The FCC has fined robocallers $208M and collected $7k

When making calls on behalf of an entity that does own that number. Happens all the time, a company hires a bunch of call centers, they make outbound calls, then those return calls go back to a number owned by the original company. They can then answer them in-house, transfer them to a certain call center, transfer them round-robin, whatever they need to do. Plus it gives them the flexibility to drop a certain call center if needed, without having to worry about losing control of that number.

Sometimes you want someone else to call on your behalf. But if they need to call back, you want them to reach you.

I imagine it's the kind of issue where there are still enough people answering the calls where if they dealt with the issue it would have a noticeable, measurable financial impact, so nobody in the company can propose it. But by not fixing the issue now it will also destroy all future business.

So short-sightedness.

What financial pressure do the phone companies feel when I never answer my phone?

I still have to give them identical amounts of money to maintain my internet connection.

Pair that with creating an access restriction to the US PSTN for any entity that originates a call with a spoofed number that is enforceable with technology rather than by voluntary or compelled action, and much of the problem will be mitigated.

Caller Id came about in '68. It was built around an honor system because that's the environment that's how telephone lines used to be operated. They weren't able to predict the future.

Isn't that exactly what T-Mobile is doing with their scam blocking? Or did you mean something a bit different?

Hiya (and presumably other solutions, but I've used Hiya extensively) does this.

This will become unhelpful as soon as it becomes sufficiently popular (perhaps even before: as the trick gets more widely recognized for what it is, the mental spam filters it hacks around will get updated whether or not they are augmented with technological tools, and the practice will lose its value and be abandoned, making automated filtering that assumes it is widely used more likely to screen out good calls than spam.)

When you receive a call you can let the phone ask what the call is about and it will locally transcribe what they say back so you can decide whether or not to pick up.

If your average handle time is too high, you're in trouble. If your sales per hour are too low, you're in trouble. If you spend too much time in wrap, you're in trouble. If you don't collect all the information you need to after a call, you're in trouble. If you're having your best week ever but end up at the bottom of the stacked rankings regardless, you're in trouble.

Very much a captive audience.

If they want to reach me, they can do so my email, and it has worked fine so far.

I was interviewing for jobs the past 4 months, and asked nicely if they would be willing to use Hangouts instead of a phone call because of lots of robocalls. Third party recruiters might refuse(but I avoid them at all costs), but I've yet to have hiring managers or engineers be unwilling to do so. Small businesses are in a tough place, but an individual really does have plenty of options for avoiding phone calls.

EDIT: I'm being a little myopic here, since not everyone is applying for engineering positions. lol Employers outside SV probably won't be receptive to not using the legacy phone system.

I said what I said because I've disabled calls for people who are not on my contact list, whom rarely call me anyway, in favor of email and video chat like Hangouts. Most businesses can be contacted via email, and nearly all my correspondence with companies, when I was apply for jobs, was handled over email and Hangouts. It just seems to me like we already have plenty of viable options for ditching the outdated, low fidelity phone system, but maybe that's not for everyone. For individuals, however, I do still think disabling calls is worth a try just to see how much one really needs to be answering them.

If a bank is calling me, they'd better want zero information from me - they better be just telling me things. Otherwise, I'm going to call them back at a number that I know is really them.

If the government calls you, you're really in trouble. Calls from the "government" are almost always a scam. Same with banks to a lesser extent.

The school issue is an interesting one. Schools ought to have other methods to contact parents(or students). At the very least, a school should be willing to provide a list of numbers to whitelist.

My point is that there are difficulties in not taking phone calls, but there aren't as many of those difficulties as one might assume, and they exist in large part because nobody is pushing for obsolescence of the phone in favor of something better.

I wouldn't even mind a system that wasn't IP based so long as it had better security measures. In fact, that'd be preferable to relying on proprietary systems owned by the likes of Facebook and Google. The fact that a Caller ID can be easily spoofed, that numbers themselves can be spoofed, and that phone companies have long been complicit in the criminal activity that goes on over their system, is absurd. It can't be fixed and should either be thrown away or rebuilt from the ground up.

Edit: This is a heavily downvoted comment. Instead of downvoting, how about you explain why you think you're entitled to paid content for free?

mfw

never subbed, never donated, adblock, stolen laptop, neighbours wifi

I'm just so used to circumventing paywalls that I forgot I actually pay for that

A cool added feature would be detecting long catches, and then calling you, so you could listen in real time.