FCC Takes Stronger Aim at Robocalls

Perhaps they can tell the USPS to not sell the change of address info, including phone numbers. If you do a change of address online you are required to accept they will sell it to every shady marketing company that exists. I actually contacted the USPS regarding the matter and their response was tldr: fuck off, you need to physically fill it the form to disable that.

Phone calls work the same way as email.

There's an incoming audio channel and some metadata [caller id]. You have no idea whether the metadata [email recv from] is spoofed. All you know _really_ know for sure is the carrier you're receiving the call from [sort like an IP address] and whether or not you "trust" them not to lie about the authenticity of the metadata.

If the FCC wants to tackle this problem, as another HN user said, we really just need the equivalent of DKIM and SPF signing of the call metadata.

Despite the TCPA Act outlawing the calling of cellphones... robo callers in the USA rotate phone numbers very quickly, so as to prevent anyone from figuring out who and when placed a call.

The article makes this odd claim:

"The constant reassignment of phone numbers creates further problems in determining which calls are legitimate and which aren’t."

I find that hard to believe. Shouldn't the phone company know up to the second exactly which numbers it has assigned and which it hasn't. And couldn't it pass that info on to peers?

For my home line, I use a whitelist/blacklist approach, with numbers on neither getting an automated voice prompting them to press 1 to ring through, else they end up going to voicemail. This has eliminated all robocalls for years. I use Anveo's call flow since it was dumb simple to setup.

For my cell, Google Voice's spam blocking seems to work pretty well.

As a European (I have absolutely never ever received one of these calls), is this really so bad? How many calls a month do you receive? What do they offer? Isn't there any kind of regulation?

If I remember correctly the law here says it's ok for you to call people to offer services or sell things, but there has to be a human talking, which is quite the deterrent.

Somebody should rent one of these robocalling centers and give them a list that consists entirely of phone numbers of US congress members. They'd find effective regulation in a hurry.

Whoa, 2.5 billion calls? That's a lot per capita.

I'm not sure how they do it, but here in the Netherlands I have received _zero_ automated calls in the past few years - in fact our landline probably hasn't ringed at all in six months. Two or three times a year I'll get a [human] call from my cellphone or energy provider and that's it.

The real solution is to have an authenticated caller ID system.

The regulatory organisation responsible for the country's phone numbers holds a root certificate, and as number ranges are allocated they issue a certificate to the new owner. This cert can in turn be used to sign more certs as this new owner is in turn allocating numbers to their customers. When a call is placed the originator uses its own certificate (issued to them by their phone provider) to sign the call request and this can be verified by any carrier in the path of the call. Any unsigned caller ID gets flagged or the call is outright dropped.

I have a 100% foolproof method to deal with unwanted calls - I don't pick up calls from unknown numbers. If they really want to contact me, they'll send me an SMS.

The worst are misconfigured or broken robocall systems.

I once received a call on my phone system which ended up in a several hour long message of pretty much every ad that was on the robocall system. Very interesting but also very disturbing in a way.

So why do the phone companies allow the number to be spoofed? Now I have not worked on phone related software for twenty odd years but back in the nineties we used ANI data provided by the phone companies to track where employees logged into work from. Being part of a guard services company with operations nationwide it was the easiest and best solution we found. Guards would call in from a phone at the location being served, enter their employee number or SSN#, and log in to out of work. It served the purpose of us knowing they were on site and enforced the requirement that guards had access to land lines at all sites increasing their safety.

So am I to understand that the phone services don't see the spoof attempt? I know its a separate information that is passed along but the number should be sacrosanct and if not from a physical location that the phone company can verify should be represented as such on the end call. The name and text I know isn't simple to deal with but none of the robo calls I am getting provide it.

I have found that waiting for the real person to pick up and asking for company name so I can report them does tend to cause the calls to drop off for awhile. Still I would prefer them to not be on my cell. they certainly do not respect any do not call list.

I'm glad to know that the FCC will crack down all businesses that use robocalls to harass people. I hope it won't just only be a sentence on the news. There have been so many complaints regarding robocalls and telemarketers that have been filed by people. I even read an article at http://www.whycall.me/news/my-4500-payday-from-a-telemarkete... about a woman who sued a company after being harassed with dozens of robocalls.

Presumably robocalls are a numbers game, i.e. they work because somebody somewhere is choosing to respond to that offer of a free vacation? You only need to sell one $500 vacation or warranty replacement to cover thousands of calls.

Technically, there is a pair of standards called SHAKEN/STIR that basically puts a trust model into the call flows (certificates, signing, attestation etc.) but it's not yet widely deployed. Kind of like DKIM/SPF for SIP. Companies like Neustar and Metaswitch have software to do this for example.

Personally, I think attacking spammers directly feels like a losing game. They're pissing in a sea of piss at this point. What I'd rather have, is more positive assurance that a call is legitimate. Spammers will try to use it too, but in the modern age with feedback systems, you could at least raise the costs and time required to match a legitimate caller, and make it easier to lose that status, too.

Same goes for "legitimate" robocalls. I don't want to take your customer surveys.

It's about friggin' time.

This scourge has gone on for years. How many elderly and poor have been duped?

Now fix the technology problems and prosecute the bastards.

I've not once gotten a robocall on my mobile phones in Sweden or Japan.

What are these countries doing differently? More expensive calls? (I know that in the US as opposed to other countries the receiver pays the extra costs of a mobile call vs the caller, even if these days those extra costs may be zero with "all you can eat" style plans)

Bad telespammers will continue until a billing entity can be derived from what appears on Caller ID.

My cellphone's microphone has broken, which I hope is actually a boon when it comes to these - whenever I pick up, the caller hears literally nothing; hopefully, this marks my phone number as invalid in some database.

I used to faithfully report telemarketers and robocallers to the FTC using their claim report site. Then recently, there was a case where one of those outfits got fined $100 Million (going on memory here, don't quote me). That's when it hit me, if they could be fined that much and I know I do get multiple calls to my numbers from the same callers then the FTC must be farming cash from them through fines. Now I just block the caller's number and move on.

Can they so the same with the spam mail that floods your mailbox?

Paywalled. Any workarounds?

it is a first world problem I admit, but it is frustrating to get these calls on my cell phone.

Asking about being put on a do not call list often ends up just them laughing at me or hanging up right away. I tried the national do not call list, even was submitting every instance of these calls to their database for a month or so, but it didn't make any difference.

I was going to try pretending to be interested in their service then trying to find their company name or address. But then I heard that's not that easy, their either don't give that away easily (expending people would do this) and once you do that it's hard to sue them because then you have established a "business relationship".

If they are in another country altogether, then anything like small claims courts is just a joke and don't work either.

With the way the caller ID easily spoofed I don't see any obvious solution.

How strongly can one aim at something? Can it be measured in pounds or kilograms? Or is this one of those strong people things where they pull 18-wheeler trucks?

How far can the FCC's aim pull a semi-truck?

> FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is trying to put more muscle into the agency’s efforts to combat illegal and fraudulent robocalls. Last month, the FCC proposed a record $120 million fine against a Miami man who the agency said was responsible for making almost 100 million falsified robocalls in late 2016.

Why bother fining a single guy $120 million? What purpose does that serve?