Ringless voice mails from telemarketers | Hacker News Reader

Ringless voice mails from telemarketers

nytimes.com

151 pointsHarryHirsch220 comments

The article doesn't describe how the technology works.

Due to the slow speed (100 voicemail/min) its likely what they are doing is initiating a call far enough for the phone system to busy out your phone, then very quickly placing a second call that the phone system sends straight to voicemail as your phone is busy. Once this call starts to hit voicemail, the original call is dropped.

I doubt phone companies let people directly send voicemail to people as they wouldn't be billing for that.

If I call my T-Mobile voicemail I can leave a message on someone else's T-Mobile line. Definitely possible.

Voicemail are just other phone numbers, most of the time they are internal to the network though.

In the uk we have had the ability to send direct voicemail for years, one operator actively marketed the system before text messages took off as a method to message another orange customer without having to ring their phone.

EDIT: just called my voicemail and the option to direct leave a voice mail for someone else is right on the main menu (Three UK).

For what it's worth, I've been able to do this in the US as well -- don't remember which carrier, I think Tracfone

what they are doing is initiating a call far enough for the phone system to busy out your phone, then very quickly placing a second call that the phone system sends straight to voicemail as your phone is busy.

I can tell you that's exactly what they are doing.

This is fascinating. It never occurred to me until now that there might be a window in the call process between "line is flagged as busy" and "phone rings."

I assume we're talking about a very narrow window here, right? How narrow?

Is it something that has always existed, or something that crept in because of the transition from phone-as-mechanical-device to phone-as-software?

Could be a second or two. The traditional phone systems are dog slow. Often takes 15 secs from A starts ringing to B does.

I can confirm. At work I have to deal with call processing [1], and the time guard [2] is 15 seconds on the originating side [3] for CDMA [4].

[1] We provide enhanced caller ID---a name in addition to the phone number. Our new product will also mark known telemarketers.

[2] The amount of time we have to do what we do

[3] The calling party---the one initiating the phone call.

[4] which may be enough to identify the carrier we work with.

As long as it's a fairly consistently timed window (and I assume it is), it doesn't matter if it's just a few milliseconds.

On a related note, I'm still surprised to find that telephone operators haven't fixed the scenario "someone calls me and I just miss it, I call them back while they're trying to call me for the second time, and we both get a busy signal". As a naive outsider, seems like it wouldn't take much to just connect those two calls.

>As a naive outsider, seems like it wouldn't take much to just connect those two calls.

Who would you charge for the call?

All phones services I've used charge for total usage, regardless of the initiator. If someone calls me, I still get dinged for every minute I'm on the line, same as if I placed an outgoing call. (Granted, I've only used pay-as-you-go type services, so perhaps other services are different.)

In Europe all services I have seen has been of the kind where whoever makes the call pays, and nobody ever gets charged for receiving calls.

Under such a system, this can become a issue.

I bet from the phone company they don't see the problem. Both were intending to place a call so they both pay :)

Apparently only the US and Canada charge the phone owner for incoming calls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_services#Incoming_calls

Europe, Asia, Australia etc all charge the caller.

This leads to awkward situations like when I called someone in the US and they were worried that they're going to get charged international rates for a call from abroad.

Wow, dick move. Getting charged for the incoming call is something I associate with getting ripped off by roaming call charges.

Many years ago, using Virgin Mobile (in the UK) I remember being charged for incoming calls, however these days on all UK networks (and I assume this is the case for most of Europe) the caller gets charged but the callee does not

Both of them, obviously. ;)

The one with lower timestamp.

Under that scheme, if I called my own line by dialing my own DID, I'd end up with a completed loopback call rather than a connection to my voicemail inbox.

Just have an exception for that case?

I don't know how phone systems work, but in any other programming scenario, a quick if..else would fix that.

To translate into Internet-engineering terms: assume that you might be having to call out through a proxy server (this is true when you e.g. have to "dial 9" to reach an outside line.) If your own phone is public-routable (i.e. your extension has its own DID, and that's what you're calling), then the routing system outside the device will have no idea that what you'll reach is, in fact, your own device. The origin of the call will appear to the POTS system as just "the PBX" (a NAT, basically); and the destination will appear to your PBX as just some anonymous public number owned by a phone company, that happens to proxy back to your own extension on the PBX when you request it. So neither the POTS system nor your PBX will be able to recognize what's going on. (I mean, you can manually program associated numbers into the PBX, but by doing so you're denormalizing DID mappings: they'll break as soon as someone's number changes on the POTS side.)

Much better if dialing out on a line just takes an exclusionary lock on the line so that it can't be dialed into; then anything that forwards back to that line, at any level of indirection, will be told the line is busy and will step to the next part of the call-tree.

(Note that this becomes important when you're trying to e.g. get a [random peer of your support-level] on the line for a consult in tech support, by "adding" to the call the same ring-group you're in. Exclusionary locking here is what ensures that you won't end up adding yourself to the call.

Perfect explanation, thank you!

I hear the crackling of my PC speakers a few seconds before the call rings on my mobile; similarly on our landline the phone lights up and shows the caller ID a second or so before it rings.

Also if you ring a phone in the same room as you [we have kids!] you'll often find you get a ring tone long before the callee's phone rings.

