Nuisance call firm Keurboom hit with record fine | Hacker News Reader

Nuisance call firm Keurboom hit with record fine

bbc.com

I would love to see the FCC begin to pay attention to this garbage in the US. I get about 4x more spam calls than from humans I actually want to hear from on my cell. I no longer pick up any call I don't recognize, which has caused problems. I also am in on-call rotation for my day job, so I can't just turn the ringer off at night when "on".

And these assholes call constantly. I'm not at all a violent person, but meeting someone with a financial stake in one of these operations would seriously test me. I find them utterly enraging.

Same, pretty much all phone calls I get these days are spam. And yes, very frustrating to constantly get calls offering small business loans for my non existent company.

Can anything be done to combat this?

Only communicate inside a walled garden. Forgo public anything. For example, do all your communication in Facebook Messenger. It's not because Facebook Messenger is the best messenger ever, but instead, it is because there are so many hoops for the person to jump through ( for example getting accepted into your social network and meeting all the security requirements that are managed by Facebook for you - SSL, 2FA, etc ) that you end up with 100% signal and no noise.

I'm using Google Fi as my voice provider. It's not an awesome solution and requires a very specific phone, but I do get three things that really help with the spam calls:

* I can manage a list of spam and blocked callers online in addition to on the phone. This lets me move blocked call management off the phone and onto the carrier.

* I never have to answer my phone or listen to my voicemail: the transcripts have gotten to be very good, and appear relatively quickly after a call is received.

* Calls are flagged when I receive them, and probable spam calls are marked as such when the phone rings.

>I also am in on-call rotation for my day job, so I can't just turn the ringer off at night when "on".

Android has a Do Not Disturb mode which can filter calls which are in your contacts, if you know that you should generally get on-call calls from a few numbers.

Thanks for the suggestion. So does the IPhone, which I use. But due to particulars, that doesn't work for my situation.

I present to you, this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/smarter-living/stop-roboc... . The following excerpt was particularly interesting:

Download apps such as Truecaller, RoboKiller, Mr. Number, Nomorobo and Hiya, which will block the calls. YouMail will stop your phone from ringing with calls from suspected robocallers and deliver a message that your number is out of service.

Mr. Quilici said phone companies, such as T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T, also have tools to combat robocalls. They work by blocking calls from numbers known to be problematic. ... And then there is the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, which turns the tables on telemarketers. This program allows a customer to put the phone on mute and patch telemarketing calls to a robot, which understands speech patterns and inflections and works to keep the caller engaged.

The Jolly Roger solution looks delightful to me. It doesn't have an app as such but the solutions it offers are not bad and the price is good.

2-bit operation folds, fine unpaid. Director and his missus (1 share each) walk away unscathed.

> In October, the government announced plans to let the ICO fine company directors as well as their businesses.

Directors are personally liable for ICO fines as a result of PECR infringement.

At least, that was the plan, I'm not sure if this was enacted: http://www.wablegal.com/uk-directors-personally-liable-nuisa...

Nope, not enacted and now kicked into the long grass.

> In October, the government announced plans to let the ICO fine company directors as well as their businesses. "Making directors responsible will stop them avoiding fines by putting their company into liquidation," the ICO said.

Can't come soon enough!

Not necessarily;

> From Spring 2017, firm directors can each be fined up to £500,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office, if they are found to be in breach of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-clamps-down-on...

The magic of limited liability. It's the codified concept of privatizing profits and socializing losses.

It really is not

You think this is bad, this is nothing. The worst thing is when one of these call-bots hijacks your phone number as the source/caller ID. Then you get all random people calling you about a missed call. We had a high-value xyz-8888 business number several years back that had this happen. We had to abandon the number. I assume it was someone entering in a random source number that just happened to be ours.

ICO is a joke. £400k fine for 100million calls? That's probably way under what they paid to make the calls in the first place, so can just be considered a cost of business.

Until our government or phone companies fix this problem in the US, I don't see another way to make a difference other than answering the phone, getting put through to a human being, and wasting their time.

Have fun with it, don't give out any personal information, and slowly take your story into ridiculous territory until the person on the other end catches on that you are playing them and hangs up on you.

> answering the phone, getting put through to a human being, and wasting their time

Not sure if that is the best strategy. I started doing that a while back only to find I started getting even more calls from a lot of different companies. In my case, they were all credit, loan, and debt related offers. I even had one person tell me in a snarky tone that they will "keep me in the system".

Now I just hang up if its a robocall (opt out if possible) or if its a live person, bluntly tell them I am not interested and why. I now get less calls overall.

The FTC Do Not Call List exists ( donotcall.gov ), and threatens fines against violators. Problems with it (beyond the janky lowest bid government website), is that you have to report the violators phone number, and anymore these are spoofed.

Also, it feels like the FTC doesn't do anything. You never hear about enforcement actions.

For a while after the DNCL came out, calls stopped, but they've been ticking up recently. I keep getting calls selling me solar panels. When I asked how they got the number, they said, "we're calling every homeowner in California." Well, that's a violation.

You have to be careful what you say:

http://www.crimeonline.com/2017/04/04/can-you-hear-me-phone-...

And, anecdotally, I live in the Chicago area and have noticed a significant increase in this garbage the last couple of weeks.

I once had somebody splice a conversation they surreptitiously recorded with me to sound like I was agreeing to a service I never agreed to. Messing with them can be fun, but it's still risky.

£400k? That's not a fine.

When the fine is that much less than the profits, its not a "fine". Its just a tax. And a light one at that.

Here's the most important part of the story:

"In October, the government announced plans to let the ICO fine company directors as well as their businesses. "Making directors responsible will stop them avoiding fines by putting their company into liquidation," the ICO said."

Awesome!

Need to stop fining companies and start suing the individuals. And actually make it hurt. 500k is change. Could even be a "indirect" donation.

Would somebody please explain the reasoning behind fining companies, not individuals, to change the behavior of individuals? Because it seems to me that if the net result of doing X is a bunch of money and no jail time, the smart move is to continue doing X.

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