Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I've had to do the same. I sometimes get three calls and voicemails per day about business loans. I'm pretty sure they got my number by scraping the LLC filings for my state :\.
I wish I would of used a Google Voice number rather than my cell.
I kept one agent on the line for a few minutes and was eventually called some very insulting swear words. If I recall correctly I was called a "bitchass mother fucker"
I think it might be something silly like confirming the number has a person on the other end. For selling to other spammers. Not sure why they can't do both at once though, so maybe I'm off.
And, obviously, they can save a bit by always having more phones answer than they can handle. This way their employees don't waste any time waiting for a call, instead it's your time that is wasted, what costs them nothing.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871131 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16873537 for what's actually happening.
I occasionally watch this guy who calls tech-support scammers or IRS scammers and attempts to waste as much of their time as possible. He will often impersonate an old lady using a voice modulator (or he'll implement other personalities) to make his performance more realistic. It can be quite entertaining.
Most of the calls are about getting my ‘business listed with google’
1. Vacation Rewards Center - selling cruises I think
2. Business line of credit - their phrasing make it sound like I called them ("Hey, just getting back to you about that $15k line of credit)
3. Tax scare tactics, trying to settle debt or penalties
I didn't know who feel for this stuff until I talked to an older gentleman who said he got these calls and it took him a long time and encouragement from his friends to know it was a scam.
I've never clicked '1', and never felt I've missed out, but I've gotten that same call from local numbers in my same block maybe 50 times already this year.
The interesting thing is that I usually only get a person 1/2 the time. The system just glitches to hangup the rest of the time.
I have considered enabling a feature that blocks all calls unless the caller is in my contacts list but I am concerned about missing something important.
Any thoughts on this?
Block any call for the native, non Google Voice number or Block any call claiming to originate from any number in the native number's local prefix. Eg, 604-233-
I haven't found a call blocker that can do this, but it has been a while since I looked.
I have been receiving alot of these spoofed neighbor number calls, and this app saves me a lot of time and stress. You can also prevent it from blocking contacts that fall into your blocked number range.
0: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/number-shield/id1319082167?m...
Edit: I read a review of Hiya and it sounds like they're still missing what we're all looking for: "Two things are missing. First, the ability to block all calls not in contacts. I have to download a separate app for that. Second, on inbound calls from the same area code (i.e., spoofed numbers) it does not pre-screen the call."
I have my phone in a permanent "Do Not Disturb" mode with a few break-through rules for "favorite" contacts (not even all contacts). Missed important calls: 0. If someone's calling and doesn't leave the voicemail, then it's not important.
I have been using this for 3 years. No issues at all.
Anyone who's important (including kid's school) is in my contact list, so I'm confident that I'm not missing anything important. And in the off chance it is important but not in my white list they will leave a message.
Why?
I send all calls that block the caller ID automatically to voicemail.
If I get repeated spam voicemails from the same number, I manually add it to a contact called “Block”. The next time they call they get a special voicemail message I recorded telling them the number is no longer in service.
This system has worked well for years.
People can leave a message. Officials can leave a message. When do you ever need to answer a call from a official? 911 is for getting instant help in emergencies. No one needs you to answer your personal phone immediately.
On a serious note, all buildings are different so you can't really do this reliably as it is unlikely you will locate the lightning rod before it is too late to course correct.
So please tell me you are joking :)
They called you, after all. They can just say what they wanted to say whether you acknowledge them or not.
Anything more restricted would make you unavailable if, say, the police called because a family member was in a crash. I will put up with some inconvenience to be available in rare emergencies.
Perhaps there would be an override if they kept calling back.
Would you also take your phone into the shower with you so you don't miss a potential call?
If I'm available I don't want to wait to find out a family member was in an accident or something.
> Would you also take your phone into the shower with you so you don't miss a potential call?
No, because I'm in the shower for less than 10 minutes. If some kind of emergency unfortunately happens while I'm in the shower then I guess I'll just have to find out after my shower. I can live with that.
