FCC threatens carriers with 'regulatory intervention' over robocalls
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I do have a trick in dealing with the calls though. I answer the line but say nothing. Humans will always say something if there is silence for a while. Robocalls will just hang up. And I notice if they hangup, the chance of future calls are lower.
I actually just finished a couple weeks of zero spam calls and it was wonderful...if not a bit on the lonely side
The main reason we have this is to lighten the load of agents manually dialing phones and wasting time on getting answering machines, fax lines, disconnected numbers, etc, which costs the business money and makes it harder to reach the coverage required by our clients by a certain date.
But like I said, it's not perfect, and we are currently fighting an issue where not enough disconnected numbers are being identified as such by the carriers and our agents are having to spend a lot of time manually verifying that they are disconnected numbers.
We don't make an attempt to spoof anything, though. These are calls done on behalf of companies that have active business with you (i.e. you got a new insurance policy and the insurance company wants to ask you some follow-up questions, etc).
How do your agents identify themselves?
What phone number shows up on caller id? Yours or the client's?
It comes up as our phone numbers. If it came up as our clients that would require spoofing.
It's not the most rewarding job I've ever had, but it is the most high profile. I wouldn't imagine having so much of an effect on the business of multiple Fortune 100 clients just a few years ago.
I got curious, and scanned https://www.organdonor.gov/ to see how one gets notified when an organ is available. I didn't see any information after a few minutes of poking around the site.
When a kidney does become available, what is the process by which you'd be notified? Do they make one phone call, and if you don't pick up, they call the next person on the list? Do they broadcast a message to you & everyone you know via every possible telecommunications & social media channel you've provided, and then give you N minutes to reply with "hey, I'm on my way to the hospital now!"
I know of one individual who didn't reply soon enough and missed out. The next match they got was 2 years down the line but it was a very good match.
Edit: I think they do call up a couple people on the top of the list but the highest priority that calls in the time allotted will get it. Again this is still a mystery to me since I'm only half way through my wait time on list so no inquiries up to now.
my stupidest (but i guess not entirely invalid) fear is that i'm listed as the primary contact for my dad in need of a kidney, and i basically can't go to any shows using yondr or any similar situation where i won't be near my phone for a while. or at least make sure that other people that will be contacted too know that i will not be available to pick up.
edit: i guess i didn't answer the specific question though! at least the center where my dad is listed - they have a bunch of contact numbers for us and i have their numbers in my address book plus a request on my voicemail msg to call me twice to bypass DND if necessary. and my dad's renal case manager knows to text/email/call me too and her direct numbers are whitelisted in my phone, always. the 1 hour limit means we (the patient/family) will have less than 1 hour to respond.
i also do believe that the center that gets the notification from UNOS also gets pinged if UNOS don't hear back at all whatsoever (like, a confirmation of the notification at minimum) within 10-15 minutes of the original notification. something like that. basically there's not really a situation where a single missed call will make or break it (unless literally someone is unreachable for the whole time.)
but the reality of this is that, if you're on a transplant list, you basically won't be doing any significant/major travel or be unreachable for long periods of time.
i will say though, this depends on the organ i imagine. i think 1 hour is standard across the board, but lists/priority and other things change dramatically depending on which organ you need - kidneys are viable for longer than hearts, etc.
UNOS/OPTN is where you want to look for information on organ distribution - https://unos.org/transplantation/faqs/ "How does the matching process work?" and https://optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/learn/about-transplantation...
By answering the phone, you're going to get even more spam calls since your number is identified as a live number.
Or you could try the call screening like what Google offers on the Pixel (and there must be other phones/apps that can do the same).
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/google-call-screening-h...
This is the first time I've seen this and I'm appalled. What business is it of the performer whether you look at your phone? Who's paying whom? Also, wouldn't anybody trying to make an unauthorized recording just bring a decoy phone?
And since we're talking about being reachable, what about that issue? If I'm on call for work and I find that I'm required to put my phone into one of those things, I'm going to be super pissed off, because I'm going to have to go home and figure out how to get a refund. How many people have actually died because someone who's suicidal or overdosing or something couldn't contact a particular loved one in one of these phone-free spaces?
I guess this kind of thing could be cute as like a performance art thing but the company trying to push this for use at concerts and comedy shows is just cancer.
When you get the call from the doctor on duty you discuss if your going for it or not - note they normally call two candidates and you both get to the designated hospital for final tests best match gets the kidney.
