adding them as contacts if I expect a call back, or hoping they leave a voicemail.
It's sad there really isn't much you can do about it. I tried do-not-call lists, answering and telling them to stop calling me, reporting them - all was apparently a waste of time.
yup, anyone who knows me knows to email if they want a reply, and that I only take calls by appointment. Leave a message and I might call back, otherwise my phone's not on me, doesn't ring if the caller isn't in my contacts and doesn't even have cell reception most of the time.
Which country? I am in Finland and have had the same number for over 20 years. It is publicly listed. I receive maybe 1-2 marketing calls a month and less than one SMS scam per year. I am somewhat restrcitive filling in my contact details when I don't expect any real business. I only use deposable email addresses, but that should be completely unrelated.
That's your answer right there. Finland is a small country with a very niche language of just about 5M people - it's too expensive to teach people Finnish good enough to convincingly scam off the elderly, not enough marks to return that investment, and you need a sizable population of poor and desperate/dumb people to act unknowingly as money mules.
In contrast, for English language scams, you got 340 million Americans, 68 million Brits and dozens if not hundreds of millions of people speaking primarily English in former colonies (India, Australia) that are potential marks. And to make it better for Indian scammers, people there are already used to Indian call center accents so their alarm bells don't go off immediately.
For German language scams, it's 84M in Germany, 9M in Austria and 4.4 million German speakers in Switzerland. For us, it's mostly scams based in Turkey, because there are a lot of Turks who learn German because they have relatives here or their parents had a stint in the 60s-90s.
Just read [1] that our local telecom authorities (NKOM) report good progress when it comes to preventing people from abusing Norwegian telephone numbers to spam/scam Norwegians.
Sweden here, and I get less than one spamm call per year I would say, likely from abroad since in Sweden you can easily opt-out of marketing calls, except from companies where you are already a customer, which can be annoying enough.
In France since the first of October you can't spoof a French phone number anymore. (Edit: at least with the existing ways of spoofing. I'm sure it's a matter of time before someone hacks an operator and signs their calls through them.)
Anecdotally, I haven't had any spam call.
I've wondered more than once if our contact information should be more like Apple's hidden emails - generated for the specific person or business we want to be able to contact us, and revocable - with a public fallback which is expected to go to a voicemail of some sort.
My personal data has been part of 2 major leaks so I'd definitely pay for this feature. I already use a service which generates random emails and forwards it to my primary email address so having such a service for phone numbers would be a great idea.
I (in Germany) still wonder why I’m lucky. I’m not complaining, I’d like to keep it this way. But my phone number is relatively ancient, as it’s still the same I got with my first phone around 22 years ago (maybe almost exactly? I think I got it for Christmas when I was 16 :D), and it even was included in the Facebook leak a while ago.
After the FB leak, I got a maybe 6-8 spam calls over the next month, and that was it again. It’s maybe 1-2 per year, and they are easy to recognize because they call from different countries.
I thought it was maybe Germany having stricter regulations, but people on Reddits /r/de do complain about spam calls, so no idea.
Experiences seem to differ a lot. In the US, I only have a cell phone so I have to give out the number and I only get junk calls once a month or so. It's certainly not in the disable incoming calls category. (Although I also suspect that different people have different tolerances and different perspectives on people being able to reach them from possibly unknown numbers.)
I get up to ten a day or something like that. It used to be a smaller number of actual people. I’d answer it to listen to them, counsel/encourage them, and tell them about Jesus Christ. Even the scammers might in rare cases change their lives.
They’re almost all AI calls now. The AI’s force a specific progression, are rude, and will argue with you. Some are programmed to claim to be human. It’s usually the same AI’s selling the same products connecting me to the same telemarketers. Some know my voice.
I can’t stand robocalls because nothing good comes from it either way. I don’t get to encourage new people. Their sales hurt by contacting the same people for stuff they’ve already been disqualified for. If I heard new offerings, I might buy or donate. For example, one was St. Jude’s reminder which I responded to on their web site.
Others are taking action. There’s regulatory penalties for repeated calls, calls outside a certain time, etc. You need to be on the do not call list to be sure. You can send the companies a cease and desist or a lawsuit in small claims under the TCPA. There’s law firms semi-automating that, too. If in the U.S., use that if they keep harassing you.
One day years ago back when our desks still had phones on them someone called back and they had spoofed my desk number as their call back. Took a bit to get down to that because I had no idea if it was someone in the company or not trying to reach me. (We checked into to desks at the time I think so the number could have been forwarded or listed as mine for the day at the time I think)
>To me the whole system is archaic - i know gen z would never ever take a call from someone they don't know, or even call each other
I suspect folks in Gen Z are also less concerned with calls from medical/emergency/etc. services. That said, habits have certainly shifted. With very few exceptions, I'm not going to make a personal call out of the blue at this point.
Easy, call via some voip implementation or another i often have internet access when i dont have phone service, not rarely have service without internet and therefore voip is already more relible. Moreover, its also quite clear who is calling me, so spoofing isn't viable. cellular based calls are dead and belong buried.
The problem is not that the phone system is old or "archaic", or that it uses old technologies - rather, the system is as bad as it is, because it's been ravaged by a cancer - a cancer on modern society known as advertising[0].
All of this has happened before, and it will happen again.