None I've yet found clearly advertise a whitelisting feature, though that's obviously the direction to roll.
I'm also trying to see if Asterisk might be applicable here.
> I don't trust anyone calling from a non-local exchange
Modern telecom scammers spoof your local exchange when they call you.
I get so many robocalls, I stopped answering my phone. But when I get a FaceTime call or an iMessage, I'm on it.
Robocalls dilute the trust consumers have in the phone system. The telcos are rapidly ceding this trust to other forms of communication -- those provided Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook etc. As robocalls proliferate, tech companies win and telcos lose. Unless they fix this, eventually the phone system might go away entirely. Consumers -- especially young people -- won't want or need it.
I for one have had calls disabled on my phone for a long time. Couldn't be happier. AT&T, Tmobile, etc... it didn't matter what carrier I had, they would all tell me to install some 3rd party app to block "unknown" calls and robocalls. Absolutely ridiculous.
If it made business sense to do this, it would happen. Until then, it probably won't. Perhaps serving millions of robocalls are more profitable than the number of consumers who will totally cancel their telephone service as a result of them.
I suspect a higher-level issue is that illegal junk calls fall into the mild annoyance category for most people. If the average person was getting a hundred calls a day to the point where they couldn't use their phone service, something would happen.
This does seem to be the endgame. The last excuse I heard was "what if a friend of a friend wants to invite you to her party so she gets your number from the shared friend, and she also does the same for a bunch of other friends of friends?"
This also seems problematic?
It is possible, but easy it definitely is not.
We just let the home phone roll to VM now. I don't answer the work phone and only my mobile phone if I know the caller. Grrrr.
Not sure if this is because of some sort of built in spam protection, or if because my area code is weird,but, worth considering?
I think it's reached the "penny stock" mark by now, I haven't had a call in 8 months.
Is it still on your credit report? You can challenge it.
If it goes to court you can most likely have it ruled invalid as well.
It's funny how freedom of speech is considered in light of for-profit stuff like this (in the Bloomberg article it was the misleading nature of the calls, not the calls themselves), but not with regards to stuff like hate speech and political speech.
In an ethical world, it would be time for a flip: heavily regulate the commercial elements of speech.
You're lucky: in the US, that's already the case legally. There's no such thing as an hate speech exception to the First Amendment, and political speech in general is mostly untouchable, whereas commercial speech can be much more regulated.
Which is why this man is facing a $120M fine.
hate speech in USA is protected unless it directly triggers violence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
political speech in USA is also highly protected -- political calls are even exempt from anti-telemarketing laws that exist today.
https://www.cga.ct.gov/2006/rpt/2006-R-0717.htm
Current law explicitly says that commercial speech is less protected than non-commerical speech.
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-17-80A1.pd...
He almost murdered someone, spread out across 100M people.
* Open source software and long distance companies make it too easy
* Why didn't they stop me?
* They should have regulated me.
* Other people do it worse.
"There are bigger fish in the sea so why are you even going after me?"
In the US there is a real problem with selective enforcement in general but this is BS, the fact that someone else is breaking the law worse doesn't make your crime not a thing.
1. He's right, biased enforcement is a crime against society. It encourages increased criminality by those who are "above the law", and unfairly harms the personal social networks of prosecuted criminals, while the personal social networks on non-prosecuted criminals thrive and have relatively more social power.
2. Random(ish) enforcement is a cost-effective deterrent. Convict 10% of the crooks, make them pay 11x their gains, and the expected value of the scam goes negative, deterring rational scammers.
Because he's still a fish.
The population of those who do not answer unknown numbers possibly has risen to 60% of the US population. I bet all of us here don't answer unknown numbers.
Text or email me and if it's important or you are important to me then I'll respond. Don't bother to leave a voicemail either unless you are going to give me money, a new job or there's a situation that desperately needs my attention.
One wrong call from a motivated scammer and I feared it could end in bankruptcy for them. On one occasion, a telemarketing scam ended up costing an elderly relative a couple thousand dollars that required other family members to help cover for her.