What other synchronous mode of communication is more reliable than a phone call for this use case?
From the link someone gave in a nearby comment: "Call Screen’s on-device speech recognition lets you see a real-time transcript of what the caller is asked and how they respond." (https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9094888)
Haven't tried the paid mobile version, has anyone tried it?
Can't you contact them on a professional basis (not as a patient), and offer them suggestions on how to fix this and make this better for everyone involved?
We had to take the call screening off the landline as it was potentially stopping calls.
Now I only wish it were the default behavior so I don't even have to press the button.
Do these robocalls harass pagers?
I had a friend in the 90s who was waiting on an organ, his mother carried a pager in case it came in. I don't recall it ever going off even though it was back when telemarketing was arguably as rampant as robocalls are now.
Also, hope your father is doing alright!
“I hope your entire family gets cancer and dies.”
It’s difficult to screen them before they vary the area code so much. Seems like my report through the FCC form of several numbers used should give the feds teeth to track them down since even if they’re using an API like Twilio, I’d expect a carrier would be required by regulators to track all number usage back to somebody.
Just something like, "Please call such such hospital at this number to reach us. We need to get in touch with you. You can google the hospital name to verify before calling."
I get one robocall every day. Interestingly, not 3 or 5, but just about 1 a day.
1. Many older patients don't use cell phones and are still on landlines.
2. Current processes would have to change. Currently healthcare companies first have to ask if the person picking up the phone matches name & DOB. If not, they need to ensure the person is authorized to receive the health information. This is done for confidentiality reasons (e.g. "hi your husband tested positive to $STD… oops you weren't supposed to know that, oh well have a nice day and tell him to make an appointment with us.").
> 1. Many older patients don't use cell phones and are still on landlines.
> 2. Current processes would have to change. Currently healthcare companies first have to ask if the person picking up the phone matches name & DOB. If not, they need to ensure the person is authorized to receive the health information. This is done for confidentiality reasons (e.g. "hi your husband tested positive to $STD… oops you weren't supposed to know that, oh well have a nice day and tell him to make an appointment with us.").
Many healthcare providers now offer forms that allow you to specify the level of detail you would like for messages (typically the same form where you can add a verified contact who is eligible to receive medical information on your behalf). I was able to select something along the lines of "Leave the full details you are reporting, even if it is to a voicemail" though I can understand that that is not workable for everyone.
2. I'm pretty sure they do that for actual callers: However, there are times they call a wife or sibling or child for a patient and they can't verify. Besides, these places DO leave voice mails asking folks to call back. This isn't much different.
Also, this last one could be resolved, but it would take some sort of stronger national digital ID. I have a secure digital mailbox for government stuff. Doctors and hospitals have a different system, but I use the same authentication for both (and payments, actually). This is a greater hurdle than dealing with robocalls, though.
...I may have also made friends with corporate telephony for a similar reason at work, but I'm not admitting anything.
Two years ago I got a txt message, "congratulations you won, we'll be calling you shortly." I thought, "NO WAY" (I remembered doing the 'text [band name] to #####' a few weeks before), then a short time later the phone rang. I picked up the tickets and went to the concert [0].
Might not have answered if not for the text.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/53wch8/17_years_ago_...
When real-time natural speech synthesis arrives with unique accents, coupled to hardware-accelerated machine-learning, it would be within the realm of possible to direct a Turing-test-capable bot to waste a scammer's time with a generated situation and personality that meets various plausibility, social, customer qualifiers and scam-delaying constraints. Also at said point, the "are you a bot?" question non-IRL will be even more worthless but possibly comical.
In the past, I managed to keep a scammer on the phone for an hour or more simply by leaving it on speaker phone and making various "oh really, interesting tell me more" sounds while half paying attention. On more than a few occasions I eventually caused the scammer to either crack up laughing-- after I got tired of stringing them along and hit them with a devastating pun-- or freak out screaming at me.
But in the last two years I've _never_ been able to bait one out long enough for them to have scammed me if I had been an eligible mark and not for the lack of trying. The majority of the scam calls just end up hanging up before I ever get to a human, the majority of those that do make it to a human hang up as soon as they hear my voice. The majority of those that don't immediately hand up, do after a couple back and forth interactions.