> on our landline the phone lights up and shows the caller ID a second or so before it rings

Not sure about the US, but in Australia this is a phone specific feature. The Caller ID comes between the first and second ring, so if you want a call blocking feature that is completely silent, you need to silence the first ring of every call. Some phones will do this automatically, others (like my Panasonic landline) make it an option you can turn on & off. The Panasonic FAQ has some info:

http://eng.faq.panasonic.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/26547/~...

I'm in UK, cheap German portable landline phone with virtually no useful settings. Could well be phone specific as you suggest.

If that is how it works, I can't see how they'll manage to argue these aren't calls in a court.

Even with the carrier/country specific techniques everyone is mentioning, they all involve calling, so they should fall under existing law too.

>I can't see how they'll manage to argue these aren't calls in a court //

I'd have thought on the basis that a telephone call involves two parties in simultaneous communication, the caller and callee, and that a voicemail box isn't a party when a message is being left; the recipient collecting the mail does so of their own volition; the communication is not a phone call, it's asynchronous.

Whether that will wash probably depends on caselaw that I have no knowledge of.

i am working on an application that sends calls straight to voicemail. there's "an api" for that in germany, meaning you put special codes between area code and number.

How do you sleep at night?

it's ok.

but the issue is randomly calling ppl. not the call itself. at least in germany random/cold calls are forbidden so you can only call people who agreed to it prior.

Opt in or opt out?

Opt-in, but nobody cares. They will just use your number anyway and, when confronted, claim that you "must have opted in at some point". They will then promise to remove your number from their list and promptly call you again a few days later.

How would this work when my phone declines their call? I assume it would hang up on the first call, then be available to hand up on the second call?

Because if not, I need to disable my voicemail.

This entire process occurs before your phone is even aware of the call to decline it. They are taking advantage of the fact that it takes at minimum a few dozen milliseconds to route a call to your phone.

If you have one of the carriers others have mentioned, they are calling your voicemail directly, completely bypassing your phone.

A few seconds actually. There's quite a bit of features that need to be checked along the path (said as someone working in the telecom industry providing name information).

But the first call would ring then.

No, the two calls are dialled concurrently with a skew such that call A finishes dialling moments before call B. Call B immediately goes to voicemail because the line is locked setting up call A. Call A disconnects before the phone starts to ring, but after the network has routed call B to voicemail.

Edit: clarified.

this can then be easily fixed by the networks. Delay the second call request until the first call actually rings.

That's exactly how it works. While I was at Twilio, we figured out how to do it - mostly from a customer abusing the system - and shut them down at the time. The problem was that it wasn't complicated enough that it would take long for others to figure out.

The problem I noted at the time is that since we only charged for minutes during the call, the first call - which was dialed and immediately dropped - would never get a charge, only the second would.

I am a big fan of twillio, but I suspect that they or companies like it are contributing to the problem.

I would like everyone that uses a telephone API to be required to register a bond. If they are found abusing the system, they will lose the bond and be banned from using ANY companies telephone system.

That telephony companies do not take the opportunity fix tbe actual problem makes me think a court may be able to find they are complicit.

What bond amount will both let a young entrepreneur play and learn and at the same time prevent a scammer with (relatively speaking) much deeper pockets?

Seems likely it could scale with expected usage.

Perhaps they could only be allowed to make calls to numbers that they have verified before investing in the bond.

  everyone that uses a telephone API

How does one enforce such a thing, around the world, where interoperable telephone systems interact across multiple jurisdictions, some of which might not be as advanced, in technical terms, as others? What constitutes abuse? Which countries will this apply to first? Who is capable of making such a thing possible?

>How does one enforce such a thing, around the world

Strongarming.

>Who is capable of making such a thing possible?

The US.

One of the most important/valuable things about Twilio is that people can get started easily with little friction. If you add a bond (aka insurance) into the process, you've added a ton of friction that will only solve a problem relevant in a tiny percentage of situations.

It doesn't have to be that complicated. Consider, for example, the credit card pre-authorization hotels perform when you check into a hotel, to ensure you can pay for incidental expenses (room service, mini bar, etc).

One can easily imagine doing something similar at signup time for postpaid services like Twilio (or any other abusable SaaS, for that matter).

Yes, and also, as toast0 says, it's likely to be impossible to have all those providers agree on such a system.

But phone operators should do something, like block voicemails left by a robot, either by detecting them automatically, or blacklisting numbers, or, why not, offer the option of a captcha before leaving a message:

in order to leave a message to this person, please enter the result of the following operation: how much is 3 times 4...

Maybe there's an opportunity for a startup here. It could work before the fact with a captcha as above, or after the fact: it would listen to your messages and spam-rate them.

https://www.nomorobo.com/ does the rating based on phone number, effectively an RBL

Contrary to popular belief, Twilio is not exactly magic. They're great in that they put a simple, easy to understand API, and very low startup friction (painful signup almost more important than cost) to do things you knew were possible, but didn't want to deal with figuring out how to sign up for. They weren't necessarily the first one to do that either.

My point is, there are at least hundreds of providers you can get a voip line from, in addition to the many traditional carriers you could get conventional phone lines from; many of which are not really beholden to the courts of whichever jurisdiction you choose. Getting them all to agree not to provide service to one person is going to be hard; especially with the large networks of reselling resold traffic.