Imagine the future of mobile adware...where they get access to your contact list, generate generic names of similar ethnicity to your real contacts, and add fake contacts. Or they add additional numbers to contacts you already have.
"Oh, my friend Stan is calling. DANGIT NO I DON'T WANT A MEDICARE SUPPLEMENT PLAN!"
And on a related note, I much prefer interacting with customer service through a well designed website or app, rather than having to call, figure out the menu, sit on hold forever, and finally talk to someone who can't help me. It boggles my mind that a phone number is the main way to get service from so many companies.
On a related note, I'm curious about a scam that popped up when I added a Craigslist ad the other day; I normally include my number, because I live in the midwest and people buying construction material don't have email; that's never been an issue.
But this time, I've gotten two separate robo text-messages asking I reply via email to magalife3@gmail.com. Googling highlights this person is spamming a few public places as well: https://www.google.com/search?q=+magalife3%40gmail.com
Curious if anyone else has come across something like that - is it just a way to get past spam filters by having me make an outbound email to the scammer?
http://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2015/01/is-item-still-avail...
Gem of a line on that page: "In reality, only poor people use Western Union, so don't be a poor person and just stop using it. "
It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the sheer chutzpah needed to say something like that. "The issue isn't that I did it, the issue is that you didn't make other people stop me." Textbook sociopathic behavior.
While Zuckerberg walked a fine line and performed as well as anyone could under such situation, I was left disappointed.
He (more or less) took a beating from congress without ever pointing the finger back at them, or at the telecom industry, or the NSA, or anyone else who is breaking trust and downright abusing existing platforms and ignoring privacy.
Robo calls are straight up scams. They're on the rise, and they're not being given any attention. This is indeed hopefully the first domino to fall, that will bring this to an end.
For those interested in these these scam calls, there's a guy on Twitch (live right now) who streams reverse scamming these centers and taking up their time.
Time and place. Zuck's job there was to defend facebook from retaliation, not piss off Congress with whatboutism.
Congressional hearings are show trials, not courts of justice.
Exactly, given the fact that most of the senators were donated to by FB prior, and the fact that they all had met days before the "hearing" and had conversations about FB etc, I am pretty sure it was bunch of congressional dinosaurs attempting to be sycophants in the private pre-meetings/dinners...
Its a farce. And given that FB tracks even physical people without their permission, or consent - FB is a social cancer just waiting to metastasize.
I use an app called nomorobo ($2/month) that's basically a blacklist that gets continually updated to block these calls prior to ringing my phone. The way they deal with the neighborhood spoofing is having local access to your contacts so they don't accidentally block any real numbers (though those that happen to be an exact match will go through).
My spam calls went from one to two a day to zero.
I don’t mind paying it either since I can report numbers that get through to their blacklist. I feel like I’m fighting back.
The do not disturb work around mutes all notifications which makes it useless for me.
Sounds like you are on iOS?
Add in the fact that people with landlines are more likely to be older people whose priors expect a human to be calling, and the only real question is why don't the spammers catalog and then exclusively target landline prefixes with this method.
It seems like ILECs could start offering a service based on ingress filtering source addrs based on numbers they know haven't been ported out, but Ma Bell is the antithesis of innovation.
Your telco knows what phone number you pay for. Can't they just not connect calls that claim to be coming from not-that-number?
What would be more useful is accessible path information, so I can complain to my carrier about a call, and they can find out where it came from and throw people or companies off the network.
It shouldn't be difficult to get a single number that is legitimate and limit the caller id to that number. Any telecom carrier whose customer is requesting a wide variety of phone numbers ought to know that something sketchy is going on.
But the carrier that handles inbound calling charges an arm and a leg for outbound, so I'd like to use another carrier for outbound; I don't want to change my inbound carrier.
It's natural for things to seem this way, but that's because there's enough data on HN to produce seeming patterns of all kinds. Overwhelmingly, it's just users being users. Unfortunately the internet habit of leaping to "shill!" or "PR!" as an explanation for $annoying_view does more damage, because it's more widespread. That's why we ask people to inhibit the reflex.
