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Comment by phaer | Hacker News Reader

I read a lot about the plague that robocalls are on international forums, especially from the U.S.

But I live in central Europe, Austria, and received only two SPAM calls in my whole life, both by what seemed to be actual human agents on the other side and hear from similar amounts from friends I've asked about the phenomena.

Can someone explain why it seems such hard to resolve problem elsewhere while it seems hardly a problem at all here? Is there a difference in infrastructure, a difference in legislature, ...?

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Robocallers in the EU get meaningful fines. European telecoms providers proactively identify and block robocallers. VOIP companies that do business with robocallers lose the right to connect to the telephone network.

It's not an insurmountable problem, you just need regulators that give a damn.

https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/?facet_type...

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/inform...

The difference is regulation.

The US is firmly gripped by the belief that "regulation doesn't work", and keeps electing people who try to prove that true via incompetence, cronyism and ideological malice.

We have plenty of regulation and government attention on the issue, and I somehow doubt Congressional pockets are being lined by the campaign contributions from Big Spam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_Registry

The problem is that a lot of spam callers are not based in the US, and it is incredibly time consuming and expensive to prosecute spam callers outside the US.

The wheels of justice work, but they don't move very quickly. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/business/irs-phone-scams-...

Carriers make money terminating the calls both in terms of using people’s cell minutes but all reciprocal compensation for terminating the call on their network. Carriers can get rid of it any time they want. Some even offer services to block the calls for a price like Att call protect.

Politicians are not being supported by the spammers themselves, but by the telecoms that do not want to make costly changes to their network to stop or enforce this problem.

This couldn’t be more obvious in our fcc chair who is basically against any kind of government regulation.

And don't forget the little fact that the telecoms make money from providing service to the spammers.

It's amazing how often I hear this kind of argument. "<Xyz> didn't work because it wasn't done correctly"

Why do we humans do that? Why doesn't failure cause introspection/examination rather than excuse making?

On a side note, it feels conspiratorial to explain failure as, "there's double agents on the inside sabotaging the effort"

> On a side note, it feels conspiratorial to explain failure as, "there's double agents on the inside sabotaging the effort"

There are people currently heading government agencies that lobbied or fought against those agencies. See the CFPB and EPA. It's not a conspiracy–it's reality.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture for a discussion of this topic.

> conspiratorial

Politicians underfunding programs, then suggesting we should cut or privatize them because they performed poorly, all intentionally, is a well known and mostly open fact, not a closely guarded secret conspiracy.

Nope, turns out it is some sort of crappy regulation preventing providers from stopping the robocallers from spoofing numbers in the US:

>"The FCC last year authorized voice service providers to block more types of calls in which the Caller ID has been spoofed or in which the number on the Caller ID is invalid." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/robocallers-evol...

Nope, turns out there is virtually no downside to making spam calls in the US, and so companies continue to do it. The spoofed numbers are just a way they implement that to get around consumer efforts to prevent it.

I'll take your word for that. But the problem is that bad regulation has created a downside for providers to block spam calls so they continue not to.

I would easily switch providers tomorrow if one of the features was "no spoofed numbers". This would be a giant market advantage if not prevented by this regulatory issue (whatever it is).

T-Mobile offers it for free: https://www.t-mobile.com/resources/call-protection

Verizon Wireless offers it for $2.99 a line: https://www.verizonwireless.com/support/call-filter-faqs/

Not sure about the other major carriers.

Neither of those block spoofed numbers, both work by creating a blacklist.

I am on T-Mobile. There was a point when most of the spam to my phone was from Scam Likely. Then the robocallers learned that this is the truth, and I get spam about my credit card and something in Chinese that isn't so flagged.

I haven't gotten a single spam call since enabling the blocking.

If that were the root cause, it would have already been fixed. There is no FCC regulation that Congress can't change.

Maybe just the market fragmentation. For example, a lot of the robocalls in the US are trying to sell extended warranties for vehicles, student loan debt services, health/life insurance, scammy tech support, etc.

If you target the US, your sales pitch can be in one language, with roughly one set of commission paying providers, and super cheap VoIP calls. I assume that would be harder in Europe due to language, state provided services for health+education, more strict laws on loans and warranties, differing costs for local VoIP numbers, etc. You would likely have to tailor for each country.

Agreed. I experienced a bit of a culture shock moving from Northern Europe to USA. Robocalls are a real pain here in the USA and I don’t know why. I’ve learned that I should never answer a call from a number I don’t know (not that easy), but it doesn’t have to be this way.

I also get a number of text messages trying to phish me into buying drugs or sex. It’s totally nuts.

