'One Ring' Phone Scam
fcc.gov
fcc.gov
How to avoid this scam: Don't answer or return any calls from numbers you don't recognize.
If the FCC is recommending we don't pick up our phones, isn't something really wrong with the system?
What I do not understand is, given that the phone is a computer, why there is not an on-phone IVR which can solicit a brief intro. I mean, I had tech that could do that for a landline 25 years ago.
if I don’t know the caller they can leave a voicemail. If it’s not important enough for a voicemail, it’s not important.
If it just deleted old entries then it's possible someone left an important message and assume you'll hear it but then it just gets silently deleted.
Imagine if PC storage devices worked this way, it'd be chaos.
I get calls from scammers occasionally, but they don't ever leave VM.
I actually called the number the CRA one left back once and a person with a French accent answered pretending to be from the CRA. I just said if they called my number again I was going to report them to the rcmp and then hung up. It stopped for a few months after that. I'm assuming if it was actually Canada revenue, they would have called back. All I was getting were the Cantonese ones. The CRA ones only started again recently.
Google has that, but I'm not sure if it's on-phone.
I'd wager someone could write an app to do this.
I would probably pay $50 for an on-phone version of Lenny; basically a voice-based chat-bot that keeps spammers occupied, without having to conference another number in.
( https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3b7na/the-story-of-lenny... )
I use it for every number I don't know, and so far it's been 100% successful (in the sense that, afaik, no one who I wanted to hear from has hung up on Google Assistant).
You can set the spam calls to be answered with selected funny time-wasting recordings, but since that would be embarrassing if I get a call from a professional contact, I set them to be answered with a plain fax tone.
Now I am back to being able to pick up all calls that ring.
(My opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer.)
What I want, though, is an interactive bot, running on my phone, that will eat up telemarketer's time by pretending to be a real person, and responding to them in such a way as to keep them on the line for as long as possible.
I want to pick up a call from a scumbag, tell them, "hang on, let me get my dad", and press the "fuck you" button - which puts a fake doddering old man on the line for them to talk to instantly, without any more intervention required from me.
I ported my landline number to Callcentric partially just to rid myself of the AT & T $75/mo charge and partially because of Callcentric's call handling.
Callcentric (and I'm sure others) allow call routing rules which include inputs for spam ranking, whitelist and IVR routing. You can upload your contacts, whitelist those for passthrough and then send anyone else to a simple "please press <fixed digit|random digit> " prompt first before routing to you if they pass the test.
https://www.thetelecomspot.com/grandstream-ht801.html
If you prefer to own the hardware yourself, it's possible to do the same by loading asterisk on a raspberry pi.
Set up your voicemail answering message to contain only two things: the tones that signify "This Phone Number Not In Use" (see http://www.k3pgp.org/telezap.htm) and a terse voice message, such as "Leave a Message", which imparts no usable information to the caller.
Now when the call goes to voicemail, two things happen: First, any robocallers will hang up when the hear the 'Not in Use' tones. Second, any humans will hear the 'Leave a Message' and they now have two options which are to hang up, or to leave a message asking you to call back.
You merely have to scan the voicemail messages and call back only those ones you choose to answer. The other 80% or more have been discarded 'automatically' before you get to hear them.
I believe Google Voice has this option. You enable it and it records them saying who they are, which is played to you to accept or reject.
(And yes, I would probably be juggling significant state at the usual calling times; pushing and popping all that is far more than 5 seconds, even if that were completely lossless)
Ideally, you should be alerted that your position on the waitlist is approaching so that you know to answer any incoming calls in case it's "the one". I have no idea if this reflects reality however.
I'm not sure the false hope would be an improvement. Unfortunately there are a whole bunch of emotional considerations that need to be made in this case.
Once the phone companies fix caller authentication, I'll probably be comfortable letting my guard down a bit. Correct caller ID would make my phone far more valuable and I'm always surprised that the big telecom companies don't compete on voice services more.
Edit: all good points. Yeah I guess that is a risk.
Also reminds me of this:
That's not even considering mundane everyday stuff like delivery people/repair people who got lost or have to reschedule last minute. You might have the main number for the business whitelisted, but those sorts of calls usually come from the phone number of the day's driver.
The only people who think "just disable incoming phone calls" is a viable option either have no friends and/or family, very little life experience, or both.
Unfortunately the 2FA calls for my corporate login seem to come from different numbers each time..
Do we know if people actually try twice in rapid succession often enough during emergencies, without special training to develop that habit?
I don't know the data on this, but I'd like to.
The only people who think "just disable incoming phone calls" is not a viable option either have no decent friends and/or family, very little life experience, or both.
I can tell you that calls from 911 don't come from the phone number '911'.
This is much better than the old days of phone-only contact.
It is strange.
Unfortunately, this isn't great for a number of reasons:
1) The last two times I got a series of missed calls every two hours from somebody who didn't leave a voicemail, it was my credit card company (a different company each time) calling to ask me about a number of suspicious charges on the other side of the country that I sure as hell didn't make (I distinctly remember saying, on one such occasion, "What the hell is a Sheetz?"). Both of those times lead to me having my card declared stolen and the bogus charges reversed. If I didn't answer, I probably wouldn't have noticed the bogus charges.