"You've been selected to get $1000 back from the IRS for being a great taxpayer!" "Oh man, thats great!" <click>
"You've been selected to get $1000 back from the IRS for being a great taxpayer!" "Really? How did that happen?" <click>
"You've been selected to get $1000 back from the IRS for being a great taxpayer!" "Whos this again?" <click>
I'm wondering if they're now doing some kind of demographic profiling using my voice-- e.g. I don't sound enough like an aged or mentally impaired pensioner, or perhaps even have some kind of machine-learning time waster voice identification. ... or maybe there is some kind of meta-scam where someone is charging another scammer to handle these calls but aren't actually doing the work.
Regardless, I'd like to encourage all of you to do your civic duty and waste a scammers time. It can be done with very little effort on your part and it almost certainly protects real potential victims (even with my frequent hangups, my actions are almost certainly extending protection via false positives, if nothing else). I have confirmed that these actions have not increased or decreased the rate of scam calls I get relative to my SO who doesn't engage in this practice (because she simply does not answer unrecognized numbers at all).
Eventually I change back and tell the person that they're working for a fraudulent business and should worry about whether they're going to get paid, and should strongly consider getting a new job.
Give the full number and an expired date and go "oh.. this is my old card... I'm sorry... give me a moment, I need to look for my new one1'
I also thought that might be the case but have performed the comparison between a number which never answers them and a number which always answers them. Several years now of experience suggests otherwise: they get the same number of spam calls.
> that they've got a recording of a particular person saying "yes"
Again, this sounds highly speculative. Do you have any citation for it? It isn't like any bank or service is comparing your voice. And if all they needed was a yes, unfortunately, there are too many ways of getting a yes from someone.
Obviously when talking to any of these scammers my 'identity' is entirely fictional.
When they used to be more responsive I had a lot of fun trying to convince them that my routing number was "1" and that my account number was "1"... Or that my name was some absurd 40 character compound name like "Jim Klenersmithvelazquezouishawexlereconomou". A friend once kept a caller from "windows" on the line for an enormous amount of time while they "restored" their system via a recovery disk after it "crashed" several times attempting to "install" their malware.
I used to simply reply with “Ola?” but now I just let GV screen the call.
I used to immediately hang up upon receiving these spam/scam calls, but they kept coming, and I decided to do this approach.
I once got a spam call from a "credit card rate reduction" scam and I was so pissed at being interrupted so I decided to play along. I gave them a fake credit card number (that checksums right with the Luhn algorithm, there's a website that generates such fake "credit card numbers"), fake expiration date, fake zipcode, fake SSN, and fake name. Of course, they were unable to charge that "card", so the first-level scammer escalated me to his boss (not kidding). The boss asked for my bank's customer service number -- I imagine so they could pretend to be me and try to finesse the bank into letting the transaction happen. I gave them some random police department dispatch phone number, and she places me on hold. She comes back on the line, literally incandescent with rage after she called the number, and she screamed at me "I talked with the police department, they gave me your address, see you soon, bye bye" and hung up.
That caused the number of spam/scam calls i receive to go down noticeably. These people don't respect any sort of do-not-call lists but I think they may place you on internal do-not-call lists if you waste their time and infuriate them enough.
Couple months later, I got another “interest rate reduction” scam-call, and the guy doesn't waste time with the social-engineering; he straight-up opens by asking me for my credit card number and expiration. I decide to meet fire with fire, and I ask “what name do you show on the account”, he replies “it’s your name”. I pointedly ask “can you read it out for me” so he yells at me: “don’t waste my fucking time, you mother fuck” and hangs up. After I did so, I barely get any spam/scam calls at all -- maybe once every two weeks. It's pretty incredible how a little trolling saved me so much annoyance.
Reminder; never give any personal information to people calling about your credit-card/bank-account no matter who they claim they are. Always HANG UP and dial the number as printed on your payment card, these scamming shits always spoof caller-ID.
I'm still shocked at the amount of times I got legit calls from my bank that start off with "please confirm your details". No, YOU confirm your details. I always tell them sorry, I have no proof that they are who they say, but they usually just say "No problem, call us back on the number on the back of your credit card" or somesuch, which is fine. I just wish they said that right away and didn't ask to confirm details, since it makes scammers lives easier.
But they never proactively asked me to set that up, it's just that I went around this "I can't authenticate to you first, so I'll have to phone you" loop and I pointed out it would work better with a password when I called them back and to my surprise they were like "Yes, we can do that, what password should we say?" and set it up immediately.
So, worth asking I guess?
I once got the credit card interest rate scam (by "card services"), and the 3-level guy got so pissed at me for wasting his time he redirected his complaint line to my number. I would pick up to hear swear words and other things. I had to unplug my landline for an hour.