I would love to see some sort of regulation requiring some ability to trace down the origin of calls, though. There should be a way to track back which carriers (and their customers) involved when the recipient would like to press charges against the entity that placed the call (ex: the fraudulent callers from "The Windows" trying to "fix" my computer). There are valid reasons for anonymous calling, so safeguards should be in place, maybe just a star code (feature code) to indicate the last received call was spam, and a caller that generates a large number of reported calls is subject to investigation by the carrier and referral to law enforcement if appropriate.

We need for phones something like what we did for email when the spam first started getting out of control -- blacklists for providers that don't have and reasonably enforce AUPs.

It may be that the US courts have no jurisdiction over a VOIP provider in Kazakhstan, but there's no reason my phone provider can't simply refuse to route their calls.

If there are enough short duration calls, the phone company will ask for more money. The every four years political calls, for example, often have to pay a little bit more due to their short call duration.

That could reasonably be regarded as wire fraud, a la prank calling.

Prank calling isn't illegal unless it's harassment.

When I worked for a telco, you could easily call the voice mail main line, and then just use options to leave a voicemail in any mailbox. Easy peasy.

Back in the day, I remember Verizon Mobile had a thing where you could dial into your voicemail and then they had an option to leave a voicemail for another VZN subscriber just by punching in their number. I used this a couple of times to listen to an unknown caller's outgoing message.

So if that is the case, these companies ARE violating the law because they are actually calling you. I hope they get slaughtered in court.

> I doubt phone companies let people directly send voicemail to people as they wouldn't be billing for that.

I mean- they could just bill for that. Like, offer a product that would send a voicemail message directly. Evil but I would not put it past a cell carrier.

> The Republican National Committee, which is in favor of ringless voice mail, goes as far as to argue that prohibiting direct-to-voice-mail messages may be a violation of free speech.

Absurd. The right to free speech does not include forcing others to listen to you.

The right to free speech does not include forcing others to listen to "it".

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1357/

Also the mouse over text applies very well to this situation as well.

This comic is really pernicious because it frames free speech as just a quirky law that restrains the government.

That's like saying honesty is just about not breaking perjury laws in court.

In reality, free speech and free inquiry are social virtues that, like honesty, should be applied and upheld at every level of society, public and private, commercial, academic, and personal. Because free speech is a key mechanism to reach consensus and keep society functioning.

This is becoming even more and more relevant as our "public squares" of discussion are no longer government-owned physical public squares, but rather online fora owned and controlled by mega-corporations.

It's disturbing enough that Facebook or Google could easily turn an election on their whim, and it would be legal. It's even more disturbing that a whole lot of people are loudly proclaiming that this is fine, totally okay, and ethical, just because they think their views will never be the ones that get silenced.

So yeah, that cartoon is terrible.

Except when we're talking about other entities, they also have their own rights to free speech/free association. It's nice to say that free speech is a social virtue, but would you be willing to hold a Klan rally/BLM rally in your front yard?

You know what happens in the real world? That person exits through the door, finds enough people like him outside and gets into political power, then proceeds to show the door to the smug stickman.

It does when you run it through the right wing filter. And when the FCC is run by the head cheerleader of right wing policies you can bet the filter is going to catch a lot more things.

This isn't right wing. This is just crony capitalism. Find the "right winger" of your choice and ask them what they think about this.

Part of the way the cronies keep us in line is to direct our fire at "the other wing", instead of at them. There is approximately nobody in this country going "Hooray, finally our right to be spammed by telemarketers on the phone that I pay for is being respected!"

I'll put Tom Wheeler (or any Democratic appointee) up against Ajit Pai, Michael Powell (or any other Republican appointee) any day when it comes to which side is more pro consumer and which is more pro big monopoly.

> Part of the way the cronies keep us in line is to direct our fire at "the other wing", instead of at them

And part of the way the right wing justifies its atrocities is to claim that "both sides do it", "both sides are the same" or some similar flat out bullshit.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant a right-winger that you know in real life, or can find on the street if that is the empty set, not some politician.

"And part of the way the right wing justifies its atrocities is to claim that "both sides do it", "both sides are the same" or some similar flat out bullshit."

Both sides may not be the same, but both sides do do it... because in a lot of ways, they aren't "both" sides but the same side wearing different masks, at that level. That is, again, that high rarified Federal level, not the people on the streets. You're not "seeing through" their game... you are right where they want you to be. You're even strongly suggesting that you're fine if your side does it as long as you get to yell at the other side and dismiss their claims about what "your side" does. Unsurprisingly, "your side" is suited just fine by your willingness to do this, and they take you up on your offer quite often.

> not some politician

tl;dr No True Scotsman.

> they aren't "both" sides but the same side wearing different masks, at that level

I showed you irrefutable evidence that one side is pro consumer and one pro business. And yet, you still insist that they're the same.

I mean, it was even your example (FCC Chairs), so it's not like I went out cherry picking

They are not forcing you to listen to anything. You can a) delete the message or b) change voicemail systems so this does not work. These problems can be mitigated from a technical perspective.

You have to listen to the message to find out if it is something important...