Any new media, any form of communications we invent, develops this cancer as it grows into mainstream awareness. The more people a new tool can reach, the more rewarding it becomes to marketers and salesmen, who all flock to it - and as they do, they accelerate the growth of the medium while also displacing and degrading the intended/legitimate usages of it. Soon enough, the medium turns into barren wasteland full of threats to users' sanity and wallets. Only once it goes so bad that people stop using the medium, and/or find a better alternative, do things get better - the cancer dies off as its nourishment supply, i.e. the audience, goes elsewhere. But the disease follows them there. And, if didn't inflict terminal damage to the old medium, chances are that old medium will experience a second spring[1], albeit in a much more diminished shape, becoming a niche hobby or internal technical tool[1].
Advertising is what destroyed AM/FM radio (remains a niche). It's what destroyed outdoor information displays (now existing only to show ads). It's what denies us beautiful vistas (all obstructed by billboards). It's what killed OTA TV, then cable TV[2]. It's what killed e-mail[3]. It's what killed the phone system, and it's what will kill any new thing we move to.
This problem will not go away until we start treating the actual disease - advertising. And by treating I mean the equivalent of radiation therapy[4]; anything else, anything narrowly targeted, leaves space for the disease to come back with extra force - the line between "outright scam" and "legitimate communication" is fuzzy, and salesmen and marketers are very creative at blurring it further.
And no, adding crypto (the legitimate kind) to the mix - authentication protocols, encrypted handshakes, whatnot - will not help, for the same reason your immune system isn't of much help against real cancer either. Sure, it'll get harder for a random Joe the Scammer to do their fly-by-night salesmanship, but advertisers in general can afford to implement all the schemes marking them as AAA tier 1 legitimate communication.
After all, if you look at the web, who's actually pushing most of the security stuff? Unsurprisingly, biggest players in adtech. Improving the medium's immune system is in their interest - they're still invisible to it, and getting rid of the most obnoxious scams secures their own ability to feed on all of us.
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[0] - Well, kinda. It also includes bits of activities classified under "sales" and "marketing". I think the closest term encompassing them all might be "marketing communications", but "advertising" as understood by regular people covers most of it.
[1] - In rare cases, it may turn into a kind of "zombie mode", a blob of glowing radioactive mutated cancer, able to live out of background cosmic radiation, or such. I mean, how else can you describe the Fax system? You plug it in, wait a moment or three, and suddenly it starts spitting out ads!
[2] - The prime example why paying doesn't protect you from the disease. Once medium contracts advertising, the option to "pay instead of seeing ads" quickly turns into "pay and see ads anyway", and then "fuck you, pay more and see even more ads".
[3] - No, spam filter only catches the worst of it. "Legitimate" advertising still fills most of everyone's inboxes, which is a big reason why people flock to closed, gate-kept alternatives.
[4] - Or nuking it from orbit. Pick your own favorite exaggerated metaphor; it's the only way to be sure.
GenX here and I'm the same - I always hang up on an unknown caller, and consider calling someone without texting first to be rude.
I don't think it's a generation thing, I think it's that what we generally consider normal has changed, but that some people got left behind in the old normal.
It’s definitely not rude to call someone without asking first. If you don’t want to answer the call then don’t and if it’s important I’ll text or leave a voicemail.
> I don't think it's a generation thing, I think it's that what we generally consider normal has changed, but that some people got left behind in the old normal.
Isn't that the definition of a "generational thing"?
Now I have to think every time, is this someone I have to text first? Or do they consider texting then calling redundant?
Anyhow, I think both are important communication techniques, adults should be able to do remote direct verbal and async written.
PSA - use a free carrier lookup website to see where your spam calls and texts come from. Mine mostly come from Bandwidth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_Inc.), Sinch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinch_AB), and other such platforms with APIs. It appears these companies have very poor anti abuse practices. When I contacted them for help they basically refused to reveal how my number was obtained, what their practices were in establishing consent, and did no more than block one specific number each time from contacting me. Sometimes they claimed they’re just a wholesale reseller and have no obligations to take more action. They didn’t even respond to my repeated request to preserve data and communications relating to these repeated abuse cases. These companies should be shut down and their executives should be personally fined.
Don't most spam calls/texts these days use fake caller/sender IDs anyway?
> It appears these companies have very poor anti abuse practices. When I contacted them for help they basically refused to reveal how my number was obtained
How would a service provider know how your customer obtained your number?
But you reporting that you're receiving unwanted calls/texts from one of their customers should of course still trigger some action on their side – if indeed that's the number that contacted you, per the above.
It does exist but you have to take the 5 minutes to fill out a form. You can find it at https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov and click “Phone issues”. I also suggest simultaneously reporting to the FTC via https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ and click “Report now”.
You can also forward spam text messages to 7726 in the US (goes to your cell phone carrier), which is very effective because the carriers have low tolerance for these issues and also train their own anti spam off this data.
I do submit a complaint for each instance. I’ve sent over a thousand now. Hopefully it’s useful data to someone.
My intent isn’t to reverse-spam the FCC though; the complaint form just only accepts one phone number at a time. Amusingly I’ve discovered that it’s possible to receive a higher volume of spam than the FCC’s rate limits allow reporting.
By looking up the carrier you can then find the right company to complain to via their reporting process, if they have one. And additionally you can file a report to the FTC and FCC that mentions them.
