Lobbyists Win Right to Bombard Student Borrowers with Robocalls

"Block robocalls, telemarketers and other spammers automatically with our Community Blacklist feature."

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flexaspect...

Yeah, they do this to any number that is listed on a business document ever. I ported my number to run through google voice, which catches only a few of them, and pretty much have stopped picking up most calls from unlisted numbers. It's sad.

The major problem with some of these issues is that if I understand it right, the phone system often isn't always aware of the source of the calls because they get routed through foreign gateways and voip and the number you see in the caller ID is spoofed and has no connection to anything.

The FCC is aware this is happening and these fall within its jurisdiction, but they're having trouble enforcing the rules.

The fact that congress is revoking the FCC's ability to enforce these rules for student loans is just bog standard corruption.

I never answer unrecognized numbers. I can't even remember the last time an unrecognized call was someone I actually wanted to talk to.

A database doesn't help you when the called ID is spoofed to a random number that has no connection to the person calling.

I've noticed the robocalls I get seem to have the same area code and prefix as my number and the last four digits appear to be random.

but you can't rely on the phone number reported by caller id - they're very spoofable.

There are quite a few Android apps out that crowdsource call blocklists. I have been using Truecaller[0] with good results thus far.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.truecaller

> It makes me want to not answer unrecognized numbers on my phone.

So don't? It's your phone, after all. Just let it go to VM.

I don't answer un-recognized calls, especially toll-free originators. I think it's entirely reasonable and they are always free to leave a voicemail.

>It makes me want to not answer unrecognized numbers on my phone.

Why would you ever answer unrecognized numbers?

Try nomorobo. They get you to set up simultaneous-ring with one of their numbers. For each incoming call, if it fails their reputation scoring, their system simply "picks up" immediately and plays a pre-recorded message. Your main number then doesn't receive the call (timing issues notwithstanding).

They have an interesting way of building the reputation database: in addition to receiving customer reports, they buy Twilio's "dirtiest" phone numbers, the ones getting so spammed they're unusable by other businesses. If you call ~3 dirty numbers, welcome to the dynamic block list.

I have a contact in my phone labelled "Spam" that lists 30 numbers and counting. Calls from those numbers go straight to voicemail and their texts are blocked. I'll gladly donate them to the database.

I do two things for this. One, I have a separate phone line that I largely ignore, and I give this as my main contact line for people or businesses that I have no dire need to talk to. Best Buy, for instance. If it's important, they'll leave a voicemail. This started as a land line, that was expensive but I needed DSL anyway (this was 10 years ago). It moved to a cell phone with basic service.

Fees sucked, so I started (shameless plug) Phone Janitor[1] to give me better filtering. This allows me to check voicemail anywhere, unlike my cell line (unless I sign up for their service) and just transferred it to my own company. Turns out this helps a lot of other folks with similar privacy desires. Control is a wonderful thing.

Ultimately it's really, really crappy, but the Telecoms and the FCC don't want to be too heavy handed in this, and advertisers are finding new ways of skirting the donotcall rules. They ruined SMS in this regard[2] as well, deliberately.

[1] - https://phonejanitor.com/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_spoofing

OR give up on phone numbers altogether and just use WhatsApp.

The mobile carriers lose.

I've started taking glee filling out the FCC form

https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us

Of course, most people can't do this for reasons similar to why Johnny can't Encrypt.

These recordings are pretty amazing. I've recently experienced an uptick in spam-call volume (despite being very cagey about who/what gets access to my real phone number), and I think this video just tipped the scales on whether or not I'll be setting up my own Asterix box this weekend. Thank you for this!

This really makes me curious as to how this works and how complicated it was to setup lol

How do you tell between telemarketers and legit cold calls? Maybe something like "if they say the word offer within the first minute, it's a telemarketer, keep them occupied"? Also, it's a bit dishonest to outright have the robot pretend to be the person, maybe they should say "Hello, I am Lenny, the phone secretary of so-and-so"? And once you pass the equivalent of a verbal CAPTCHA, you are allowed through?

It's almost like the best course of action for any of these communication systems is educating the user, and giving them the tools to do it themselves! Who would have thought?!

Same. I actually use Call Control for this exact purpose.

Email > Phone Calls any day of the week. Especially with strangers.