I contacted AT&T, because a lawyer I talked with said that was the right way to deal with this, and I was blown away how little shits they gave and how much BS they tried to get me to do. I canceled that landline soon after.
Now if only I were allowed to dispose of my mailbox I could have a home free of advertising. Yesterday I received an infuriating catalog from Restoration Hardware that weighed a pound and a half, all because I bought one awful product that fell apart in a few months and had to be recycled. It amazes me that we subsidize such obnoxious ads being delivered to every resident.
That decade-long social norm is dead. Now all phones are for being advertised to.
In Australia basically every mailbox has that on it and it is enforced by law.
https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/508.htm
Sections "1.1.2 Refusal at Delivery" and "1.1.3 Refusal After Delivery".
Here in Finland I think 97%+ of physical advertisement "mail" is non-addressed and the carriers of those respect "no ads" signs (no address => ad).
I think this might be different in US in that advertisement mail is usually addressed?
It's actually the other way around. The amount of bulk mail helps to keep costs low for the USPS. I have receiving it, but it does make things cheaper, because it is only delivered when there's capacity (less busy days).
Naturally you just can't expect a comprehensive fiber network in the largest metropolitan area in the Western world, though.
The german telcos have to my knowledge also started to block large lists of numbers used by the scammers if they are incoming calls. Some stuff still works like callback scams (They ring you for a few seconds, then hang up, calling back is expensive).
There is also the difference that the US is 300 million people that basically all speak english, which is a cheap option to hire for in Indian callcenters. Europe is much more diverse and the languages are more expensive to hire for, so it's less profitable.
Based on my understanding of our phone system it's a bit easier here though, as we don't have the split in operators of the core landline network - it's all OpenReach underneath.
MY dad went through a phase of being plagued because he is from a time when it would be considered rude not to engage in the conversation. As a consequence I suspect he was on some kind of suckers list?
It took a while to train him off this habit, then he discovered email...
On that note, does anyone know how SHAKEN/STIR is supposed to work? I understand that it basically sets up a PKI with JWTs in SIP headers, but from what I can tell there needs to be some sort of trusted CA which creates and signs these things, but I can't tell who that CA is or if there even is an agreed upon central CA.
I'd also be interested in any corrections/expansion on any of the things I said above, I really don't know much about it and would like to.
edit: after making this comment I did a bit more research, and it looks like[0] there will be per-country CAs that can issue certificates to owners of phone numbers within that country. I'm specifically curious about which CAs will be trusted in the United States.
[0]: https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-burger-stir-iana-cert-00.htm...
I'd imagine Ericsson would spin up a new CA instance just for this. As the administratior, they keep the records of who phone numbers are assigned to, and where they've been ported.
My understanding is once a +1 area code is allocated to a country, that country's telecoms regulator manages further allocations (or contracts it out).
I see Neustar has a page that seems related: https://www.home.neustar/atis-testbed/index.php ?
* "Caller Verified is T-Mobile’s implementation of the STIR and SHAKEN standards" [0]
* "Verizon reiterates both our commitment to deploying the STIR/SHAKEN call authentication technology" [1]
* "Sprint supports efforts to build the SHAKEN/STIR call authentication system" [2]
* AT&T doesn't seem to mention STIR or SHAKEN by name on their robocall page [3] but the FCC sent them a letter thanking them for their "commitment to implement a robust call authentication framework in 2019" [4]
* "Comcast is proud to be at the forefront of efforts to address the scourge of illegal spoofed robocalls in this country, including the development of the end-to-end call authentication protocol known as SHAKEN and STIR" [5]
etc
[0]: https://www.t-mobile.com/news/caller-verified-note9
[1]: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1119062987519/2018%2011%2019%20...
[2]: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1091391175368/Sprint%20Call%20A...
[3]: https://about.att.com/sites/cyberaware/ae/robocall
[4]: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354933A2.pdf
[5]: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/111974588343/Comcast%20Resp%20t...
But all in all, the problem is that the phone company will refuse to help unless required by law. They make good money from shitty robocallers.
https://www.cnet.com/news/courts-nixes-fcc-rules-targeting-r...
This guy is anti consumer. Don't let him fool you.
What he is asking for now is that caller IDs be verified. I don't know how realistic that is given the way they are implimented (trivially spoofable) but that's a narrower demand.
The law is not applied by dumb machines. No-one is getting fined in the scenario you mentioned, just like no-one is being fined for calling a pizza place because they found their number on a menu. Behavior can be used to infer consent.