EDIT: The idea is that you complain to the company whose platform is sending you spam, the regulatory agencies at https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/ and https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/, your own cell phone carrier by forwarding text spam to 7726, and that will result in actions that hopefully will address that one situation but also collectively reduce spam for everyone. Without identifying which platform sent you the spam, you cannot know which company to go complain to (they usually have a reporting tool on their website). And you can name them in your complaints to the FCC and FTC.
FWIW, my previous company is on that list — they provide telephony services as part of a CRM product (making robocalls via the product would be very difficult, and very noticeable given the scale).
The only reason they are in the Robocall Mitigation database at all is because they briefly tried out a telephony provider years ago who required registering as part of their setup process.
They now use a vendor who handles robocall mitigation and registration in the database for them. Anecdotal, but it’s certainly possible that many companies on this list aren’t actually facilitating robocalls (though obviously, given the number of calls I get, many are).
That sounds.... Fine? I'm totally fine with some collateral damage in this space - the crm can surely contact out their telephony needs to someone who can actually keep up with the regulations.
I think this could be some collateral damage from negotiated rulemaking.
Seems to me that each time the FCC overhauls their (actually the US citizens') airwaves, there's always more people that want a piece than there were the previous time. Plus some of the same old big players want more. In a big way.
The high-powered operators have the strong lobbying efforts but this is a strict government agency and broadcasters do not always get their way. So they have to go into negotiations with flexible business models to build on what they already have, or for new ventures.
The only thing the FCC has to bargain with is the airwaves themselves.
So both sides make compromises until agreement is reached.
When the FCC will not budge, the business model must change.
Then the licensee comes back with a revised business model, giving up some lucrative plans in exchange for the FCC to be flexible also. If the FCC settles with good will after only giving in a small amount to the operators' ambitions, everything seems about as fair as it can be and things go forward with only a "slight change" to accommodate the "new normal".
All the FCC ever compromises is the airwaves themselves, even if it's only a little bit. It never goes the other way. Little by little the usefulness of the airwaves to the citizens is chipped away at in favor of those who are more empowered than ever to use the airwaves against the citizens instead. And that's above and beyond the financial implications.
Not just the airwaves. When a recognized greedy operator (usually regulated) wants permission to blatantly rip off the ratepayers more than ever (very obvious in the fine print), any decent regulator catches it in the first draft and starts negotiating it away ASAP before the public finds out how bad it was really intended to be for them.
This bold-faced greed doesn't really slip past that many regulators, it's just too extreme to begin with.
So basically on behalf of the operators, the public representative waters down the proposal to something they think might have a chance for approval, without seeming too much like a complete public giveaway from the beginning.
And even then, when the idea is to get more money out of everybody all the time, and more often too, everybody understands that, plus it's one of the most common business models that doesn't take any acumen at all.
But that way there's always the significant fraction of the financially non-prosperous who could barely afford to participate already and would be devastated by any rate increase whatsoever.
Well that's who the compromises will made in the name of, so the cost increases for the protected group (for those relatively few poor citizens) can be held dramatically below maximum levels. It sure looks good on paper and can be pointed to as some real compromise.
As long as it is agreed that everyone else can be ripped of like never before, that will more than make up for it.
Only one side is negotiating in a way that can be taken to the bank no matter what.
I think at one time cell carriers were negotiating to rip off customers worse, and they couldn't get their way without letting "competitors" use their networks like never before.
Which gave rise to the reseller gold rush until that niche ended up being filled by a few major (usually decent legitimate) marketers getting most of the true competitive monthly consumer dollars. Resellers like Cricket or Metro without their own radio towers, giving customers a slightly better deal to use the same wireless networks owned by places like AT&T, T-Mobile, etc.
Some would say better than no regulation at all, but I think rule migration in this direction has allowed a well-crafted robocaller to get operational more often than a competitive new cellular reseller could ever do again.
And now there's hundreds if not thousands which have been added to the list right under everybody's nose for years.
The main reason I use a Google Pixel is because of its automated call screening feature. I crank it up to maximum sensitivity (screen all unknown numbers) and answer every call that gets through because it's always a human, and it's never a spam call. I'm surprised more smartphone companies haven't already implemented similar features.
The most important features of my Pixel phone are all the ways it prevents me from getting unwanted phone calls and text messages. It's pretty good at it.
We've allowed the entire telephone medium to get corrupted by scams. It has been ruined.
I don't get why other phones don't do this. Is it complicated? I think it just plays a recorded voice greeting. It's simpler than a answering machine. There is no fancy AI or anything like that.
It doesn't play any kind of greeter. Seems to be an online database of spam numbers, I receive calls marked as Spam with a big red exclamation mark. it's not as simple as blocking any calls that aren't already contacts. I could never use that professionally.
I had a huuuuuuuuuuge increase the past couple months (10-20 a day). Almost all medicare fraud scams. They seem to be tapering down a bit (2-5 a day). It's interesting, because they have all my info (where I live, my full name, etc.), but somehow not my age? Because if they knew my real age, they shouldn't be calling me for medicare fraud scams... I wonder if maybe what's happening is that the people selling leads lists for scammers are willfully omitting age information, so they can charge more for a larger list which is not obviously 50%+ garbage scam leads for medicare fraud.
I also had an uptick in text spam (used to be very rare until maybe 9 months ago, then it became about 1-2 a day, now it's back down to just a few a week).