Bill collectors have been known to spoof caller ID with relatives' phone numbers. Yes, I know this is illegal, but it is still done.

The best approach is audio captcha where you have to enter a random 3 digit code to get the phone to ring. This throws off most call centers because, the part which makes the phone ring is automated. Once the line is answered, an agent is connected to the line.

If the collection agency does not use automated dialing, then DTMF passwords may be necessary. This is a pain for friends and family, but it can be a very effective filter.

Pretty much precisely this. Though my crap phone doesn't have a whitelist feature (it _does_ offer number blocking).

I'm headed toward likely having burner phones I use intermittently for convenience, and some digital service, preferably self-hosted, for other comms. If the telcos don't get a handle on phone spam, they're going to relegate themselves to utter irrelevance all the faster.

Burner dumbphone (with whitelist if at all possible), tablet + VOIP + text-to-voice messaging, etc., _not_ on mainstream commercial OS.

Seeing how 90% of my contacts are recruiters I don't know I'm not too worried about it.

I'm actually not all that concerned. Telemarketing has been going on for a very long time. That's what drove the do-not-call registry and related laws in the first place. I'm not saying what still exists (whether because of deliberate loopholes in the laws or simply breaking them) isn't annoying but it doesn't really seem to be getting worse either from personal experience or from the experience of others I speak with.

I get very few junk calls on my cell--though why there isn't a "report junk call" button I don't know. Home gets a steady enough stream to be annoying (2 or 3 a day) but they're easy enough to ignore if I don't recognize the caller ID.

Or everything goes to mutually authenticated encrypted VoIP with whitelists. Like Signal.

How about a constitutional amendment which states that a bill can only address 1 issue. Separate bills would be required for K street lobbyists to address their interests, and then they would have a tougher time getting these passed.

> You get elected on hopes and dreams, and propose a bill, but you are a freshman. The senior guy you ask to help you sponsor the bill which is only 10 pages long then says he will support you if you add an amendment that says X, even that amendment has nothing to do with the main bill, and he has been donated money or promised campaign support by $KSTREETGROUP. If you say no, you get derailed, the bill never leaves committee, and you have made an enemy. You agree, and then the floodgates are open for 10 other sitting house members to throw in their amendments too. Before you know it, your bill is 250 pages and they removed all your original text and it's no longer your bill. If you rock the boat, you make enemies and forever get shoved aside. Agree and support the bill you introduced, that is actually now bad legislation, and all those people say they will help you next time.

The alternative is that you're a freshman congressman (so are many of the rest—term limits!—and no-one could be called senior) so you have no idea WTF is going on, so one or both of 1) long-term staff you inherited from your predecessors—mind you, I'm not even sure such people exist under the current system, so this is hypothetical, or 2) lobbyists, who really are so helpful, telling you how to get things done and summarizing complicated bills for you, and won't you just do this one little thing for them? end up running the show.

One solution, (not that it would ever happen) , is to anonymize the bills. In order to submit a bill, you have to be a house member, but once you submit it your name is stripped off. everyone reviews it and either adds it to a larger bill or discards it. larger bills eventually make it up to group vote.

another deterrent would be a rule that every meeting between congressmen and lobbyist has to be recorded. So CSPAN can air what actually goes in at the negotiating table between these "lobbyists".

finally, if there were some kind of "citizens' lobby" that could influence these assholes the same way corporations do (even though this is how it was supposed to work all along). But the "citizens" are so divided on partisan and emotional issues they'd never agree to form a coalition and lobby on par with industry.

That sounds like it's not the bank, but some shady player that the bank sold your debt to for .01 on the dollar. If you want to settle the debt, do some research on these players so you don't just throw the money away without getting any credit for it on your credit report.

That really depends on the situation and the debt collector company in question. My phone is on the do-not-call list, and I have never defaulted on a debt. My phone number has also been mine for eight years now. Two years back, I was getting somewhere along the lines of ten-fifteen calls a day about a debt under a completely different name. They were all robocalls that didn't give the option to stop them contacting me, and repeated calls from me to their company, asking that they cease the harassment and that the person they're calling hasn't used that phone number for at least six years resulted in a lot of "Yeah, okay, we'll stop" only for the frustration and annoyance to continue.