2) My employer covers a large chunk of my phone + Internet bills. This is so I can answer emergency calls from our NOC whenever one of the important applications my team maintains goes kablooey. The whole thing with Android not resolving people's numbers right away includes them, as well. The call comes in as a long string of numbers, and if I miss it, it takes a few minutes before the long string of numbers resolves to a name on my contacts list. I'd rather not develop a reputation for snubbing our internal customers, especially not when they have an emergency.
This is a huge part of why this system doesn't work. Perhaps 95% of the calls I get from unknown numbers either produce informative voicemails or are scams. But the ones that don't are often the most important calls I get, from sources like credit card companies and doctors. Depressingly often, the numbers they're using aren't even listed online to look up later.
It's like how responding to spammers with "No, thank you!" will actually get you more spam.
If anyone knows of a scam in which simply picking up a call can produce extra costs, they should definitely share!
Edit: I know I’m not alone because CNN just released a poll with no responses from people under the age of fifty, because they couldn’t reach enough of them by phone.
I'm currently getting a visa, if someone involved in the decision making process calls my number I better answer it.
I was interviewing for a job not that long ago, when people get back to me by the phone I better answer it.
When my dentist or doctor calls to schedule an appointment I need to answer it.
If a family member needs to get my attention a phone call works better than text - the ringtone is more noticeable.
Of course I live in Canada and my number isn't scattered everywhere on the web, I don't think I even get a robocall a week on average. But even if I lived in the states, I don't see how I could avoid the first two requiring I answer my phone sometimes, possibly the third as well but at least I'm the client there so I might be able to talk them into an alternative means of contacting me.
Semo-related but it's infuriating how many companies refuse to contact you by email. I'm currently remortgaging a flat, and I've told the broker repeatedly to contact me by email, and they still phone, leave a voicemail asking to be called back, and send an email saying they called.
Um.... they have to let you know that you need an appointment. "Your lab tests came back and we'd like to make a follow-up appointment."
My mortgage broker didn't mind emails.
I'm starting to believe they don't want certain things in black and white so they would rather call you. It could just be policy though, who's to say.
I do still find it irritating that they insist. I'm much more likely to respond to an email quickly than to a phone call and I only answer phone calls from my family while I'm at work.
All of that said, yes, pollsters do have to do more work to survey younger people. They have recently added cell phones to their call lists, since land line phones are going the way of the dodo.
In New Zealand, I have had periods where spam phone calls have been pretty bad for me. 2 or 3 a day for a week or so, and that was annoying.
But they always seem to stop.
The last spam call I got was long enough ago that it doesn't show up in my iphones call history. Certainly several months ago.
Can't the phone companies look at calls the same way email providers do and use all the information they have at their disposal to filter out the spam?
Most people just use hiya and all of the apps that community source the blocking. Tbh my experience is probably better with those.
It's the same BS with credit scores/credit freeze
"Do you have a minute to talk about your phone service, we're calling from your provider."
OR
"We're finding out for the government about voter preferences."
That sort of thing. People thing they may have an obligation to the company.
UK government do a paper-based survey of businesses for which there is a legal obligation (backed by a fine) to respond, but it appears when you first get it just like one of these scammy polling companies.
>When the German electronic band Kraftwerk were in the studio, they refused to be disturbed. Working for hours on end, patiently perfecting their sonic arrangements, required zero interruptions. So much so that they even took the ringer out of the only telephone in the studio. So what happened when someone wanted to call them? Simple. If someone wanted to speak to them when they were working in the studio, the band would instruct that person to call at a precise time - not 2 minutes before and not a couple of minutes after, but exactly at that time. Then, at that precise time, a member of the band would stop what they were doing, walk across the studio, pick up the none ringing phone and say ‘Hello’ and the call would begin. That’s the only way you could get to speak to them. You made an agreement. You said what you were going to do and then you did it.
http://www.youneedstandout.com/blog/2014/10/20/how-to-call-k...
Calls I make are split ~50/50 between personal, to people who know me and have my number, and business, when I either want to buy something or resolve some issue. Calls I receive are split 40/60 between personal and spam. And I'm in Europe. In the US, from what I hear, that would be closer to 10/90.
There's a huge asymmetry in phone use. Marketers and scammers make the phone network near-unusable to regular people, by ensuring most of the calls they receive are unwanted.
Occasionally I use it for a general network connection when I don't have wifi.
I call my parents every once in a while, though. It's a nice to have feature.
- to get directions
- to send and receive text messages
- to listen to music and media
- voicemail
and lastly
- to make and receive phone calls agreed upon in advance, usually text
I could probably dump my phone number except for WhatsApp. That's basically replaced my phone for all friends and family. I haven't turned on my ringer in months.
I had call after call after call from this one number, over about 3 weeks. Eventually, after I was complaining about it to my wife the phone went and it was the same number so I picked up ... it was a domain registrar asking "are you happy, do you need any help", that was it, just a lousy marketing call (probably because I basketed a domain with them and then bought it elsewhere).
