Why Phone Fraud Starts with a Silent Call | Hacker News Reader

Why Phone Fraud Starts with a Silent Call

npr.org

69 pointsjoe515055 comments

Everyone should let the robocalls play from start to finish, then press 1 (or whatever) to talk to a live operator. Lie to the operator. Take up as much time as possible, say "ummmm" a lot, ask for the operator's name, insist that you be called "Ed" or something. Take some time to "fumble" for your "credit card". I keep an expired gift card in my wallet to give out to fraudsters. Express "disbelief" when your account doesn't show up at "CitiBank" or whatever. If you have some knowledge of credit card number formats, give out a scrambled card number. I usually end up the call with a few anglo-saxon synonyms for the masculine organ of primogeniture, I reccommend you develop your own abuse technique.

If enough people do this to fraudsters, and the occasional real credit card or bank person, then things will change.

I do a milder version of this: I press the buttons, mute my mic, and leave the phone on the desk. Less work for me, but still costs them a little bit in terms of connecting to the phone of a real person who goes through their intro-spiel.

Man do I hate robocalls. Every few days now I get these, "Since you are a valuable customer of [insert large consumer company here], we would like to reward you with [cash/vacation/whatever]. Please press 1 to accept." So many calls. Wishing for them to get shut down seems overly optimistic, so I hope they just get better at recognizing people who will never fall for their scam and stop wasting resources on those numbers...

(Seriously though, I feel for the real victims, and obviously having your savings disappear is infinitely worse than being annoyed by scam calls every few days. Still annoying though.)

This article did not mention spoofed caller id, which is really scary and annoying. Normally I do not pick calls from numbers I do not recognize. With calller id spoofing, the fraudsters are able to show a phone number that is very similar to mine : the first 6 digits are identical to my landline ; this fools me into believing it is a neighbor or my kid' friends that is calling and I end up picking up the phone.

It's not just fraudsters. Until recently, I was a reasonably high-up IT leader at a big corporation and I probably received 3-5 cold calls per day from vendors and other service providers. By the past 12 months, almost all of them spoofed my local area code -- this is what finally put me over the top. I no longer answer calls from numbers I don't recognize unless I am expecting one.

In Australia that's flat out illegal. You must present a number, and that number has to be connected to your business so that the person receiving the call can call back.

Spoofing caller ID for financial gain is illegal in the US, too, with a $10K per violation fine. But having worked in wholesale telecom a bit, no one actually cares, because no one follows up.

When you complain to your service provider, what happens is the vendor will say to the carrier sending traffic "hey calls from this number are getting us complaints, please shut it off". The call traffic just moves around or changes number. There will be several layers of resellers involved, so it's not like the resellers are being intentionally malicious and generating bad traffic, they're just relaying the calls for their customer and so on.

No one actually wants to investigate, so getting calls from a certain number to stop is usually enough to please everyone. If the FCC wanted to, they could kill this stuff in a week just by adding stronger liability rules and making carriers vet their traffic. If resellers had even a $5000 fine liability for sending bad traffic, they'd pretty quickly figure out a way to limit their exposure. But without real pressure, the FCC is happy to let things stay as they are.

That's very interesting. Why is the FTC happy to let people get scammed and annoyed, and let scammers reduce the utility of the phone system in general?

Is the FTC in on this rubbish? Are they getting payoffs? WTF?

My guess is the FCC asked carriers how to stop it and carriers said it was too hard. It's unlikely that the people the FCC talks to would say that fining them was a good idea.

Or they proposed a fine, then the big carriers said if there was any liability, they'd stop selling to smaller guys and the whole system would stop working.

I've been using numbers from Burner to sell stuff on Craigslist, and they actually let you select the area code of the number they assign you. Pretty neat, but it definitely demonstrates the meaninglessness of phone number digits today.

I got one that was my exact name and number showing up on caller ID, which should be unlisted. As in, my home phone appeared to be calling itself.

That one pissed me off enough to ask for a supervisor, which caused the guy to immediately hang up.

How hard would it be to add X.509 (or other PKI) capability to caller ID, where the certificates would be 100% managed by the carrier?

Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1 has a fantastic feature for weird numbers that immediately hang up. Mostly those are call centers, though, and not fraudsters, at least in my experience.

When you select the suspicious number from the call list you get a menu, on which you can block the number.

It's very straight forward and savers me a lot of having to deal with impertinent assholes.

That really helps when it's the same number trying to call you again and again (and for the record, all of my Android phones have had the same feature). Unfortunately, here in the UK it's my landline that gets called (which doesn't have that feature) and almost always from a withheld or international number, which means I can't block just that caller anyway.

I'm not sure about stock Android, but on Cyanogenmod you can block calls from unknown numbers (not present on your contact list) or even block using wildcards. Extremely useful feature for my spam phone.