In the end, I spent somewhere along the lines of three hours of my time in a single day to get in touch with a high-up enough person that could actually take action and stop the calls. This does not include the numerous previous times I called the company and asked my phone number to be removed from their list, or the amount of frustration the numerous daily calls caused.

From what I understand, debt collector agencies tend to be on the shadier side. Not saying there aren't companies that actually handle matters the way they're supposed to, I'm sure they are, but from what I've seen they're the minority.

There was even a case where an agency had decided that I had a debt (Amusingly, the amount there was $8.95) and went as far as contacting my grandmother in another country and threatening her that they'd take her house away if she didn't contact me and make me pay the debt I owed them.

I've also heard of stories where parents/relatives of friends were contacted and passively threatened with remarks like "We know where you live".

So no, free reign to make robocalls isn't a good thing in my opinion. If anything, companies that make those illegally/after being asked to cease should be getting punished instead.

> I understand that sometimes an old number or something might be called in error but that has be a pretty rare thing and something easy to deal with on the receiving end. > I think the best way to avoid robocalls from debt collectors is to not let your debt go into collections.

Your statement isn't true in many cases.

I've got two "debts" that debt collectors keep trying to collect. One for ~15 years and one for ~6 years. The reason for the quotes? Neither of these debts are mine.

I was a minor and someone at the hospital assigned something to the wrong patient. I hadn't gone into that hospital that entire year, the previous year, or the preceding year. Yet, they keep trying to collect from a 15 year old kid who only went to that hospital once when he was 11. I somehow doubt they forgot to bill my parents for 4 years. This is the date on the actual documentation, so its not like my parents ignored it for 4 years and I was unaware.

1) The hospital refused to admit fault and could provide 0 evidence I was actually there when it happened.

2) Years later it went to collections, and I was 17. They robocalled and threatened me with jail time and a bunch of other shit. I told them I could prove I wasn't even in the state of California [which was true, I was visiting family on the date I was supposedly at the Hospital ... on the other side of the country ]. Proof was provided.

3) They've since sold this debt several times, and this year, I still get some debt collector calling me. I call them up and point out I can still prove it was physically impossible that I was in the hospital on the date I supposedly incurred this debt.

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The "other debt" is a parking ticket on a car I can prove I haven't owned for years [ I have both insurance and DMV paperwork showing I sold the car years before this ticket happened ], in a city I've never been to, on a date I can prove I was [literally] a thousand miles away at a gas station within an hour of the date/time stamp on the ticket.

Guess what happened?

1) They sent mail to the wrong address [ literally 5+ years old ].

2) They falsely claimed I owned the car at the time and convinced the state tax board to hold my refund when I failed to respond to this "notification".

3) The man on the other end of the phone when I called was abusive, called me a liar, and insisted that I owned the car. He intentionally gave the wrong address verbally to mail documentation proof too. The information he gave didn't match their site at all. When he insisted he didn't get any of the mail I sent him after a couple of months and I must have "sent it to the wrong address", I moved on to the next step.

4) I had to get a lawyer and take the "debt collector" to court in order to get my money back + legal fees. The moment he was notified I filed, I got a phone call saying there was "No need. He found the clerical error and was correcting it." and cut a check for ~$4000 that I got about 48 hours later via overnight mail.

5) Despite the fact this asshole knew he was trying to collect from the wrong person at this point, guess what? He sold it some other schmuck who tried to pull the same shit a couple years later. The only difference was he couldn't get my tax refund hell and just resorted to calling me.

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Now, maybe, I just have exceptional bad luck and I'm just extremely hard to find. I doubt this somehow.

> But if that is the route they want to go the FCDPA clearly states that they can force the debt collector to cease communication for the most part and the avenues that remain open are via written mail.

Yeah, every time I do that, they sell it to another debt collector who then calls to "notify me about my debt". I get these same two calls every year.

Echoing others, you may not have any choice in this.

Back in 2007 Certegy had a terrible data breach, an employee, sysadmin or dbadmin, sold info on 3 million people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certegy#Consumer_information_c...).

Not all that long after that, pretty clearly based on information gained from Certegy or some other compromise of my most basic checking account information---but bizarrely, not necessarily my name? Something was very wrong in the set of info---a debt collector claimed I'd charged hundreds of dollars to on-line porn sites to my checking account.