.. and why does that allow them to spam you? Just because you can avoid it by changing numbers? You could make that same argument for a restraining order -- "Oh you can just move, so why would we legally protect you?". Absurd.

I think the problems with receiving a voicemail message and requiring a serious legal protection because you could be murdered or physically harmed by a specific person and not even close to the same order of magnitude.

Although I see where you are coming from, restraining orders aren't just for stalking/threats/abuse. It'a also for harassment, which I would definitely say telemarketers do.

> change voicemail systems so this does not work

But if the GOP made prohibiting direct-to-voice-mail illegal you wouldn't be able to do that...

Not going to happen.

Regardless of if it does or not, what's the likely end result? Spam voicemails become the new email, filtered aggressively, and increasingly ignored over time in favor of less-spam-prone methods. They're asking for something pointlessly unsustainable that would be no different from any of the other high-noise/low-signal-ratio channels they already have.

More likely IMO, is people just ignore / disable their voicemail in favor of text messages / email / etc in the short term.

Alternatively, carriers simply block voicemail for the first few seconds of a call which kills the perceived loophole. Because frankly this is an obvious feature that people will switch carriers for.

How feasible is antispam for voicemail?

Something like:

in my address book => allow

no id or not in my address book => delete

Anyone who's read one free speech case knows that commercial speech has less protection than, say, political speech.

It also doesn't including using a private commercial service that I am paying for.

The stench of hypocrisy is more than subtle, here.

As always, follow the money.

P.S. Here's what I expect from carriers, if this goes through: A clear, easy to use, and permanent switch to turn this off on my account. (Yes, government emergency situations -- genuine ones -- excepted.)

If this really is a "free market" or something arguably comperable -- their basis for arguing for the elimination of a whole bunch of regulation -- then someone should offer this "off switch" as a feature in response to the obvious demand for it.

If they don't? One more nail in the argument that they do not represent anything like a free market nor real competition.

How many nails do you need in that coffin? I don't even see a coffin anymore. I just see a bunch of nail heads in the shape of a coffin.

This is because the use the technology and it works well.

Anyone else in a situation where you're receiving robocalls ten times a day? Hard to believe, but I can show screenshots as proof.

I just counted. It's four times per day, like clockwork. Then there are various other robocalls that come in every couple days. So sometimes it's 4 per day, sometimes it's up to 7.

It's mildly annoying, but is there any other option than to just ignore it or keep blocking the endless new numbers that pop up?

Is getting a new number a bad option for you?

robocalls are made by war dialers.

Ehh, sentimental value. I've had it since I was 13 or so. Plus I occasionally get a random text from an old friend.

I've thought about it though. If I knew it'd fix the problem, I might do it. But the robocalls seem to scale up faster than new numbers. I guess it'd be a nice reprieve.

It never helps.

I seem to have a very good number. I never got a call from telemarketers. Might be the German laws or the fact that I have had that number since the dawn of mobile phones.

I have had several friends and colleagues get new numbers and immediately be hounded by collection agencies looking for the old owner of the number. Some of these collection agencies also stared sending postal mail to their homes based on the linking this new number with their addresses.

There's an easy way to stop this. After it happens call the police and say you're getting harassing calls. They'll file a police report. You then call the phone company and tell them you've been getting harassing calls, have a police report, and would like to put a trace on your line. They'll give you a phone number to call. Whenever you get a debt collector calling you, you dial the number. After 3 or 4 calls, the police will contact the debt collector and tell them to stop calling you. They will.

It's against the law for collection agencies to call you if you tell them not to.

Oh! If it's against the law, surely that will stop annoying phone calls! How did we not think of that easy solution to the problem!?

You can actually sue them if they do call you after you tell them not to for $1200 per violation. Is also illegal for them to call mobile phones. This technology actually cropped up because collection agencies are getting backlash from using robo dialers. I'd argue collection agencies are much more regulated than telemarketers. Google the FDCPA law.

I get about 4 "Card Services" or "Google Marketing" or some such robocalls a day, too.

The Verizon customer service rep suggested "just blocking the number" after expressing shock and awe that robocalls happen, and he had never heard of such a thing!

I suggest at least leaving the robocall running until it hangs up. Any given organization has to have a finite number of outgoing lines, and IVR/VRU's, so keeping them occupied should be a priority for all of us. If you've got the time to fuck around with a Real Human, do that, too. They definitely have a large, but finite, supply of call center workers. Keeping them unhappy should be a priority for all of us. The faster someone quits out of despair, the more that they have to pay to train a new worker.

Most of the call spam blocking solutions suffer from needing to trust Caller ID. Spoofing caller ID is now trivial and used by spammers [1] There are some work arounds to this like "audio fingerprinting".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing

These orgs don't necessarily have a finite number of outbound lines - they'd be using SIP and just buy more channels from the myriad providers out there for a few bucks a month. You can also get "unlimited channels"-SIP trunk providers too - in which case you're limited only by the number of simultaneous virtual channels your Asterisk setup can handle.

So no, "keeping them busy" is not a viable solution.