I thought my girlfriend had abandoned me. My most frequent phone call by far was from a nice sounding recorded lady informing me that the extended warranty I never bought on a car that I never owned was in danger of expiring and this was my last chance to renew it. Ever. She would sometimes call me three times per day with that message but I haven't heard from her in months. I was afraid that my last chance had come and gone, or that she is no longer that into me. But it's just the FCC coming between us.
I get very little phone or SMS spam. All SMS spam gets replied to with "STOP", which, for most of the SMS services, is a strike against the spammer. I've been on the Do Not Call list since it started.
Email spam is repetitive enough that the usual Thunderbird filters work.
If a spam email has an unsubscribe link, I click on that and add the sender to the block list. If it doesn't have an unsubscribe link, I try to find out which service sent it and send them a notice of a CAN-SPAM law violation. The usual suspects (Mailchump, SpamGrid, etc.) do terminate accounts for that, to prevent being blocked themselves.
I've started to get spam via iMessage lately which I assume avoids most automated scrutiny that may apply to bulk SMS. Usually in the form of "your UPS/USPS package address needs to be verified" or something.
My iMessage is configured to send read receipts, so I quickly bounce the setting before opening the message to click the "Report Junk" link (maybe it's pointless). It would be nice to mark things as spam/junk without having to open them, perhaps I will just delete them since iMessage has been a malware vector in the past.
Could you share some advice on finding the service if they're missing an unsubscribe link? I have been reporting these kinds of emails to their domain registrars, but if I can do more I would like to.
I haven't had a junk call since 2023 (aside from political polling) but I receive a fake usps text from international numbers pretty much daily.
google's messages app is pretty good at corralling them into a spam folder but I do peep in there every now and then. I hope that whatever provider is allowing these gets disconnected.
I've been getting a ton of those USPS and Amazon shipping and return related phishing texts. The first couple of times I genuinely looked at them but they always have bitly URLs and sometimes they have little thoughts at the end like "May the day ahead bring you peace and clarity, from USPS!" Which is so funny to me because it reveals a complete cultural unawareness of how American companies communicate.
About 7 weeks ago I picked up a new AT&T SIM to use for data backup while my fiber connection was out. Never placed _any_ calls and only 1 text to my current mobile number to capture the new number. I get 4-6 calls per day, most labelled "Spam Risk". This period included the last couple of weeks of the US election and the volume then was much higher from what I am guessing was robo-war-dialing election campaigns.
Even though I'm in an older generation and prefer voice over text I have adopted the habit of only picking up callers that I know I want to speak to.
The robocalls are more rare for sure. But there’s been a huge uptick in shitty recruiters calling me with lowball offers for shitty jobs. I’ve had to remove my phone number from my resumes and delist it from indeed and stuff but it doesn’t seem to be helping. I don’t know how they’re finding me and they refuse to tell me.
I still get regular spam calls and spam texts. Maybe half the texts are obvious scams (make $1000s a day from home reshipping stolen goods) and the other texts are conversation starters that shady telcos can explain away as plausibly harmless (but are likely to be the first step in deliberate pig butchering scams).
I get no calls anymore, but I attribute it to pruning where my contact info is distributed and using the spam filters available on call/text.
My father got (no hyperbole) 90 calls a day, consistently, until I realized why he wasn’t answering his phone. He had used zero of the tools that the cell service provider and smartphone OS made available to him. Additionally, he likes talking to people, so he wouldn’t be “mean” to tell callers/testers to take him off their list.
If it is that the ROI is just real unattractive for spam calls now... I wonder if the waves are just new people trying to spam for the first time. And taking a little bit of time to figure out that it's not profitable.
If so that's not great. Because there's probably an infinite supply of people ready to waste their money trying get-rich-quick crap.
That's definitely true. I answer each one that I can to get a Guage on their business model and then make fun of them for how much they spent on my lead.
I think they are all different and resell to eachother because they keep calling no matter how horribly I've trolled them day after day.
Most other scams never call back after my trolling.
I'm wondering if the Medicare calls are the "setup your own turnkey business" flavor of the day.
I haven't had to handle any scam calls or texts since I switched to Android. I had no idea the feature was so effective. They should advertise it more.
I almost never get spam calls yet I started to receive them almost daily preceding and after the election. Fortunately iOS is great at filtering them. I'd just like a feature to not see them at all, they don't deserve a single missed call notification or unread flag on my device.
Exponential increase over the past decade. Currently I get 5-10 calls per day. I'll get the same robocall from the same LA phone number (I've never lived anywhere near LA) three times a day for a month advertising roof repair or some shit like that (I don't own a home).
I apologize for the commercial plug, but when I switched off of CenturyLink and onto Ooma last year my robo / spam calls went way down. Part of that is that they have some filtering options, part of that is that I believe they provide telemetry to something akin to NoMoRobo.
I may be atypical because I started a company and unfortunately used my personal cell is several places which got into sales databases. And made a political donation.
For me, it got so bad (multiple calls per day) I've stopped answering anything that isn't in my contacts already.
I think it must vary a lot between numbers. My girlfriend gets a huge amount of spam calls. I get almost none, and we're on the same network. I do get a ton of spam texts though.
I still get multiple a day. Have had multiple a day for months (maybe years? My call log doesn’t go back far enough to know for sure).