Which of course is particularly bizarre, because if it was real, why hadn't they just debited my account in the first place?

So, no debt, but it went into collections, and they didn't give up for more than a year. Can't remember why they gave up, other than that they pretty clearly knew the case was weak, assuming the whole thing wasn't a scam to begin with.

"I get it in the sense that they didn't pay their bills and they've chosen denial as their plan for dealing with it but I don't get why anyone else would want to validate that kind of behavior."

Because debt collectors are assholes. They lie and harass not only the person in debt, but their friends and families. I support every measure to hamper them in doing business.

The "called in error" rate is not pretty rare. It's quite high in my experience. There are a number of reasons:

1) People who owe money often put fake phone numbers on forms so they can't be contacted. They will sometimes randomly choose your number.

2) Debt collectors don't believe you when you say, "There's nobody here by that name. You have the wrong number," because that's what people who owe them money try to say.

I had this happen to me when I moved into a new apartment and got a new phone number. I told them 3 or 4 times that the person they were looking for was not at this number. I even told them that I had recently moved and was just assigned the number. They literally said, "Yeah, right."

So I called the police. They filed a telephone harassment report for me. I then sent the report to the phone company who set up a tap for me. Whenever the debt collectors would call, I would wait until the call ended, dial a special number and it would figure out what number called me (even if they turned on caller-ID blocking), and note it in a file. After 3 or 4 times, they sent it to the police who contacted the debt collectors and told them to stop harassing me or they'd face criminal charges.

It shouldn't have to come to this for innocent people, but this is by no means an isolated or rare incident. Every person I know has had these types of calls, with differing amounts of success at getting rid of them.

>I understand that sometimes an old number or something might be called in error but that has be a pretty rare thing

I hope you're starting to get the impression that errors are not as rare as you believed they were this morning. I know I have received all manner of erroneous debt collection calls (looking for relatives, looking for people I've never heard of, etc).

> and something easy to deal with on the receiving end.

Obviously, it isn't.

> I think the best way to avoid robocalls from debt collectors is to not let your debt go into collections.

If anyone deserves to have their phone bill crammed, it's people who say things like that. I had mine crammed when I was in college & couldn't/wouldn't pay the several hundred dollars in extra charges; it followed me around for years.

BTW, if anyone is a Sprint or Verizon customer since 2010 and has had their bill crammed, there has been a huge fine, & websites set up to pay restitution.

https://www.fcc.gov/guides/cramming-unauthorized-misleading-...

Because once a debt has been turned over to a collections agency it is not in your interest to pay it.

The window of opportunity to not have a credit strike has closed. Paying the bill will not improve your credit. The counterparty has already written off the debt, if suing was a credible option they wouldn't have sold it to collections. They harass because it's their only recourse.

It's a mistake to communicate with collections regardless of the legitimacy of the debt.

> But if that is the route they want to go the FCDPA clearly states that they can force the debt collector to cease communication for the most part and the avenues that remain open are via written mail.

Most people aren't aware of the FDCPA and its not clear that debt collectors are all that compliant with it. In any case, the FDCPA only requires collectors to stop contact when they have received a written request from the debtor.

> I understand that sometimes an old number or something might be called in error but that has be a pretty rare thing and something easy to deal with on the receiving end.

Inaccurate numbers getting called (and not just "old numbers that were once valid for the debtor") isn't (AFAICT, from direct experience) a particularly rare thing, nor will debt collectors stop calling when they reach an inaccurate number (nor will they accept a request to stop calling at that number.)

> I think the best way to avoid robocalls from debt collectors is to not let your debt go into collections.

Sure, if by "your" you mean "no one who has ever been, either through intentional misrepresentation to avoid contact by debt collectors, or by past use, or for any other reason, had their account associated with your phone number".

I've been getting calls for 4 years from debt collectors for someone else. Not for my debt, but for someone else's debt and legal troubles. So when telling them to stop calling me hasn't worked, what can I do? It's 4 years now, and anyone calling for the old person at this point is being negligent.

Instead of a government for the People, the People, and of the People, it's actually a government for the Opulent Minority, by the Opulent Minority and of the Opulent Minority.

James Madison stated: "Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability."

Anyone can lobby and so groups who have similar interests raise funds to send people to speak to government officials about what they would like to see done by the government. It's pretty simple.