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Comment by bradleyankrom | Hacker News Reader

do you iive outside the U.S.?

I like in the UK and get maybe 5 robocalls a year. I'm not at all cautious about giving out my phone number and I've had the same number for at least 10 years.

Why is this such a problem in America but not elsewhere?

I'm not an expert, but I would guess that regulation around these kinds of `nuisance` calls is tighter outside the U.S. We (in the U.S.) have a National Do Not Call Registry[0] but I don't know how strong the enforcement of violations is. With scammers, I think much of the problem is that they're using VoIP and other technologies that make it difficult to pin down exactly who is making the calls, and from where.

[0] https://www.donotcall.gov

It's not. Robocalls are one of those things that really upsets a small subset of people either because they are overly sensitive to robocalls or that they are a member of that unlucky subset that does receive a very high amount. Like most things in the social media era, the grievances of a very vocal minority appear to be a larger group than they actually are.

For example, the title of the article tells us that robocalls are "killing us".

> Robocalls are one of those things that really upsets a small subset of people either because they are overly sensitive to robocalls or that they are a member of that unlucky subset that does receive a very high amount.

And you never get Robocalls?

I live it the US, had my number for 10+ years and actually have not gotten a Robocall once.

And I have shared my number in a lot of places

Between my cell and landline, I get 5 to 10 "robocalls" a day. Recently I started getting them in the wee hours of the morning. They outnumber legitimate calls about 30:1. Very many show up with a Caller ID with a spoofed local area-code and prefix.

I noticed a big uptick when I was dumb enough to buy a domain without paying the privacy fee.

i am guessing that robocalls go after specific demographics. so people in more popular groups get more calls than others

I think there is less intelligence in the system than that. I get a lot of robocalls in Spanish, a language I do not know. (and other than living in California, there's not a lot about me that would suggest I know Spanish?) I mean, it is a small portion of my robocalls, but it's still several a week, when I answer unknown numbers.

But, I get a lot of robocalls; 3 calls a day is light. So clearly, some people get more calls than others, I'm just saying, I don't think the filtering criteria is particularly smart.

that, or the source data is not very good. maybe you got a phone number used by a person of spanish origin before.

that's sort of what I was getting at? I mean, I think that we have the same problem we have with spam; it's so cheap to send it that it doesn't really matter that only a tiny fraction of those who receive the spam might actually be credible targets; but it's so cheap that it doesn't really matter.

I’m in Finland. I get about 2-3 telemarketing calls a month which I quickly end and add the number as a spam contact.

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