AT&T, Apple, Google to work on 'robocall' crackdown
reuters.com
reuters.com
In fact, when nomo robo (www.nomorobo.com) came up with a pretty good solution (they won an FCC robo blocking contest ), the phone companies lobbied congress to shut it down. No only were they not helping, they were blocking progress from others.
In order to combat this, all tier-1 carriers now have ASR (answer ratio) and ACD (average call duration) minimums. In addition, if you have more than ~10% of your calls less than 6 seconds, you get an ADDITIONAL 1-2 cent per call surcharge. That's a lot of money given that my average cost of long distance is .17 cents ($0.0017) per minute.
It's the second tier carriers that is "blending" this traffic with good traffic in order to get the minimums then charge the telemarketers much higher costs per minute.
It depends on which provider, but the dialer penalties usually aren't that harsh. Regardless, everyone's cautious. And they'll mix right to the limit. Put on restrictions on how many times a number can call? They'll switch up numbers and keep the mix perfect.
It creates a huge opportunity. If the FCC was serious, they'd just start cracking down and push liability on down the line. Then no one would want to take the risk. It's high volume, so without huge deposits and guarantees, no one would touch it.
Conversely there are a number of large, more ethical SIP providers who will cut you off if your outbound traffic consistently falls into the same pattern with low ACD. "No dialer traffic" is turning up in Terms of Service agreements with greater frequency.
There is also the other side, do they lose any money from spam calls? If they don't or it's negligible, they aren't going to be open to spending money to block them.
I guess the article above describes the phone companies are working on it.
I'm not sure how important lists are.
You are correct in that I think they (telcos) lost. I believe the founder of nomrobo had to testify before congress. He emailed a petition to users a year or two ago, asking us to write supportive testimonials. I think he presented the testimonials to congress and won.
The telcom companies know who to bill, why do they have to develop any method to fight abuse ?
Being a suspicious person, I suspect it'll be a new feature to add to the bill.
I've ran companies doing 1B+ calls a week. Any time there's some sort of complaint from a customer or vendor, we just kick it down the line and say "please verify caller ID xxx is correct". We block it, everyone moves on. No one cares. I tried a few times to get the end user to file a complaint. Vendors and customers would just get annoyed; nothing happened.
Even in cases where an AG gets involved and sends out a subpeona, I've never seen anything happen. Hell, even on DHS investigations (like where callers are pretending to be IRS agents), nothing happens.
Until the FCC starts getting serious about it, that'll remain the status quo.
(Only time I've seen things actually happen is when the request is incidental to another investigation, like "terrorism" or drugs. Why the hell they fwd us any details about the suspect beats me. All over plaintext, too.)
(And did it on simple commodity stuff, including just a $5000 SQL Server box for accounting/recording.)
Individual telecom companies know who to bill, but "the telecom companies" don't have collective knowledge except by deliberate effort.
There's no incentive to expend that effort unless it's "a new feature to add to the bill," and all it takes to make that effort worthless is one carrier who refuses to play along.
What do you do when a company has a large set of numbers on a single trunk? Do you maintain a list of authorized CID source numbers? How do you enable 3rd parties to make calls on your behalf?
Why should that be possible? If anything the disadvantages of nuisance or even scamming obviously far outweigh the benefits.
We once had a customer that set their callerID name to "DEAD" to signal that the phone number was no longer in use. People thought they were issuing threads on their outbound calls.
I see how it's a hard problem to solve in 100% of cases, but I don't see why it's not solved for most of them. Carriers have their own interconnects, pricing, and contracts. I believe 99.99% of call spam can be solved in a few months by major telcos coming up with a definition of spam callers and updating contracts to say: if you route more than N such calls within M days, and don't report who you disconnected because of it, we're disconnecting you instead. Real small telcos would have to drop misbehaving lines immediately. Fake telcos selling services only to spammers could not continue to do business.
When dealing with end users, the FCC can get really hyper. I've had them call me at 8PM Eastern, on a Friday, to tell us to emergency port a customer or things like that.
If enough people do this it might result in some pressure. It might get them kicked off one provider and move to another. Maybe.
