Robocalls Flooding Your Cellphone? Here’s How to Stop Them

If a telemarketeer has to pay for setting up a call, rather than the end-user for accepting it (no matter how small the charge is), then placing millions of automated calls all over a sudden start costing money to the marketeer.

Think of it: the caller has the will to talk to someone - why should (at least in the past) this someone pay for that? The Euro-zone does it the other way round: you want to talk, you call, you pay.

Either way, in both situations with call volumes going down and people switching to data-type connections you see the price of calling/receiving calls drop sharply and as listed above the money telco's make comes from the data plans.

I think its because an internet connection has to be initiated by you at which point you give your consent to be charged for it. On the other hand you can get a phone call from anyone really without you previously agreeing to paying the cost of the call.

This was a tricky bit of grammar but I believe it's 100% correct.

But as for the receiving end, paying for receiving calls and texts only applies during holidays. It's not the standard case so whatever. Apparently that's different abroad.

Yes I agree if you don't know what you are going to be charged just by calling is wrong. But that's not the system, calling a specific set of prefixes let's you know what it's going to cost. So calling a mobile you know it's going to cost more since it had a mobile prefix.

Calling international costs more because of a prefix.

There are numerous examples of this: The phone system, the email system, any large IM system that gets beyond a certain size, the physical mail system (reigned in by charges there, though), social networks...

It would be easy if the adversaries were not actively using their intelligence to get around whatever solution you think might work. If all the spam phone calls came from the same number, which never moved or changed, this would be easy. But even before you account for the unauthenticated nature of caller ID that allows spammers to trivially forge any number they'd like, the mere fact that they're willing and able to buy up large blocks of numbers and would switch them around a lot would make this a difficult problem. Stopping intelligent, adaptive adversaries willing to dedicate time and resources to this is a very hard problem.

You can also attack this problem by trying to hit the first clause I gave, but that creates a very different kind of system. And in general, you need some sort of system that you don't have to prewhitelist people, so that your doctor can call you even though you didn't whitelist them, etc.

May I suggest that you guys are in some sort of bubble?

My mom's a 60 year old with a flip-phone, and her husband's nephrologist, neurologist and audiologist isn't going to ask her via chat to kindly turn on her phone.

I block numbers on my Android and my landline phone has a one button screening function.

I think you might be too paranoid, and the explanation is simpler: if you dial enough numbers, eventually you'll find some idiot willing to hand over control of their computer, or their credit card number, or social security number.

In the United States, it is a violation of federal law for telemarketers to block or fraudulently spoof caller ID information. I emphasize 'fraudulently' because there are some legitimate reasons for spoofing, such as substituting a central callback number (e.g., a legitimate customer service number) for the desk number of the employee making the call. Those legitimate cases are why it is allowed at all. Whether this constitutes a 'good enough' reason, given the rampant abuse, is valid question.

The problem with these regulations is that they are difficult to enforce. How does one report calls with spoofed caller ID when they do not know who actually placed the call?

The numbers are often spoofed, so you'll end up blocking some random local numbers instead.

Of course, this means that call blocking apps have less features than on Android. For example, apps can't dynamically look up a number when a call is revived and make an on-the-fly decision. This is in keeping with iOS' philosophy of "privacy/security over features", vs. Android's "everything is completely open to developers, for better or worse".

Many utilities just opened up the floodgates to email and other forms of customer service, without adding any staff to handle said workload, hence the severe backlog at many of these utilities. Same deal with meter readers, most utilities have stopped hiring them because within 2 to 3 years, the utility will have a new smart meter system implemented across the board, and they'd rather not fire a whole team outright. Letting the employees churn without replacing them is much less dramatic.

France started with 06 and is now using 07… but 08 is already taken for some other purposes.

Just because they ask for it (phone number) does not mean they actually need it. Does USPS ever call anyone? Just enter a fake number (xxx-555-1212 often works if their web programmer was not trying to be smart).

In fact, I once got a new phone number that was previously owned by someone who owed a lot of people money. I was getting regular harassing calls from debt collectors who didn't believe that I was the new owner of the number. So I called the police and filed a report. I then called the phone company and gave them the number of the police report, and they gave me a phone number to call a few minutes after each time the debt collectors would call me. After 2 or 3 calls, they had the contact info of the debt collectors, gave it to the police who contacted the debt collectors and I never heard from them again.

Why can't this approach work for scam calls? I mean if they're outside the country, it would involve more work, but if thousands or millions of people are reporting calls that originate from the same place, then it seems like it would rise to the level of being worth it to do something about it.

Plausible, and kind of works, except when you get regular phone calls from real people whose numbers you don't yet have in your phone. Luckily, this would likely work okay for my mom.

> register on the donotcall list

Which I'm sure Indian call-centers respect.

(Sorry to keep harping on the Indian call-center thing, by the way; I don't mean to show any disrespect to any Indians, but these things do seem to operate largely out of India, much like the 419 scams seem to be forever embedded in the cultural mindset with Nigeria.)

> Why not just switch?

Two year contract that's expensive to get out of.

My advice to her was to report the calls as harassment to Verizon every time; I believe they can't charge you to block harassing calls.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/05/14/google-has-updated-t...

I would love to have it, but I'm not going to buy a Pixel strictly for that purpose.

I think a phone number is shifting to be a replacement for social security numbers in customer databases.

My grocery store/gas station relationship, Guitar Center, jewelry store, and oil/lube service station. And that's just the last week-or-so interactions. They don't know my social, but they're using my phone as a primary key for their rewards/lookup.

If you really wanted to smash it, make it harder for the roboscammers to abuse the relatively new API systems of inexpensively buying phone numbers in the US market. That either has to occur at Twilio & Co's level or it will have to be government action.

If Twilio & Co are smart, they'll get on this soon rather than allowing their business to be destroyed by heavy handed or inept government moves. There are few things more ripe for bad and unintended outcomes than the US government moving rapidly into something they don't understand in the name of safe guarding the people.

I talked to someone who received such a call when he star-69'ed it.

T-Mobile blocks a lot of spam callers, but they do not seem to block these spoofed caller ID calls.

Thankfully these spoofed calls are so easy to spot that they aren't even a real annoyance to me.

http://www.sfgate.com/local/article/Those-who-have-received-...

$300-$900 TPCA settlement. You can query their form for your phone number to see if you're eligible.

I know people with numbers in the same area code, but definitely not with the same prefix. That said, just about every actual person I know texts before calling, if at least to check when might be a good time to call. Almost nobody calls outright, and if they do and I don't answer, there's always a follow-up text.

The same code and prefix thing really seems to have picked up significantly in the last couple months. I have an app that catches most known spam calls, but tends to let these through, which I assume is one of the the underlying reasons for this type of spoofing.

If spam volume from an interconnecting carrier is too high, cut them off.

Telco routing is a lot of twisty passages, but there are many fewer players than internet routing, so it should be easier to get bad apples off the network, as long as there is desire and some users are willing to provide feedback on calls.

http://www.npr.org/2017/07/31/540515367/familiar-looking-num...

One thing that this doesn't mention, but which I heard somewhere, is don't call that number back and ask "Why did you call me?" In case it isn't obvious, the caller IDs are spoofed using random numbers, and the person who has the number listed doesn't know their number is being used this way.

One amusing anecdote from the NPR piece is the person who received a call with a caller ID of ... their own phone number!