Good + heavy $$$ punishments. My father had heart attack few weeks ago and my brother refused to pickup a call, because he was thinking that it was a robocall. It was a call from hospital in VA, they a left voicemail.
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.
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.
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_...