They will have to still pay for it. If the RoI on these kind of campaigns become low enough, due to combination of higher cost and lower conversion, they will abandon it. You could develop a dialer app to autoroute, and perhaps even generate auto responses ( inverse robo call ?) to make it more frustrating

Yes, precisely. Does any research exist on what percentage of, say, cold calls, has to go bad before organizations abandon the practice? I'd google for this, but I'm not certain of what terms to use. It seems to me that percent honeypots might be relevant, percent of sabotage of cold calls, but I just don't know enough of this field to even start to get an answer.

I do know enough to say that a simple North American can cause enough ire in an Indian call center worker, that he will call back 4 times just to say "Fuck you, sir!", and that if, by chance, the same North American call center worker gets you twice in a day, the conversation is quite profane.

> I suggest at least leaving the robocall running until it hangs up.

It only lasts for maybe 15 seconds.

If you want to hurt them more, press 1 (or whatever) to talk to the operator, and string them along.

But the downside - if you care - is that the person working a job in some hellish call center probably gets dinged, performance wise, for spending 15 minutes on a go-nowhere call with you.

But on the gripping hand, you can't hurt the top without hurting everyone along the path - from the person on the phone, up to the call center manager, up to the call center owner, up to the actual business contracting through them.

They took an evil job. I'm fine with them getting a poor performance review.

I would take an evil job to feed my family if I had no other choice; sometimes people don't.

I honestly don't care. There are extremely few instances where that's actually the case. And it still doesn't excuse the fact that the job is evil.

But it is something to take into consideration when you're punishing someone. You're actively making someone's life worse - you can argue that it's for a good cause, but you can't look away from the collateral damage, even though it's small.

No, it isn't. And I'm not doing a thing. They made the choice to do evil. They are the ones that made their life worse.

My experience tells me it varies by network. All my family runs on ATT, Verizon and TMobile.. and all get spam by robocalls. Meanwhile I have SimpleTalk (which is a rebrnd t-mobile so you get reception of tmobile network under silly name simpletalk), I got about 10 robocalls since I have this number circa 2011.

Also - certain area codes are hotter than others. While I have Cali number, I know many folks living in Alaska and never got robocalled.

For a long time now I've received many many more robocalls than real calls. It makes me want to turn off the phone features of my phone.

I did! You can do that with most providers. If they don't explicitly offer it, just tell them you want to switch to an tablet/iPad plan. I pay $15/month for a 3 GB data-only plan and $1/month for a VoIP number that routes SMS to email/app (voip.ms), for those 2 people I know who still use SMS.

> for those 2 people I know who still use SMS.

Interesting. I think I use SMS for more people than every other phone-based method of contact put together.

US high schooler here. I use SMS pretty frequently if you count iMessage, maybe real SMS with 2 or 3 people.

I use a lot of messaging apps, just not SMS. Partly for privacy reasons, partly for convenience.

Hmm. Convenience is the exact reason I'd give for staying away from "a lot of messaging apps" and using primarily SMS. I've got a couple friends that really like Signal, so that's the only other messaging app I ever install.

Be careful about leaking your phone number online, such as in whois data or other places. I started an LLC a few years ago and my god the number of spam calls I got, it was absolutely ludicrous (I still get them to this day, although it's now on the order of 2 a month)

Oh god, not just phone calls, but mail, too. And they make some weird connections. I once got a credit card offer that was addressed to me and a woman who's name I did not recognize. It took me a few minutes to realize that she and her husband ran the ISP I used. I was the business contact for my domain, but she was the technical contact since she was at the hosting company. Luckily my spouse is a very understanding person! She was like, "Why are you getting credit card offers with this other woman's name on them?"

I've gone as far as reporting the numbers to my state AG, but it clearly hasn't stopped them. I get them constantly. I used to hang up right away but these days I try to keep the robot on the line as long as possible to make it less cost effective to call me.

Do we need the equivalent of Fail2Ban for phone numbers? Some app that allows you to flag calls, and past some threshold the whole network bans the number?

As far as I know, they just spoof the originating number. This makes reporting the numbers useless, as well as any kind of blacklisting. Imagine if you could send spam emails from any arbitrary IP address or domain you wanted to. Blacklisting would be meaningless in that case.

The spoofing happens frequently and it's incredibly frustrating if you are the unfortunate person whose number gets spoofed.

My number got spoofed by a robo-dialer who called the ENTIRE +1 469 prefix. I received dozens of calls a day from angry people who got called.

I’m afraid my number might be used as the originator someday. Often when I get these calls, I keep them on the line as long as possible, feigning interest in whatever they’re selling. I figure as long as I tie them up, maybe I can waste a bit of their resources. Probably futile, but makes me feel better.

Except they might retaliate one day and set their outgoing ANI to my number...

I do the same. A few of them got very angry, yelling quite creative obscenities. Some were amusing and I had never heard of. I took it as a an enriching cultural exchange. But did realize they have my number and could do something like what you suggested.

It's a fun hobby to learn to swear in all kinds of languages. Russians are very creative in this respect.

If you're on Android, there's call-blocking apps that let you do various kinds of blacklist/whitelist call screening.

For now, I block spammy numbers and unknown/private numbers. If it gets bad, I'll move to a whitelist (only people on my contact list ring through).

It's galling beyond belief that any political party anywhere would let the abuse of the phone system become a free speech issue. These people are actively making the world worse. (And what's worse is how cheaply they're bought off. Come on, you scummy congresspeople, are you really worth so little?)