I can’t block them because they are different numbers every time, so I have all unknown incoming calls set to go straight to voicemail.
I don’t even know what they are calling for. If I ever try to answer there is only silence on the line. But I haven’t even done that in months- hoping the calls would eventually stop. (They haven’t)
One infuriating thing is that there is some sort of “verified” checkmark in my call log for some numbers? Or maybe not verified, but “valid number?” Why are they even allowing non-verified calls through? It wouldn’t stop the problem, as 1/4 of my spam calls have the icon anyway. But it would help, surely.
I guess, it's a remote spam farm. The machine calls you, and when you answer, it calls a remote spammer who works from home, so it can take them a while to answer. I guess, it's a clean comfy job: they work from home even without profession or education, maybe even subscribed to several spam farms.
I've not been asked about my car's extended warranty for months now.
I think the FCC finally shutting down just one or two blatant bad actors made a massive difference in robocalls. It just took them months (years?) to do it.
WCB notified each Company on March 29, 2024, that its certification was noncompliant with section 64.6305 because the Company had failed to submit an updated RMD certification and updated robocall mitigation plan by the February 26, 2024 deadline. WCB's notification informed each Company that it must submit an updated certification and updated robocall mitigation plan in the Robocall Mitigation Database by Monday, April 29, 2024. After this second deadline, the Companies still had not updated their RMD certifications and robocall mitigation plans with the required information; as a result, WCB referred each Company to the Bureau to initiate removal proceedings.
2,411 companies have been deficient since February. The FCC sent them a strongly worded letter in March, giving then a new deadline in April. Roughly seven months later, the FCC is finally starting enforcement procedures.
> The FCC sent them a strongly worded letter in March, giving then a new deadline in April. Roughly seven months later, the FCC is finally starting enforcement procedures.
To me, they’re trying to avoid any and all accusations that they’re moving unfairly quickly or terminating access without appropriate consideration if people missed the notice or needed more time to respond.
Pretty sure most Americans would support the FCC taking swift retributive action the very first day it was legal. These companies didn't just accidentally miss the notice. They have been active in profiting off of fraud for years and know exactly what they are doing.
That's generally how regulations work. Which means they're always getting screamed at from two sides: one who thinks they're going too slowly, and the other who thinks they're abusive for doing anything at all.
Readit News
Aha, the list was linked from the original URL, but dang unfortunately changed it to the plain text news release https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-408083A1.txt which doesn't link to the list. The original URL was https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-could-block-over-2400-provi..., which links to https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-24-1235A1.pdf, which lists the providers that will be shut down. And I'm happy to see that my SIP provider isn't on it.
(source: wikipedia and I worked in a small segment of the mobile network operator market for a short while)
I have some questions 1) are these telcos effectively pass-thru operators for actual spammers ? in other words, just a paper entity working with 1-2 customers ?
2) Do these VOIP providers act as resellers for the big telcos ? If yes, how does the telco contracting/onboarding fail so hard at screening for bad actors as potential customers (is there a law like KYC for them at all ?)
3) Finally, once onboarded don't the big telcos have some incentive to boot bad actors from their busy networks ?
They are created/supported by the robocallers.
I feel like there is a shadow cartel where all telcos agree to suck as much as possible so there's no real incentive to switch. Also aggregators love re-bills where you pay them for another provider's invoice but they can't do anything service-wise on it.
At my work (in charge of 140 Windows laptops/iPhones) the only way T-Mobile would give me a deal on 30 new iPhones was by selling me 50 new SIMs for lines I told them I absolutely didn't need. I'm turning those off now. Don't even get me started on Granite or Telepacific, each of which make Comcast and AT&T look like shining examples of greatness.
For a long time the area was serviced by AT&T, who probably started with phone lines and then progressed over time to dial up and then more modern cable / broadband. They probably bundled in home phone service for many years.
When the local ISP built out all their gigabit fiber infrastructure they probably felt they had to offer some kind of phone service to compete, and went with VOIP since they weren't going to build out a whole telephone network infrastructure. I'd bet most people don't use it, but they need to offer it to be viable for certain older customers that don't want to give up their home phones.
I briefly set up a home phone on the provided VOIP, just for fun and nostalgia, but it was pretty annoying with sometimes getting disconnected and needing a manual power cycle to reconnect so I stopped using it.
However having said that, I'm not sure it will keep working if the original provider goes bust. If it's the same as in the UK, under the hood the implementation requires the original owner of the number range to do forwarding. So it's worth checking if the owner of the range of numbers containing your number - often a different company - is on the list
(Edited to add) Actually it looks like the US has a centralised implementation: https://10xpeople.com/blog/switching-carriers-and-retaining-...
So perhaps inbound calls and inbound texts will be fine?
To me the whole system is archaic - i know gen z would never ever take a call from someone they don't know, or even call each other - it's simply not something you do - it would be like reading your spam mails.
And i'm coming to the same conclusion, answering random people is naive.
Practically we need something new though.
So the public phone system now supports it, but the problem is that not all providers support it yet, which fundamentally weakens the system. Of course, you can’t just add a new “protocol version” to an over-100 year old phone system with zero time to do a migration.*
But now that it’s been a few years, we are reaching a point where, at least for the US, the FCC wants to ban any provider who hasn’t added support.
*simplification
End to end authenticated calls is the ideal state, but I don't think we're fully there yet.