> I've learned that I should never answer a call from a number I don’t know (not that easy), but it doesn’t have to be this way.

Not only that, but you basically need to program in all the random numbers you do business with to make sure you don't miss something important. Dentist, doctor, real estate agent, mortgage officer, the random office you're only going to visit once who did your MRI.

And still, someone can just as easily spoof one of those numbers (even purely by coincidence) and you'll pick up.

Apparently in Europe you're the customer. However on this side of the Atlantic we're the product. Big difference.

It's like sitting down at a poker game and looking around the table. If you can't spot the mark, well you're the s/mark/product/g.

When I was young I would hear the saying: "The value of a business is directly related to the goodwill associated with it." I haven't heard that in a long time. But I have heard: "We don't care, we don't have to."

Proof's in the pudding: just as with universal healthcare we can't seem to get it together. All(most?) of Europe and Canada and Russia and Israel manage to pull it off. Too bad for US.

It could have something to do with data sharing, which people in the US (myself included) seem to do more of compared to e.g. those in europe (in my experience).

I get 10+ robo/spam calls a day (to the point where I just gave up on answering all unknown numbers over a year ago) but when I do answer the occasional one they seem surprisingly targeted. I was searching for health insurance a few months ago and that spawned 4-5 robocalls/day all about health insurance. I run a small business that gets ~5 calls/day about financing and a smattering of other cold robocalls about services people could provide. When I had a death in the family, I started getting robocalls about funeral services and life insurance.

I don't know why it's so hard to resolve (why isn't cold calling someone illegal?) but on a personal level it's relatively easy to mostly-resolve by screening calls and limiting your number's exposure (both online and to businesses that resell that information). Lack of regulation, enforcement on what regulations do exist, availability of numbers to buy (aided by metadata on who is on the other side of that number), and a heavier reliance on phones/calls in general (compared to my 1.5 years living in europe) seems to be the biggest driving factors.

> It could have something to do with data sharing.

Hardly. I got my first robo call (ever) within an hour of getting my first US phone number. They have been a constant annoyance for me ever since. I have never gotten a robocall outside of the US.

Calling to almost all US numbers is cheap. You don't have to pay more to call mobile numbers, for example.

Additionally, people in the US have a generally high ability to pay and often have means to pay for things over the phone.

So, you don't have to pay much to try to scam people, and if you do, you're likely to get paid.

Probably the proliferation of small telephone companies helps avoid tracking and getting booted off the network.

Maybe if each caller be required to pay a few cents per call, mass robocalling will be too expensive. Same for email spam: charge an e-stamp of a cent or two. I'd be willing to pay a bit to keep out riff raff.

Frequent callers/emailers who you register with your account can be given a discount.

The overwhelming majority of the US also speaks English, which makes it really easy to hire telephone operators. And there's also large immigrant communities that do not speak well enough and are unfamiliar with and afraid of the government.

There are 38M Spanish speakers in the US compared to 8M people in all of Austria.

Reply All had an episode that explored it: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/135-the-robocall-conun... One reason is that a law that had existed was overturned as too broad. Another is the lax laws in the USA regarding what businesses can do with information about customers. In the episode they talk about how an app on your phone that is allowed location access may sell that information to a spam caller so that the spam caller can fake the phone number to make it appear to be coming from near you.

Counterpoint: the moment you do receive spam calls in Austria, our regulatory office is so incompetent, they'll not do anything about it. Last time their reply was "this is a VOIP number and it's already disconnected, so we cannot figure out who the caller was" ... after waiting a month before contacting the involved carriers.

> Can someone explain why it seems such hard to resolve problem elsewhere while it seems hardly a problem at all here?

Because politics is broken in the US. There is a ton of lobbying money that is spent to ensure this problem does not get effectively resolved.

Last time I went to the US, I got a phone number from MetroPCS (e.g. T-Mobile reseller). I didn't give it to anybody and started receiving 3-4 spam calls a day. They are obviously reselling the phone numbers directly, which is illegal in most countries.

Or just wardialing all numbers and marking valid ones. VOIP calls are dirt cheap. A fair number of the spam calls I get have no idea what my name is.

The prior holder of that number was already a target. Numbers are reused quickly in area codes facing any possible future shortage.

You probably were assigned a phone number that had been used by someone else prior, so the number was already on all the lists.

Every time I get a new number, I end up spending a few weeks getting calls from real people to the person who had the number before it was assigned to me.

People in the US are more likely to fall for these pitches. Maybe due to the lower average intelligence of the common dude. Just a hypothesis. This phenomenon deserves a deeper inquiry.

Oh, that's fun. Americans have a lower average intelligence than Europeans?

Just a hypothesis.

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