What if a legitimate person, such as a friend, gets your number from someone else? What if you use that number for business (e.g. you're a freelancer), and you want to be able to receive calls from customers?

There's basically about a thousand scenarios where "block calls from unknown numbers" feature wouldn't work. I call it the "nuclear option" and just with nukes, the collateral damage just isn't worth it.

While immediately blocking all unknown numbers may well be excessive, I'd like a feature where all known good numbers (my "white list") go straight through, all known bad numbers (my "black list") don't even cause the phone to ring, and all other numbers go straight to voicemail. They'd be easy to review at my leisure for addition to my white or black list and the phone spammers would never again interrupt the peaceful enjoyment of my dinner.

I don't imply that this feature solves all the problems, but I know plenty of people (mostly attractive girls), that won't answer to unknown numbers on their personal phone anyway. Furthermore, there's log of blocked calls you can always check for repeated attemps and call back, or your hypothetical friend can send you sms to present himself.

I kind of feel like saying "don't use landlines then dummy!" I mean it's a bit glib, but in all seriousness, why would you use landlines these days for telephone calls? Maybe it's different in the UK, but certainly here in France even the most basic phone plans come with pretty much unlimited domestic calls making the low-tech problems associated with landline phones just not worth the hassle anymore.

For a lot of subscribers in the US, telephone is bundled with cable TV and internet packages. trying to purchase one or the other or both without the all-in-one bundle is usually more expensive.

Also, at least in my market, I've been seeing a lot of scaremongering ads about how cell phones aren't reliable in an emergency and don't alert LE to your location immediately like dialing 911 from a landline does. It's ironic when these ads are placed by the cable companies which generally use digital telephone products that are susceptible to outages and don't work when the power is out, just like cable.

Even if you save money by accepting a landline as part of a bundle, doesn't mean you have to plug a phone into the socket.

That's true, but I think most people will feel obligated to since they're paying for it anyway, and landline phones are cheap.

You should check your cable bundle again. Chances are, they're charging you at least $20 for that digital 'landline' service you don't really use.

I'm also curious since I've never had a landline. Maybe we did at some point because it was bundled with other subscriptions, but never had anything plugged into it. I'd just use my cell phone for every single call I make anyway, so I don't really see the point of having one.

Landline calls are generally much cheaper, especially if you go via a rerouter such as 18866. My wife frequently makes hour-long international calls for 2p or 4p per minute when the Vodafone charge on "pay monthly" is £1.50 per minute.

On my UK mobile, it costs 10x more to call my son in the next room than to call the USA.

Of course, it all depends on the mobile deal you have, who you call, and where they live....

Voice quality on mobile phones is crap. I can't believe you haven't noticed. Landline to landline calls are crystal clear. On cellphone calls I find myself often having to ask people to repeat themselves. I think this is one of the big reasons people tend to prefer SMS to voice on mobile phones.

I haven't noticed, because I've only used a landline a couple of times, years ago. I'm not having trouble understanding people during cell phone-to-cell phone or VoiP calls either, and I'm probably in the minority with this, but I prefer calling to texting. I can understand that people want to keep their landline connection if it's that much cheaper for international calls for example, but it never really occurred to me get one.

1. Somewhat higher quality. 2. Different legal status (police calls etc.). 3. Powered from a separate "battery", often will work even nothing else does.

I'd like to ditch my landline, and my internet is over cable rather than the landline, so there should be no inconvenience. However the pricing system (UK, Virgin Media) means that Internet+phone is almost the same as just Internet :/

We had a landline in college for the longest time for DSL, but cellphones were already ubiquitous then - we just never bothered hooking up the phone to it.

We could still call out in case of emergency, but it freed us from receiving calls.

(On the other hand, given how many people here don't pick up unknown numbers, calling anyone except emergency services from a previously unused landline would be useless...)

I know what you mean. Every time I try to cancel my Virgin Media land line, they offer me phone + internet for cheaper than just internet. And then over the term of the contract, the price seems to gradually go up and up :-( Still the best and fastest internet though.

> why would you use landlines these days for telephone calls

Because in areas that have relatively frequent natural disasters land lines will be more reliable and repaired faster then cell service.

Then there is also the reason that I don't have cellular signal in my house without wifi.

> Because in areas that have relatively frequent natural disasters land lines will be more reliable and repaired faster then cell service.

Other than losing power for extended periods, thereby affecting charging capability, how is this true? It seems like miles of physical wires are going to be more difficult to fix than towers.

Depends on the severity of the problem. Cut lines are easy to fix as compared to rebuilding a tower that's been knocked down due to bad weather.

Am I the only one who prefers voice quality on a landline?

For conversations longer than 1 minute it's just much easier on the ears, in my opinion.

VoLTE (Voice over LTE) and WiFi calling both sound spectacular, but they're still in the process of being rolled out and require both parties to opt-in ahead of time.