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Which is why people who pick up are great targets for whatever garbage is being peddled.
It's sad there really isn't much you can do about it. I tried do-not-call lists, answering and telling them to stop calling me, reporting them - all was apparently a waste of time.
The last "Microsoft" support call was years ago.
That's your answer right there. Finland is a small country with a very niche language of just about 5M people - it's too expensive to teach people Finnish good enough to convincingly scam off the elderly, not enough marks to return that investment, and you need a sizable population of poor and desperate/dumb people to act unknowingly as money mules.
In contrast, for English language scams, you got 340 million Americans, 68 million Brits and dozens if not hundreds of millions of people speaking primarily English in former colonies (India, Australia) that are potential marks. And to make it better for Indian scammers, people there are already used to Indian call center accents so their alarm bells don't go off immediately.
For German language scams, it's 84M in Germany, 9M in Austria and 4.4 million German speakers in Switzerland. For us, it's mostly scams based in Turkey, because there are a lot of Turks who learn German because they have relatives here or their parents had a stint in the 60s-90s.
Just read [1] that our local telecom authorities (NKOM) report good progress when it comes to preventing people from abusing Norwegian telephone numbers to spam/scam Norwegians.
[1]: https://www.tek.no/nyheter/nyhet/i/jQgEl0/nytt-digitalt-skjo...
French link: https://www.fftelecoms.org/nos-travaux-et-champs-dactions/ca...
Unfortunately some businesses have started marking them as spam because they don't like not having the direct personal email of each user
After the FB leak, I got a maybe 6-8 spam calls over the next month, and that was it again. It’s maybe 1-2 per year, and they are easy to recognize because they call from different countries.
I thought it was maybe Germany having stricter regulations, but people on Reddits /r/de do complain about spam calls, so no idea.
On this front, the Bundesnetzagentur (https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Vportal/TK/Aerger/start....) does its job quite well, for decades at this point.
Whenever I get a temporary number for the US I get spam SMS and calls.
They’re almost all AI calls now. The AI’s force a specific progression, are rude, and will argue with you. Some are programmed to claim to be human. It’s usually the same AI’s selling the same products connecting me to the same telemarketers. Some know my voice.
I can’t stand robocalls because nothing good comes from it either way. I don’t get to encourage new people. Their sales hurt by contacting the same people for stuff they’ve already been disqualified for. If I heard new offerings, I might buy or donate. For example, one was St. Jude’s reminder which I responded to on their web site.
Others are taking action. There’s regulatory penalties for repeated calls, calls outside a certain time, etc. You need to be on the do not call list to be sure. You can send the companies a cease and desist or a lawsuit in small claims under the TCPA. There’s law firms semi-automating that, too. If in the U.S., use that if they keep harassing you.
In Singapore, they've enacted SMS identifiers and you've got to register your company to send SMSes via shorthand.
Looks like we'll want to do the same to general phone numbers. If I knew my bank or a government office was calling me I'd happily answer.
But 99% of the time it's robo callers claiming to be the bank hahaha sigh.
I suspect folks in Gen Z are also less concerned with calls from medical/emergency/etc. services. That said, habits have certainly shifted. With very few exceptions, I'm not going to make a personal call out of the blue at this point.
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On the flip side, it only took me a few days to fix my friend's business domain so they could send emails to Gmail users.
All of this has happened before, and it will happen again.
Any new media, any form of communications we invent, develops this cancer as it grows into mainstream awareness. The more people a new tool can reach, the more rewarding it becomes to marketers and salesmen, who all flock to it - and as they do, they accelerate the growth of the medium while also displacing and degrading the intended/legitimate usages of it. Soon enough, the medium turns into barren wasteland full of threats to users' sanity and wallets. Only once it goes so bad that people stop using the medium, and/or find a better alternative, do things get better - the cancer dies off as its nourishment supply, i.e. the audience, goes elsewhere. But the disease follows them there. And, if didn't inflict terminal damage to the old medium, chances are that old medium will experience a second spring[1], albeit in a much more diminished shape, becoming a niche hobby or internal technical tool[1].
Advertising is what destroyed AM/FM radio (remains a niche). It's what destroyed outdoor information displays (now existing only to show ads). It's what denies us beautiful vistas (all obstructed by billboards). It's what killed OTA TV, then cable TV[2]. It's what killed e-mail[3]. It's what killed the phone system, and it's what will kill any new thing we move to.
This problem will not go away until we start treating the actual disease - advertising. And by treating I mean the equivalent of radiation therapy[4]; anything else, anything narrowly targeted, leaves space for the disease to come back with extra force - the line between "outright scam" and "legitimate communication" is fuzzy, and salesmen and marketers are very creative at blurring it further.
And no, adding crypto (the legitimate kind) to the mix - authentication protocols, encrypted handshakes, whatnot - will not help, for the same reason your immune system isn't of much help against real cancer either. Sure, it'll get harder for a random Joe the Scammer to do their fly-by-night salesmanship, but advertisers in general can afford to implement all the schemes marking them as AAA tier 1 legitimate communication.
After all, if you look at the web, who's actually pushing most of the security stuff? Unsurprisingly, biggest players in adtech. Improving the medium's immune system is in their interest - they're still invisible to it, and getting rid of the most obnoxious scams secures their own ability to feed on all of us.