I've posted a ton about this if anyone wants more background: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
They want to know everything about everyone. Always have.
Or maybe Facebook put the games/apps up for free and just gave the data away?
I dunno, but "We aren't in the business of selling your data. We just gave it away." isn't a great message.
The point is that companies like Tesla can change their business model at anytime and start selling something new, like they did when they started selling battery packs in addition to cars.
People weren't expecting targeted political propaganda and other sketchy things.
This is one of the best things I've ever seen.
The robocallers are already using NLP to call me, so why doesn't someone use it to waste their time?
I spent a solid couple minutes trying to find the screencap, but it went down in 4chan history for the distinct Hiroyuki-style response, that went something like
>Many DDOS IPs were from Russia. So, we block Russian IPs. Now, DDOS ended.
What I get are not spam calls, but silent calls. When I answer them there is no sound at all from the other end. If I let calls go to voice mail they leave long silent voicemails.
I also get calls which ring for only a couple of seconds, hardly long enough to reach for my phone before they hang up.
I've heard that these may be scammers trying to trick me into calling back, so they could charge me however many dollars per minute.
New contacts can leave a message, and you can call back and add them to contact book if desired.
> trick me into calling back, so they could charge me however many dollars per minute.
Yup. Bitcoin scammers and dark-pattern website builders have got nothing on classic telecom scammers, exploiting fundamental flaws in the trust model.
In 2007, when the iPhone was first released, maybe the “phone” part was an important app. Now though, I can’t believe the phone app is still allowed to immediately interrupt anything I am doing and take over the entire screen!
What’s worse is that the Answer and Hang Up buttons could easily appear right under your fingers while you’re in the middle of using a definitely-not-phone app, causing you to do things you don’t want.
And why are my only options to “Do Not Disturb” (blocking everything, including stuff I don’t want to block), or to just sit and wait for the ringing to end? If I answer or hang up immediately, the spammer knows I’m a real person with a valid phone number and I probably end up on a list for more spam.
Here’s what I want: a checkbox that says “do not ever ring my phone, allow voicemail”, with an option to use a standard notification if a call comes in. Period. Tired of the full-screen-screw-whatever-you-were-doing-here’s-some-spam interface.
It's a shame Mr. Abramovich did not learn respect at yeshiva, if he was raised in my orthodox community he would not be acting like this..
Instead of just popping my head into every comment, I wanted to give some insight into what's actually happening out there.
Background: I won the FTC Robocall Challenge back in 2013. I turned my prototype/idea into Nomorobo, which is the leading robocall blocker out there. In 4 years, we've stopped over 630 million robocalls from reaching people.
I'll actually be testifying at next week's House subcommittee hearing on robocalls.
# Not picking up unknown numbers
Unfortunately, this is what people think is the best solution. Even the government gives this advice. #1 is to use a robocall blocker and #2 is to not answer numbers that you don't recognize.
That frustrates me to no end. That's not a good answer.
"Doctor, it hurts when I do 'this'. Then don't do 'that'."
I really get worried when people say they turn on Do Not Disturb. What if there's an emergency? You have no idea who needs to call you.
This is especially important for people with kids. Is it a school? Is it a neighbor?
This is an actual story that happened to me - no BS.
My Uncle wound up in the hospital last month. Ambulance had to come pick him up off the bathroom floor and everything. No one in the family knew it was happening.
I got a call from a number that I didn't recognize but, since I trust Nomorobo, I answered it. It was my Uncle telling me what happened, what hospital he was in, etc.
Damn good thing that I answered that call.
But the fun doesn't stop there.
A few hours later, I go over to his house to pick up a bunch of his stuff and bring it over to the hospital for him. While I'm getting things together, his old flip-style cell phone starts ringing. I figure it's one of his friends that's worried about him.
I answer it.
"Congratulations! You've won a free cruise."