These exist for most phones and provider. However, having read the terms of service on them, they pretty much collect a bunch of data about you for marketing purposes, so it kind of defeats the point. They will, for example, collect the numbers of everyone who calls you. (They have to be able to do that in order to look up and block calls from known spammers.) No thanks.

I used to get one or two robocalls a month, but over the past 2-3 months I've been getting multiple nearly every single day.

What's really interesting is that I'm seeing a lot of spoofed numbers from my same area code, and even from the same branch (i.e., the next four digits). My guess is that the robocallers have found that people are more likely to pick up when the call might be coming from next door.

The spam call filter is arguably one of the best benefits of using a Google Voice number. My spam call and voicemail folder is full of SEO, payday loan, and other outright scam messages. Just activate the filter and you never see these calls unless you go into the spam interface on the Voice site. You can manually add a number to your spam block but most calls are auto-blocked against a list of known offenders.

Google Voice filters out most of the spam calls I get, but there's still one or so per day that make it through.

I use google voice (hangouts?) and get 3 to 6 robo voicemails a day. They are 2-5 seconds in length, and empty.

You have to activate spam call filtering, it is not on by default.

I do have it enabled and they still get through. I also have 'straight to voicemail' turned on for all calls, so maybe that bypasses the spam check...

I'm at the point where I'm going to start telling places my Skype ID and let them figure out how to contact me. We don't need our phone numbers any more.

The problem is, we do. Telegram, LINE, 2fa on many sites, banks, they all want my phone number. They require it. I already use a google voice number, but that still doesn't solve it all (still getting tons of bot voicemails)

I pick up and say "Please put this number on your do not call list", talking over them if necessary.

People doubt it, but this works. They don't actually want to waste resources on you if you are not a good lead. Even the scammers want to be efficient.

You actually get real people who are calling you, and not "if you're interested, press 1"?

This is a funny routine: http://sfglobe.com/?id=18461

Also:

> The Jolly Roger Telephone Co.

> Tired of telemarketers? Now you can turn the tables on them with this clever bot.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/202664225/the-jolly-rog...

nomorobo.com works well for me (with an AT&T U-verse VOIP line). You need to have the "simultaneous ring" feature, which most mobile phone carriers do not provide.

Yeah, me, too. And the calls are mostly from numbers near my number. Only once did I get repeated calls from the same number (until I blocked it). Very, very annoying.

> Regulators are considering whether to ban these messages. They have been hearing from ringless voice mail providers and pro-business groups, which argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing.

What's the point of a death penalty if not for this?

The method (at least here in my country) is really simple (and not really a secret): The voicemail can be reached from a special number. This number is easy to derive from the actual phone number (usually inserting one or two digits, depending on the provider). When the "owner" calls the mailbox, he gets the "admin" functionality. Anyone else calling it can only add messages. The rest is just simple call forwarding. So all that is needed is finding out the number of the mail box.

Not sure if it still works, but in Israel it is as simple as prepending the voice mail prefix to the phone number. Some voice mail boxes can receive faxes, so there is some legitimate use for it.

>They have been hearing from ringless voice mail providers and pro-business groups, which argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing.

There's no limit to how low pro-business thinking can go.

There is no "low" in business thinking. Capital is amoral.

True - for all businesses in which there is only capital involved and no people [or animals, or environmental concerns, or ...]. Capital may be amoral, but the people using it certainly are not.

People can be amoral. The word wasn't coined only to apply to things that aren't people.

Seems I'm wrong. I was working on amoral as meaning without morality rather than without concern for morality, so excuse my ignorance. Under my (wrong) definition I was expressing that people's actions always have moral consequences as that appeared to me the contrary of what the parent was suggesting.

Thanks for calling it out

The sibling comment by s73ver however remains valid I feel, capital is unconcerned with morality but people are concerned with it in general (not being so is considered a mental illness).

(not being so is considered a mental illness)

It absolutely is not. Here's just one example, and note that the defendants did not plead insanity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

I can find many, many more examples of both overt and subtle rejections of moralities you appear to think is a requirement for a functional life in society, but even without that we can find capitalist amorality all day every day in the form of fraud.

People aren't. And unless we have business robots, there are still people involved.

The moral hazard of capital is that people lose their humanity, so to speak, so "people aren't" isn't actually a limit on the behavior of capitalists.

A nail in the coffin for voice mail, which I hardly check at all anyway. Automatic transcription has made thee easier to ignore, but if the volume goes up I'll just disable voice mail completely.

I'm not sure anybody actually listens to their messages any more and so I rarely leave them. After all, if it's important, why would you call at all?

I see death of conventional telephony.

POTS is dow to <10% in many areas. Mobile is abysmal.

VOIP, voice chat, highly constrained accept policies.

If you'd like to submit a comment on this to the FCC, the link is here:

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings

The proceeding code is 02-278.

I should be able to charge people to leave a voice mail.

Not much, say 25 cents or around there. If it's important that's a negligible cost.

There may be (depending on the mechanism used to acheive this) a good policy argument to be made that these shouldn't be governed by laws governing phone calls, but they are exactly the same arguments that would lead to the conclusion that they should be governed by laws concerning unsolicited commercial email.