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[0] - Well, kinda. It also includes bits of activities classified under "sales" and "marketing". I think the closest term encompassing them all might be "marketing communications", but "advertising" as understood by regular people covers most of it.
[1] - In rare cases, it may turn into a kind of "zombie mode", a blob of glowing radioactive mutated cancer, able to live out of background cosmic radiation, or such. I mean, how else can you describe the Fax system? You plug it in, wait a moment or three, and suddenly it starts spitting out ads!
[2] - The prime example why paying doesn't protect you from the disease. Once medium contracts advertising, the option to "pay instead of seeing ads" quickly turns into "pay and see ads anyway", and then "fuck you, pay more and see even more ads".
[3] - No, spam filter only catches the worst of it. "Legitimate" advertising still fills most of everyone's inboxes, which is a big reason why people flock to closed, gate-kept alternatives.
[4] - Or nuking it from orbit. Pick your own favorite exaggerated metaphor; it's the only way to be sure.
I don't think it's a generation thing, I think it's that what we generally consider normal has changed, but that some people got left behind in the old normal.
Isn't that the definition of a "generational thing"?
Now I have to think every time, is this someone I have to text first? Or do they consider texting then calling redundant? Anyhow, I think both are important communication techniques, adults should be able to do remote direct verbal and async written.
Delivery Drivers/taxis use their own phones to tell you if their arrival times will change.
Medical calls can come from personal phones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking#2600_hertz
(ref: https://xkcd.com/1053/)
> It appears these companies have very poor anti abuse practices. When I contacted them for help they basically refused to reveal how my number was obtained
How would a service provider know how your customer obtained your number?
But you reporting that you're receiving unwanted calls/texts from one of their customers should of course still trigger some action on their side – if indeed that's the number that contacted you, per the above.
You can also forward spam text messages to 7726 in the US (goes to your cell phone carrier), which is very effective because the carriers have low tolerance for these issues and also train their own anti spam off this data.
My intent isn’t to reverse-spam the FCC though; the complaint form just only accepts one phone number at a time. Amusingly I’ve discovered that it’s possible to receive a higher volume of spam than the FCC’s rate limits allow reporting.
https://freecarrierlookup.com/
https://www.carrierlookup.com/
https://www.ipqualityscore.com/free-carrier-lookup
By looking up the carrier you can then find the right company to complain to via their reporting process, if they have one. And additionally you can file a report to the FTC and FCC that mentions them.
EDIT: The idea is that you complain to the company whose platform is sending you spam, the regulatory agencies at https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/ and https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/, your own cell phone carrier by forwarding text spam to 7726, and that will result in actions that hopefully will address that one situation but also collectively reduce spam for everyone. Without identifying which platform sent you the spam, you cannot know which company to go complain to (they usually have a reporting tool on their website). And you can name them in your complaints to the FCC and FTC.
Yep, I get spam from "Onvoy, LLC" which is a Sinch company. I don't see either on this list and I've filed FCC complaints.
The only reason they are in the Robocall Mitigation database at all is because they briefly tried out a telephony provider years ago who required registering as part of their setup process.
They now use a vendor who handles robocall mitigation and registration in the database for them. Anecdotal, but it’s certainly possible that many companies on this list aren’t actually facilitating robocalls (though obviously, given the number of calls I get, many are).
This is a dangerous path to follow.
Seems to me that each time the FCC overhauls their (actually the US citizens') airwaves, there's always more people that want a piece than there were the previous time. Plus some of the same old big players want more. In a big way.
The high-powered operators have the strong lobbying efforts but this is a strict government agency and broadcasters do not always get their way. So they have to go into negotiations with flexible business models to build on what they already have, or for new ventures.
The only thing the FCC has to bargain with is the airwaves themselves.
So both sides make compromises until agreement is reached.
When the FCC will not budge, the business model must change.
Then the licensee comes back with a revised business model, giving up some lucrative plans in exchange for the FCC to be flexible also. If the FCC settles with good will after only giving in a small amount to the operators' ambitions, everything seems about as fair as it can be and things go forward with only a "slight change" to accommodate the "new normal".
All the FCC ever compromises is the airwaves themselves, even if it's only a little bit. It never goes the other way. Little by little the usefulness of the airwaves to the citizens is chipped away at in favor of those who are more empowered than ever to use the airwaves against the citizens instead. And that's above and beyond the financial implications.
Not just the airwaves. When a recognized greedy operator (usually regulated) wants permission to blatantly rip off the ratepayers more than ever (very obvious in the fine print), any decent regulator catches it in the first draft and starts negotiating it away ASAP before the public finds out how bad it was really intended to be for them.
This bold-faced greed doesn't really slip past that many regulators, it's just too extreme to begin with.
So basically on behalf of the operators, the public representative waters down the proposal to something they think might have a chance for approval, without seeming too much like a complete public giveaway from the beginning.
And even then, when the idea is to get more money out of everybody all the time, and more often too, everybody understands that, plus it's one of the most common business models that doesn't take any acumen at all.
But that way there's always the significant fraction of the financially non-prosperous who could barely afford to participate already and would be devastated by any rate increase whatsoever.
Well that's who the compromises will made in the name of, so the cost increases for the protected group (for those relatively few poor citizens) can be held dramatically below maximum levels. It sure looks good on paper and can be pointed to as some real compromise.