# Neighbor Spoofing
Yep - if the number shown is close to yours and it's not in your contacts, it's probably a robocaller. But spoofing is the norm with robocall scams.
Our algorithm detects over 1300 new robocalling numbers every day and they're basically all spoofed.
Whatever number is shown usually can't be called back. It usually doesn't belong to the actual robocaller. And they usually try to make the call take a confusing journey through "the tubes" that's impossible to trace back.
Neighbor spoofing is really hard for carriers to stop because a lot of people have sequential numbers and they don't want to accidentally block good calls.
It's especially confusing when people don't understand what's going on and they call back the unknown number:
Person A: Why did you call me? Person B: I didn't call you. Why are you calling me? Person A: Because you called me. Person B: No, I didn't. Person A: Yes, you did. Person B: Leave me alone, crazy person. [blocked]
But, as an app on your phone, it's really easy for us to stop.
If you give us permission to look at your contact list (they never leave your phone and are never stored by us), then we can fully block all neighbor spoofed calls. If you don't give us that permission, we simply identify them as "Robocaller" whenever they call.
# Wasting their time
Don't waste YOUR time. It will not help. You are trying to warm up the ocean by pissing into it.
The scale that these automated callers work at is unbelievable.
According to our stats, 40% of all calls in the US are spam robocalls.
Someone mentioned Jolly Roger Telco. We worked with them this holiday season to make www.DoNotCallChristmas.com. It was fun and it makes people feel good but that's about the only impact it has on the problem.
# So...why don't the carriers just make the calls stop?
There are a lot of tech people here on HN. You know TFW someone says to you, "Oh, that's easy - you just hook up a database to a web page, right?"
"And put some that blockchains in there while you're at it."
Well, it's the same way with the phone system. It's not as easy as it looks.
The phone system has a birth defect. Call it one of the worst cases of technical debt, ever.
When it was first created, it was a closed, trusted system (with AT&T running the whole shebang). No one could imagine a situation where someone would lie about the caller ID so they didn't require it to be verified.
But then the system changed. Deregulation. The rise of VoIP. Interconnectivity.
Whoops. Toothpaste is out of the tube. It's tough to put it back in.
So, yes, secure and verified caller ID systems are being worked on (STIR/SHAKEN) but it's years off.
Will it reduce voice spam? Of course. But, this problem will NEVER go away.
People still get ripped off every day by thinking that the Nigerian Price is going to make them rich.
# What about the Do Not Call list?
The laws that govern automated calling were written back in the early 90's.
I was using a 14.4k baud modem and connecting to BBSes at that time. The internet as we know it didn't exist. People were still paying by-the-minute for long distance phone service. Then technology rocketed past regulations.
Today, the Do Not Call list is virtually useless against modern robocalling scammers.
At the House subcommittee hearing next week, I'm actually going to advocate that the government scrap all the existing laws and rewrite them with a simple, plain thought:
High frequency, automated phone soliciting should be opt-IN, not opt-out.
You must have the express written permission of the person that you are calling. Period. Full stop.
It doesn't matter if your number is on the Do Not Call Registry or not. It doesn't matter if you're calling a landline or a cell phone. It doesn't matter if it's a business or a residential line.
Got permission? OK. Don't have permission? Nope.
Note: If you're sending a purely informational message, this doesn't apply. I'm only talking about commercial solicitations here. Think of it like preventing modern day door-to-door salespeople. Ride hailing notification, doctor's office reminders, schools closing, etc. just aren't the same type of thing.
# Closing thoughts
So, in 2018, the best way to stop these types of scams is by using a robocall blocker. I'm highly biased here but I think Nomorobo is the best one out there. We understand the problem and the solution better than anyone else. It's completely free on landlines and has a 14-day free trial on mobile. On top of all that, we're extremely privacy friendly.
And, while I never blame the victims, there is a bit of a shared responsibility that we all have here. The more people that use robocall blocking technology, the less effective these scams will be. The less effective they are, the less of them there will be. It's a virtuous cycle.
Let me know if there's anything else that you'd like to dig into. I'm all ears.