Nobody is looking to saddle non-commercial personal calls with fines or prior consent.
[1] I'm sure it is someone's.
I wouldn't want to see statistical surveys, polling and other grey area items here impacted.
I know the FCC doesn't have express legislative power here, but can't they impose fines or am I mistaken-on either or both?
Since literally everyone I personally know has given up answering calls because of all the spam, I'd say that your "grey area" items are already being impacted.
That was the case before. Political polls and other related things were explicitly exempted.
For example, you "survey" people with questions like "Are you aware that Hello Fresh delivers in your area?" and "Would you be more or less likely to vote for Barack Hussein Obama if you knew he was a Muslim?"
Sadly surveys and polling are already spam, anyone who wants to get rid of phone spam will have to ban nonconsensual telephone polling as well.
At least some of the robodialer operators programatically check out a block of numbers from a VoIP vendor, make a bunch of calls, then release the numbers. If all they have to do is correctly report the number they're calling from, that's pretty useless. The called party has practically no recourse because the number that called them never accepted inbound calls, and has been disconnected by the time you call it back anyway.
How could 'valid caller ID' be defined so that robocallers can be identified?
They simply aren't going to do that unless they're forced by law or regulation.
With spoofed numbers, I’ve seen calls appear to come from an FBI office in Virginia, local and state police divisions, state troopers, and random businesses. There isn’t any way to really deal with those kinds of calls - and you can’t reasonably screen them out.
Honestly, I'd be utterly stunned if this made any noticeable impact at all.
This is exactly the way it should be.
They are trivially spoofable at the tech level. But if there was a "know your customer" style law enforced for telcos, it would be easy to resolve. Telcos know who sends them the call. It's either a) their customer and they're responsible for verification, b) their customer with a signed agreement for caller id substitution (customer is responsible), or c) another telco, and now it's their turn through this question.
Foreign telcos could be a problem, but really, the US can put enough pressure by "comply or we can't legally forward the call" to solve this.
The UK has a lot of white collar crooks who'd really rather you didn't know what they own. Companies House, the regulator and list of all companies incorporated in the UK, was told wink wink to get them to list the actual Human People who control them.
Unsurprisingly in practice the result is full of obvious lies (corporations listed instead of Human People for example) and omissions (companies that claim there is no-one controlling them when obviously they're actually run by a Russian oligarch who suspects his name on the paperwork might make life trickier)
When asked about this Companies House says alas, it doesn't have the funding needed to ever actually prosecute anyone for violating the law. Too bad.
But it turns out they did find enough money to prosecute exactly one person. The person who registered bogus companies with the names of politicians who allowed this bullshit to happen as the Human Persons controlling them. That person, unlike all the tax evading billionaires, crooks, and mass murderers known to be violating the law, got prosecuted...
The _wrong_ lesson is that we shouldn't have asked. The _right_ lesson is that the government is complicit and its regulator needs to be run by somebody who isn't there to cover for the bad guys.
If they also add large fines for spoofing, with strong & rapid enforcement, that may at least reduce the onslaught of 'neighbor spoofing' calls.
They also need to add large fines with strong & rapid enforcement for violating the Do Not Call list.
With this, there might be the basis for a set of apps allowing users to add numbers to blacklists that then just get routed to the bitbucket.
It should be done at the network level by Verizon/AT&T, etc. let us subscribe to and augment the blacklists.
At that office, like every desk (many unoccupied) had a normal phone, with an extension #.
In one instance, a recruiter called and it was answered and he/she was told not interested. After that call, every phone on each of the row of desks started ringing one at a time.
After about 3 - 5 such ringings, someone picked up and told them to knock it off.
For one thing, I have no idea how they got my desk number (they knew my name), as that's supposed to be internal-only information, so that was an unpleasant surprise.
For another thing, I'm of that population that strongly prefers text-mode communication over phone calls.
So making an cold call to my work was a great way to get a "fuck off" and blacklist that recruiter. I wonder from what business culture they come from, and what their success rate with that method are, to make that approach seem viable.
If you need 1 minute per number: ~10,000,000 minutes * 0.013 $/minute = $130,000
[2-9](?!11)[0-9]{2}
So there's only 7,200,000 numbers allowable within a singe NANP area code.
Just sayin'...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/telephone-scam-artist-p...
> A telephone scam artist picked the wrong target — former FBI chief and CIA boss William Webster.