Beyond voice quality, a POTS landline (at least in the US) will keep running even when the local power grid is down. Unfortunately, phone lines and power lines share utility poles, so if there's physical damage your phone service will also be interrupted.

Where I used to live, the POTS lines were on separate poles from the power lines in a lot of areas, and the phone lines were far and away more robust than the power lines. During the winter, snow would routinely take out the power in huge areas, sometimes for two weeks or longer, but you could still use the phone if you had a basic trimline model (which everybody kept one around for these situations) into the jack.

I seem to remember that you can hear your own voice on a landline, so you can more comfortably regulate the volume. Talking on a cellphone is just randomly speaking and hoping the other person hear it right. I think this led to a lot of the shouting on cellphones in in the street or on the train that people used to do. Uncomfortable I agree.

No, you're not. I do too. Also, whatever noise cancellation, sampling or jitter that cell phones have makes it so that people talk over each other a significant number of times. Landlines don't have that, and I suspect that the analog "last mile" is the reason.

because they are part of the tv / phone / internet bundle which is cheaper than just two parts of the bundle alone

In my area (north of SF), 911 calls from cellular phones get routed to a call center on the other side of the bay from me (if I recall right). This means that response time for 911 calls from a cellular phone are about 20 minutes, whereas response time for land-line 911 calls is about 5-10 minutes, because my local services can see from the land line my address, and dispatch someone Right Away.

Cardiac Arrest gets significantly more deadly after 7 minutes (I think?), and every second counts. A cellular phone is great in an emergency, but consider using a land line whenever possible.

I have the same issue, but on my mobile. Same message every time "We've been trying to contact you regarding mis-sold PPI.." but different number.

Originally it was from a range of UK mobile numbers, but now it seems to all be foreign numbers so I guess the mobile operators picked up on it. Not really anyway to block it, but at least when it's an unknown foreign number I can be reasonably sure it's a scam and just reject the call.

You can block callers in recent versions of iOS as well, but I think the majority of people who are going to be subjected to these calls are getting them on their landlines. Blocking numbers at your phone service provider is never so simple.

never so simple - ha, what an understatement. I've called Verizon over the "Rachel from Cardholder Services" robocalls. The chummy customer "service" rep claimed he'd never heard of anyone with such problems. He was shocked, shocked I say! to learn that robocallers actually send different caller ID numbers, so it's useless to try to block them. This whole robocaller thing is dependent on a lot of different things, all of them due to sluggishness or callousness on the part of service providers and regulators.

I use Truecaller[1], so far it has worked great. They crowdsource their blocklist so almost all telemarketers are marked as SPAM on their first call. You can then choose to proceed and take the call or add it to your blocklist.

[1]https://www.truecaller.com/

It would be interesting if there was some audio-based exploit that could be used against the systems in question.

It would depend heavily on the nature of the software and the processing done, I realize. But if only one overly-clever person who wants an inordinate amount of praise and fame can manage it. . .

I think as telecom-as-a-service grows and facilitates further and further automation of this kind of thing, we may see the growth of phone call spam filtering the same way we have with email. Of course, telemarketing is nothing new, and so far nobody's really attempted anything like that to my knowledge.

What if any technologies exist for PSTN that are analogous to DKIM or SPF in email?

Regarding giving out PIN numbers. Banks should make a better effort at informing customers that no other human should ever know their PIN or internet banking password, not even the bank's staff. As soon as you tell anybody your PIN, that means you're being scammed.

Unfortunately, scanners have evolved, they will tell you same and will forward you to take automated system.

> Company researchers estimate 1 in every 2,200 calls is a fraud attempt.

This number does not pass the smell test for me. About 2 out of 3 landline calls that I receive are fraud attempts.

Maybe they're counting cell calls as well? I get maybe one call a month that I would classify as spam.

Also, do you get many calls on your landline, or is it more that you get six calls a month, four of which are spammy?

I get almost no legit calls to my cell phone (no land line). So I get percentage-wise a very high number of spam calls. My solution is too add the number to my contact list and mark that contact as silent ring. There's 33 numbers spread across 4 "scam" contacts (a contact can only have 10 numbers). Some of those numbers have called up to 10 times.

Where as if I check my "recent" call list there's been no more than 2 legit calls a month

Interesting; I wonder if there's a way to check which company currently owns those numbers.

Then again, I'm sure it's a totally legitimate (no sarcasm) company; hard to make sure that 0% of your customers are spammers.

> Also, do you get many calls on your landline, or is it more that you get six calls a month, four of which are spammy?

I'm 56 so I get more calls on my landline than on my cell. :-)

Maybe three calls a day, two on the landline, and of those the great majority of the ones during the day are spam (sometimes a dentist appmt-type call, but typically spam).

With the exception of my wife, 90%+ of calls I receive are fraud attempts.

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