Hmm. I worked on voice mail systems in the 90s (by then they were already old and encrusted with feature bloat). This is actually how they work: like email or any other message delivery system. Messages are sent and delivered into mailboxes. The typical "ring-no-answer -> automated attendant" workflow that everyone sees as the face of VM is in fact an application layered on to of the base messaging service. If you know how (and it hasn't been administratively disabled) you can log in, compose a message and give it a recipient list just like email. Yoh can even schedule delayed delivery, ask for read receipt and on and on.

I never got the appeal of having voice mail in the first place. Send me a text, call again or wait for me to call back.

i dont answer phone calls from numbers i dont recognize because 90% of the calls i receive are telemarketing

if they dont leave a voicemail i assume it's not important enough for a phone call

My phone already alerts me to "spam" phone numbers for incoming calls, this will become just another spam control issue based on audio analysis / transcription of the message content. Regulations would be awesome but considering how poorly enforced even simple things like "do not call" are, well established spam control techniques probably where this will end up.

You might very well be using the software my company produced. I'm not sure how the database is constructed, but there is a query we make that returns the type of call, it's reputation (on a -4 to +4 scale---low score is bad), the category, the carrier network and line type, which we pass on to the phone. I suspect it might be partially created from complaints about calling numbers, or even carrier (one recent spammer call I received came from the "Onvoy" carrier, whoever they are).

I get maybe a dozen calls per week that become 2 second hangup voicemails. It's been going on for a few years. Mark the number spam in Google Voice, but I still get a voice mail notification on my phone for those numbers unless they're also blocked. But it's a different number every time, endless.

But HOW does it work? It's not clear by the article precisely how this is done. Possibly a triple call system. Three calls to that same number at once, each a millisecond after the other, and when the third hits the voicemail the other two disconnect immediately.

Wasn't thinking of that. I assumed the phone company was complicit and selling this as a service to the telemarketers, but we can't really know if the article avoids any implementation details.

Or bribe the phone company and get direct access to the mail box.

You really only need a double call. It's quite easy.

I wrote this ages ago http://edoceo.com/exemplar/call-to-voicemail

Oddly, my number gets blown up by these things.

How about call waiting?

It's a far from perfect system. But it hits right like 90+% of the time. YMMV

That's why I was thinking triple call. Only double call would cause call waiting.

I've never gotten them. -shrugs- How strange.

Another way of doing this is looking at LRN database and hitting the voicemail access numbers for the carrier. Often times the pilot number will let you dial a mailbox directly.

LRM database? Could you please elaborate?

LRN database is kind of like the DNS of telephony. Since local numbers can be on any switch, LRN tells everyone which switch manages the number.

See: Location Routing Number https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_Routing_Number

People still use voice mail? I don't believe I've encountered one in at least a decade...

Where abouts are you? Here in AU, it seems everyone uses voicemail for their mobiles.

Sweden. A text message is faster and infinitely more accessible for the recipient.

Heck, a voice message over the chat client of their choice is faster, infinitely more accessible, and still voice.

Well, half of the point is that you don't want voice in the first place...

Voice is by far the least of the problems with voicemail.

- If someone leaves you voicemail, you don't necessarily know that that happened.

- Checking your voicemail is effortful.

- Any random idiot can dial your phone number and leave you voicemail.

- Voice is harder to process than text.

Leaving someone a voice message doesn't help with #4, but that's a very minor issue. It solves all of the first three.

I wholeheartedly agree with all your points (and that is exactly what I meant with accessible). But it being voice is also a major issue of its own.

You can't check voice messages in many situations where you can read and possibly respond to a text. Also, if you listen to music/podcasts/whatever there will be an annoying interrupt.

I get an interrupt when I receive text messages too. I want it; it lets me know that someone sent me a message.

Of course, but there is a huge difference. Read the text and then continue - total time is less than 5 seconds. Often you don't even miss a beat doing what you are doing anyway.

Rather than having to stop what you are doing, check voice mail, and then continue. And in many situations you can't even do it (meeting, lecture, noisy environment etc.).

The question you're looking for is how old are you, for my generation(later mellenial) it's a minor faux paux to leave a voicemail instead of a text.

I changed my message to say please don't leave me voicemail but they did anyways. So I got rid of it and I like not having it

You can always set your voicemail number to something funny. I used to set it to a French ski resort automated weather report telephone - that's annoying and an expensive international call to boot, so people quickly stop trying (not that you'd notice if they didn't).

AFAIK It is charged to you (to whom forwarding) not to the caller

It's like a computer dialog box. Just as users don't read dialog boxes, phone users don't listen to the message at all. They just wait until the beep and start talking. I used to have a home phone that had voice mail boxes and we had a message that said, "To leave a message for husband, press 1, to leave a message for wife press 2." It had a default mailbox if the user didn't press anything. 95% of calls went to the default mailbox. People are idiots.

I disabled my voicemail as I'm charged to call it, but not to receive calls normally

Seeing this and some of the other people who get spam calls (I get them too from time to time), I am wondering if they allow this legally, why not do something to make the effort of it not worth it?

https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

I am reminded of this, where the goal is to waste to telemarketers time as much as possible, and my thought is enough people used it, it would make spam calling not worth it.