As long as it is agreed that everyone else can be ripped of like never before, that will more than make up for it.
Only one side is negotiating in a way that can be taken to the bank no matter what.
I think at one time cell carriers were negotiating to rip off customers worse, and they couldn't get their way without letting "competitors" use their networks like never before.
Which gave rise to the reseller gold rush until that niche ended up being filled by a few major (usually decent legitimate) marketers getting most of the true competitive monthly consumer dollars. Resellers like Cricket or Metro without their own radio towers, giving customers a slightly better deal to use the same wireless networks owned by places like AT&T, T-Mobile, etc.
Some would say better than no regulation at all, but I think rule migration in this direction has allowed a well-crafted robocaller to get operational more often than a competitive new cellular reseller could ever do again.
And now there's hundreds if not thousands which have been added to the list right under everybody's nose for years.
Who knew?
We've allowed the entire telephone medium to get corrupted by scams. It has been ruined.
I wasn't aware Google didn't extend the service to other phones, I wonder why that is? It can't be a hardware specific feature.
It is.
Is that what everybody else is seeing? That maybe Stir/Shaken is actually starting to work?
I guess it could just be that generational social change... where more people just don't take phone calls. So the ROI for spam calls has reduced...
I also had an uptick in text spam (used to be very rare until maybe 9 months ago, then it became about 1-2 a day, now it's back down to just a few a week).
Email spam is repetitive enough that the usual Thunderbird filters work. If a spam email has an unsubscribe link, I click on that and add the sender to the block list. If it doesn't have an unsubscribe link, I try to find out which service sent it and send them a notice of a CAN-SPAM law violation. The usual suspects (Mailchump, SpamGrid, etc.) do terminate accounts for that, to prevent being blocked themselves.
Huh, didn’t know that. I assumed that it was nothing more than baiting a response, verifying that the phone number is a hit.
My iMessage is configured to send read receipts, so I quickly bounce the setting before opening the message to click the "Report Junk" link (maybe it's pointless). It would be nice to mark things as spam/junk without having to open them, perhaps I will just delete them since iMessage has been a malware vector in the past.
Citation needed.
All the vendors we use have STOP functionality baked in as it’s the correct way to ensure we can unsubscribe folk.
Even the FCC[1] seems to agree.
[1] - https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-24-24A1.pdf?bcs-...
My favorite spam call was someone wanting to make a cash offer on the Ohio State University building that my office is in.
google's messages app is pretty good at corralling them into a spam folder but I do peep in there every now and then. I hope that whatever provider is allowing these gets disconnected.
Even though I'm in an older generation and prefer voice over text I have adopted the habit of only picking up callers that I know I want to speak to.
I get no calls anymore, but I attribute it to pruning where my contact info is distributed and using the spam filters available on call/text.
My father got (no hyperbole) 90 calls a day, consistently, until I realized why he wasn’t answering his phone. He had used zero of the tools that the cell service provider and smartphone OS made available to him. Additionally, he likes talking to people, so he wouldn’t be “mean” to tell callers/testers to take him off their list.
If so that's not great. Because there's probably an infinite supply of people ready to waste their money trying get-rich-quick crap.
I have a business line, and pretty much every call to it is spam.
The spoofed calls have picked up again. It looks like STIR/SHAKEN means squat.
I think they are all different and resell to eachother because they keep calling no matter how horribly I've trolled them day after day.
Most other scams never call back after my trolling.
I'm wondering if the Medicare calls are the "setup your own turnkey business" flavor of the day.
For me, it got so bad (multiple calls per day) I've stopped answering anything that isn't in my contacts already.
Isn’t that what everyone does? Or is it just a millennial thing…
I can’t block them because they are different numbers every time, so I have all unknown incoming calls set to go straight to voicemail.
I don’t even know what they are calling for. If I ever try to answer there is only silence on the line. But I haven’t even done that in months- hoping the calls would eventually stop. (They haven’t)
One infuriating thing is that there is some sort of “verified” checkmark in my call log for some numbers? Or maybe not verified, but “valid number?” Why are they even allowing non-verified calls through? It wouldn’t stop the problem, as 1/4 of my spam calls have the icon anyway. But it would help, surely.
I guess, it's a remote spam farm. The machine calls you, and when you answer, it calls a remote spammer who works from home, so it can take them a while to answer. I guess, it's a clean comfy job: they work from home even without profession or education, maybe even subscribed to several spam farms.
I think the FCC finally shutting down just one or two blatant bad actors made a massive difference in robocalls. It just took them months (years?) to do it.
WCB notified each Company on March 29, 2024, that its certification was noncompliant with section 64.6305 because the Company had failed to submit an updated RMD certification and updated robocall mitigation plan by the February 26, 2024 deadline. WCB's notification informed each Company that it must submit an updated certification and updated robocall mitigation plan in the Robocall Mitigation Database by Monday, April 29, 2024. After this second deadline, the Companies still had not updated their RMD certifications and robocall mitigation plans with the required information; as a result, WCB referred each Company to the Bureau to initiate removal proceedings.
2,411 companies have been deficient since February. The FCC sent them a strongly worded letter in March, giving then a new deadline in April. Roughly seven months later, the FCC is finally starting enforcement procedures.
To me, they’re trying to avoid any and all accusations that they’re moving unfairly quickly or terminating access without appropriate consideration if people missed the notice or needed more time to respond.