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.
Varies by time and by recipient. My "bad" months only net ~10 robocalls, but I'm apparently on the low end. That's more than reaches my email spam folder! I basically no longer pick up for unrecognized numbers - which has it's own problems.
> What do they offer?
From what I can tell, the ones calling me are straight up scammers. "Rachel with cardholder services", "free vacation" nonsense, etc.
> Isn't there any kind of regulation?
Ineffective ones, yes. I may have recieved one or two legal robocalls (there are a few exemptions for e.g. political calls) but the majority I get are illegal. Enforcement is problematic - caller ID spoofing is common. VOIP lets a call center in India spoof your local area code, and even enforcement against domestic callers has taken distressingly long.
> 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.
We have similar here - although I'm not sure if it's legal to blind call cellphones, or numbers in the "do not call" registry, unless you've established some kind of business relationship. They're also generally required to add you to their own "do not call" lists if you tell them to (possibly an exception there for debt collectors?)
Meanwhile, these robocallers don't have a means of opting out, don't have the scammer on the line to yell at, and run the same fucking campaign for months! It'd be one thing if those ~10/month calls were varied - but no, it's the exact same prerecorded message 20 times from 20 unique spoofed phone numbers all hailing from my own area code, that I hang up 3 seconds into because I remember their intros.
I believe some of them are because literally 5 years ago, I registered a domain without using WHOIS privacy. Some of them are probably from other marketing lists, like the USPS change of address forms, and some is likely just random.
Curious, what problems? I haven't regularly answered calls from numbers I don't recognize as long as I've had a cell phone. Anyone who has a real reason to call me would leave a voicemail (or text me these days).
My experience is that this is only mostly true - and of course it's hard to tell exactly what I've missed from calls I didn't pick up except for the few times when I still hear about it later. For me this is the occasional missed social or family event - being easy to reach has it's benefits.
fwiw, my elderly father uses a cellphone. The only time we can't reach him is when he leaves it inside to go outside, and then a landline wouldn't help him, either :P
I often get back to back calls with one bearing my landline prefix and followed by one to my mobile with its prefix (both numbers undoubtedly spoofed).
Although once I did get a phone call from Adobe, back when they had that big userinfo leak. I thanked them for the call, but said I wasn't going to do anything over the phone, they could contact me through my email address, which they did. So that's one legit one, at least.
I have to leave our house fax unplugged most of the time for the same reason. It is a genuine annoyance.
https://complaints.donotcall.gov/complaint/complaintcheck.as...
Then click Continue and view the list named: "What was the call about?".
This tactic may work for landlines, where prefixes are similar in particular neighborhoods (at least in the US). But for cell phones, it's actually a dead giveaway for many people. This is because prefixes are less correlated to location. For example, I have only ever known one person who had the same prefix as my cell phone. So whenever I see a matching prefix on the caller ID, I know it's a spoofed robocall.
But it's possible that these robocallers actually don't mind that people like me get wise to them in this way, because they'd rather only reach less tech-savvy targets, who don't know about caller ID spoofing.
This is like how spammers are rumored to use well-known tropes in their messages because then the only people dumb enough to respond are "qualified leads" that are more likely to fall for scams.
(not that the cookie directive is better, but the cost is small and people usually overdo it)
Anyway, to me the issue is that exchanges that plug into the POTS service needs to be held accountable
Things like: you're allowed to spoof the number if your own that number (like IP blocks) and can receive a call on that number, otherwise call gets blocked and/or you get fined (the interchange)
VoIP call rates seem to be around 3c per min (compare that to a pre-paid cellphone minute in the US and see how it's extortionate)
Auto-dialers with spoofed caller ID are usually Indian call centres doing "Microsoft support" scam; or are UK fake invoice scammers; or are UK "phone companies" who try to convince you to change your phone/broadband (or sometimes energy supply) usually by saying someone else already agreed to it and this is just the final confirmation call.
We're on all the do-not-call lists.
Robocallers tend to not leave messages (unless it is my auto insurance on a holiday telling me to drive safe).
It's really bad. Gladly, that's my work number, so if the numbers aren't in contacts, I don't answer.