You can exploit this, get a number in an small area code where you know no one and do no business with. Then don't answer any calls with that area code. This is highly effective.
Google is using that info to black list those numbers, so you'd be contributing to the greater good...
I've used that feature on Google voice for years, until they decided drop it. 4yrs later they release this. let's count how long it take to go away again.
and fun fact, Google voice is the only Google product i pay to use from them
So time to move on to the next scheme.
Fake tech support calls from India to "remove viruses from your Windows machines" is popular now. It targets seniors and those who are not computer literate.
They called an acquaintance of ours she is in the 70's and she ended up paying 100s of dollars or so and probably got all the files and password stolen as well. That was before I knew what it was to warn her. She was convinced they helped her and she was talking to "Microsoft" all that time.
I think there are "waves" of it picking up. There was a time a few years ago where everybody and their dog was receiving a robocall about buying an extended vehicle warranty or Rachel from card services "just checking in".
Smaller telcos restrict the outbound callerID to only CallerIDs (DIDs) that you own. This would be very difficult to enforce for a wholesale carrier - where their customer is an aggregate of thousands of customers.
Billing in telcos is important and has all the details you need. This is either information of who placed the call (if they're your customer) or which carrier the call came from (if they aren't). The only problem right now is that there's no reason for responsible behaviour. As soon as carriers are forced/want to say "stop sending us spam calls, or we stop taking your traffic" to both customers and other carriers, this will get sorted.
But changing IDs is already illegal, so the FCC could decide to chase it down if enough people complain.
It's also genius, if we can automate transferring telemarketers to stuff like this, we'd be using technology against them, use up all their human paid time and make it unprofitable to spam call.
The issue is that nowadays, I rarely get spam from the same numbers multiple times. They just generate a new fake number if the first one didn't get a response.
I wish I could simply globally block international and unknown numbers unless on a whitelist. Every blocking solution I've seen works on individual caller IDs, which is obviously useless for witheld or spoofed calls. Sending to voicemail is a sort-of solution, but results in a lot of half scripts recorded - they must always start speaking the moment the answering message starts playing.
I've had my number since I was a teenager and don't want to stop using it but I've been seriously considering it lately because the calls feel like harassment. I don't get how they are able to do this and why something hasn't been done about it.
I'm really tempted to try that but I'm worried about missing important calls.
It would be neat if they simply let you block every number that's ever been reported. Sort of like a real time global blacklist.
i think most people are starting to realize that there really isn't any such thing as an important call from a number you don't recognize.
And because of privacy considerations, they are often reluctant to leave a detailed message.
This isn't because I can't resist picking up the phone. But checking for voicemail after the fact takes even more time and cycles. And I don't want to end up playing telephone tag if someone actually does need to reach me.
I recently got into a car accident. I occasionally get important calls from the involved insurance companies, on numbers I might not have seen before.
And never mind that even when I am expecting a call, I don't necessarily know the exact phone number beforehand.
There are such things as important calls from numbers you don't recognize.
In fact the particularly evil ones will probably do that. It makes sense say to put popular numbers there, as it would discourage people from black-listing.
The blacklist would have to somehow know that this is an indeed a good number (say the number of a local hospital) and not actually a spam number.
They send me physical mail addressed to resident. I called them to cancel it. They took my name and soon no more mail is going to resident. Its addressed to me personally.
I later call to cancel that mail. Soon, no more mail is going to me. Its going to resident again.
The FCC had to pass a memorandum (or something) earlier this year explicitly spelling out the AT&T had absolutely no grounds for their believe and was allowed to and SHOULD work on the issue.
As I understand there is an incentive model in place to encourage this type of traffic.
Carriers have to accept traffic from other carriers, even if they have not paid their CABS bill.
Right now, no one is paying anyone. That's why fair cross-carrier compensation and flat-rates are a big talk in the FCC instead of what's called "Tariff rates" which vary by carrier and by destination.
Freeconferencecall.com exists because of CABS and having very high tariff rates. They do NOT want lots of short duration calls. That doesn't help them at all.