I would gladly pay for a program in which I could load that up on my phone and have it distract/annoy them back.

Thoughts?

http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/

No affiliation.

Marriots is a company that should probably be bombed into oblivion. I signed up for a free night at a hotel. Ever since, I have probably received 2000 calls over the years from them. I think it's not just them but affiliates and other scammy/scummy businesses. If anyone is out there, please please do not ever pay Marriots a single penny. They need to go under.

When a particular company calls you, just ask to be put on their "do not call" list. Real organizations always seem to honor that list, and there are large fines from the FCC if they don't. (The robocallers described in the article are a different beast, who spoof numbers and pop up under a new identity as soon as they are shut down.)

One of the times I answered I told him to put me on the do-not-call list and the live person said: "FUCK YOUUUUUU" and hung up. My calls increased considerably after that day. Yes I have considered suing many times, but chicken out realizing how much work would be involved. Most of the calls don't ring anymore as I migrated to Google Voice and just turned on Do Not Disturb for everyone. I can read that it's telemarketing spam or someone that's real.

Regarding spoofing - 100% are spoofed now. In the last 6 months all of the spam calls I have in my GVoice inbox match the same first 6 digits of my phone number. The last 4 digits are random numbers.

You could always show up to their office IRL and start some shit.

My first impression is that having the government regulate them is unnecessary, since you can block them on your phone(and phone providers can sell phones that block them by default). All you need is one company to sell a "telemarketer-resistant" phone with an automatically-synced blocklist and some other settings enabled by default.

If they're using the approach described elsewhere in the thread, sounds like you can't.

I disabled voicemail a long time ago, never going back. I educated my contacts to retry or send a text, worked well so far.

So what happens when, for example, you're trying to get a home loan to buy a new house, and the loan officer is an older person who doesn't use texts? (This is something real that recently happened to me, and for which a phone and voicemail were indispensable.)

I find that while I can do what you suggest for friends and family, there are just enough situations where I can't do that, that I need to still have voicemail. Doctors offices that robocall to remind you of an appointment are another one. The occasional lawyer, or other professional who have a particular way of doing things. Getting rid of phone and/or voicemail just isn't a realistic option for a lot of people.

I disagree, people have used phones without voicemail for decades, they know they can retry. And when I miss a call from an unknown number I can easily look it up if I'm expecting important calls. There are also apps that helps with that, showing who called you even when it's a new number. About robocalls from doctors and pharmacies etc I also manage those comms via email, I take care of telling doctors and pharmacies to give me an electronic prompt, most have a computerized system that does that anyway. There might be people who need voicemail, but I don't buy that it's so common, it's more about people being used to it and not knowing they can turn it off.

In a way, this is a huge relief. I never listen to voice mails, so not having to be bothered by my phone ringing for something unimportant saves me a bit of time and anxiety.

Now I just have to worry about people I know, phone interviews, and debt collectors (who seem to be harassing me less often via phone these days).

How about just disabling VM?

Then I would get the call no? VM isn't the problem. The problem is the ringing.

In early 2000s this used to be a feature of my phone and I actually liked it. It allowed me to call someone and leave some information quick and easily. Text messages have largely replaced the need for that now. So much so that I've often pondered disabling my voicemail altogether.

OK, so if the spammer wants you to call back, they must leave a number. So say, if someone offered suitable SaaS, you could put that number on a list to be voicemail spammed. At one minute interval, from random numbers.

The weird thing is I get plenty of telemarketing calls now, but they almost never leave voicemail. I had assumed their whole business model was to get a live victim on the phone, not in leaving spam behind.

This is pure evil, and I hope those doing it end up living under a bridge.

How does this even work? How can you not ring the phone and have a voicemail?

I expected the article to cover this, but it doesn't. I suspect they call a number from two lines simultaneously, causing it to reach voicemail.

Permission from the carrier to dump an audio file directly into your voicemail box.

If that's the mechanism and this takes off, there'll be a strong incentive for one carrier to offer spam-free voice mail and either steal all the customers or cause the entire industry to fall in line.

But the carrier who provides the service to advertisers to target messages and directly load them into subscriber inboxes can charge their subscribers lower prices because they have another customer, so your hypothetical ethical carrier will lose out to them. Hell, if they can open up the ad sales channel enough they could probably give away calling for free, just like a proper modern internet business.

Does the existence of ad-funded free search engines mean the market naturally ought to produce spam-free search engines that steal all the customers?

All carriers will eventually charge customers to block this "service." Until consumer-friendly legislation bans the practice ... I'd estimate approximately two decades from the time this "service" is allowed.

Yea, I was expecting the article to be a technical explanation.

Perhaps a shrink-wrap style TOS in my voice mail message? By leaving a message you agree to pay a fee per ringless message?

I have heard that this works legally, but that you have to be willing to take them to small claims court, and good luck getting them to actually pay when you win a judgement against them. (You'll have to hire someone else to actually collect the money from them, and that likely makes it not worth your time and/or money.)

I was planning to switch to data-only SIM anyway, don't need no phone number or voice mail.

I assume one can make either-direction VOIP calls (i.e. Google Voice) via a data-only SIM? I wonder if I could get that via Verizon.

As if voicemail wasn't already in danger of being routinely disabled.

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