What they may want to consider is a team of people to actually take the calls and trace them back to the source. Or at least the people that are making money in some way. And don't say or react 'oh that wouldn't work'. Of course it would work if done correctly. No point in selling health insurance by way of a third party making calls or on your own if it will get you in hot water.
From what I can tell nobody is making robo calls to simply be annoying. It's quite different than a DOS attack done for fun or many other 'crimes' if you want to call it that.
Not that they shouldn't approach this in the way they are. But to simply make as if there is no way to get the perps is a bit ridiculous. Someone is in the end selling something or collecting some name or something like that.
I am reminded of what I thought back when graffiti was a bigger deal than it is now. Why not simply set honey pots that you know are going to get tagged? Or monitor various locations likely to get graffiti.
Now this doesn't mean that offshore people with scams won't get involved. That could happen. But as a start might make sense to at least gut the people in the US that are benefiting from this (in addition not instead of other 'remedies' by the carriers).
My hope is that this is training these individuals to be more aware of the issue, assuming they've forgotten about it due to being desensitized or using some paid caller ID spam service that not everyone has access to for lack of funds.
I've also long turned off my voice mail; it's just a waste of time.
I don't like junk calls either but cutting myself off from normal communication channels doesn't seem as if it would be very practical.
And, yes, I do in fact use punctuation on text messages...
I've heard that some smart phones don't let people use my method any more. i.e. you can not set default tones to silent.
In 2018 Americans got 26.3 billion robocalls, up 46% from 2017.
With an estimated population of 328,863,150 in 2018, that's 79 per person, so more than once a week on average, and of course a whole bunch of that population doesn't have a phone (e.g. most kids)
I get far fewer scam calls on the cell phone than I do on my ex-landline (now VoIP), at least. For the VoIP, I had to set up a CAPTCHA on Asterisk.
You should double check with customer care (611). As I mention in a sibling comment, I'm on a very old plan (20+ years). It's SimpleChoice, 10GB per line unlimited calling and texting (4 lines + 2 free as part of a one time promo).
I only get about one a week because I don't engage with the robocalls or give my number out freely.
Other people don't protect their privacy as well, or they do engage with the robocalls (answer, or say "hello" when they answer which triggers the bot to continue, etc).
Can you cite some support for this belief?
My SO never answers any calls with unrecognized numbers, screening all of them via voicemail.
I eagerly respond to every call in an effort to waste the scammer's time.
We get the same number of junk calls.
Or maybe the robocallers could be calling you two equally because whatever information they have, indicates the owners of those two numbers are married and either person could answer the phone. All they know is that they spend a lot of time on the phone with you, and you haven't bought anything yet.
I'm not sure why the facts that different people have different views on privacy or that robocallers wait for victims to say something, need to be cited.
If you meant to quote this: "I only get about one a week because I don't engage with the robocalls or give my number out freely." I should have written "... in part because ..."
There are probably other factors that robocallers use to profile their victims such as income, debts, purchase history, family, etc which they probably use to target (call them more often) people who they think are more susceptable to their scams/products/services.
One piece of anecdata I'd note is that I'm around people all the time, and their phones are seldom ringing. When they do ring, they at least look at it.
Nice to get that evening call from Stan, or James, or Dave, wanting to clean my ducts. Every fucking evening.
Yes, FCC. Do it do it do it!
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/11/20/fcc-has...
It's definitely not a blind system of calling all numbers, you can have a robocall-free existence. I've simply never supplied the numbers for those phones to any personal information selling (or leaking) services/businesses, and that seems to effectively keep them off the call lists.
Dear Google: here take my money! Keep Google Voice!
Sadly, I'm not aware of a good way to filter these out.
¹The factory warranty on my vehicle is going to expire? I don't have a vehicle with an expiring warranty. "This is your final notice" how I wish those words would be true. Or my "medical-grade knee brace" that I supposedly wear. Or the interest rate I could get on the CC I don't have.
[Edit: And I think it is in fact working, in that the non-fraud people don't call me much anymore. So the ones who do call are the ones willing to break the do-not-call law, which means they're probably also willing to break other laws, like the ones against fraud.]
These days I just don't answer unless it's someone in my contacts, if it's anything important they'll leave a message.
Wonder if it's possible to have a plan with NO voice on it!
For cell phones, you'll usually have to pay for such an app that can intercept calls and check RBLs of naughty numbers.
We really need a solution to prevent number spoofing.
It's about time.