What an absolute waste of time.
My phone is in Do Not Disturb mode 100% of the time, with only alarms and priority calls whitelisted, so I know that if a call comes through, it's probably important.
Everyone else can send a message or record a voicemail. I'll call or write back when I feel like it. I have also taken the step of disabling all notifications except for direct messages to me. Those get to pop an icon in the notification bar, but no sound nor vibration alerts. I'll see the message whenever I decide to check my phone.
Ive contemplated changing my number. But I imagine that won’t actually help. Is this just the new reality? Are there any solutions?
Are you referring to this? [0] I was googling because I was interested. Looking at this the data seems fishy. Under total respondents they have answers for the age group, but not under any of the democratic/democratic leaning responses. So it looks like they only interviewed republicans under 50 and both groups 50+. There's some more fishy patterns like that with repubs <$50k.
So it is hard to say if only young republicans answer their phones or the data set is (purposefully?) biased.
[0] http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/images/03/19/rel4b.-.2020.pdf
For the poll questions that specifically say. “For voters registered as Democrats or democrat-leaning independents”, the response Pool is cut down to something like 450 (the exact number is listed in the description). If they then divide that into four age groups, then it would actually be reasonable for NONE of them to exceed 125 respondents.
If you look at other breakdowns in the survey, it is clear that all of the age groups and demographics are covered.
Also note that polls results are almost always corrected after the fact for sampling error - so if they get a low response rate from 20-30 year olds, then they weight those responses more heavily so that they represent the expected proportion of the overall population.
Most of the spam calls are from energy companies selling energy to small businesses, because I'm registered as a business. Maybe I should get a separate phone number that goes straight to voicemail for my CoC registration.
But other than that, our do-not-call regulation seems to be working quite well. Maybe the US should copy it.
I'm in my late 30s, have a cell phone only, which is on the do not call registry. The only times I get harassed are when I update my resume on whatever job site. Then for a few weeks/months I get what I consider too many calls from recruiters.
I wonder if we have different purchase histories or something that has resulted in this very different outcome.
I use to not travel much, and any traveling I did was pretty basic flight + hotel. No fancy vacations or anything. A bit over a year ago I booked a trip to a resort in Cancun through a travel agency in Florida. None stop spam since. I noticed a massive increase the amount of email spam I got and started to received a large number of phone calls.
I can't say for certain that was the cause as it seems spam phone calls have been heavily increasing over the last few years, but it's the only thing I can point to as an out of the ordinary change.
It seems plausible to me that some people would have learned similar correlations between chat notifications vs ringtones.
First things first: Everyone hears your end of the conversation with a voice call. I absolutely hate that: My family would pick up pieces (by accident or not) and when my ex's mental illness was worse, he would listen. Period.
But there are also other things: I can flush the toilet. I don't have to do as many "formalities" and I don't have to stop everything I'm doing to have a conversation with someone.
I figure communication goes on a sliding scale of intrusiveness. Video is the most intrusive (I don't know why old sci-fi wanted this!)... and text the least.
People who prefer to create drama or interminable conversations can and do do so via any medium.
A reasonable theory would be that if your typing skills are good enough, the opposite is true.
Voice calls are useful for things that need to be dealt with quickly but otherwise async communication is much more pleasant.
Encouraging non-PSTN calls can have huge privacy implications (e.g. using Facebook for health care provider communications).
But ya; personally, I have a dedicated voicemail number that I hand out when I “must” provide a phone number.
I am very interested in a cheap voip service that is literally just voicemail. I'd love that. Especially if it's only $1-2/mo.
I answer the phone all the time and it's always someone I know. I do not have a caller id display.
Here's how I managed that.
Only 4 people know my real phone number and are under orders not to add it to any digital address book.
My phone number is registered to an alias. I pay for my phone using cash.
My area code is in a city I've never lived in and have no connection to.
I add my number to the do not call list.
For generic phone number requests, such as stores and shipper that demand it, it's always 555-1212.
Of course this method won't work well for people who need to give their phone number out to people they don't know. But then again if that result is simply not to answer the phone ever, why would that be better. And for those who really only ever want to hear from a half dozen or fewer trusted friends and family, this is a solution that works.
My main actual trick has been to be discerning in the things I sign up for and never filling in information that's not required.
I always find it interesting how these almost cease each weekend day. Do scammers' charge more to answer a phone on a weekend?
If every cell phone has LTE and internet connection, why the fuck do we need traditional cell phone number? I never use it except for calling my pharmacy, customer support or restaurants/shops. All conversations with friends and family happen over messages and Facetime Audio or Whatsapp.
While I don't wish to suggest we move to a proprietary system such as Facetime, I think there is a real need for email equivalent of a VOIP solution where there is automatic spam filtering just like emails.
Also, why can't cell phone providers use same spam filtering techniques used in email filters? I don't know the details of spoofing but I feel like telephone providers are scum of the earth and they have some kind of a reverse incentive to continue allowing spam calls.
I would also bet that there are regulations that require phone providers to complete all calls that are presented to them.
My provider, T Mobile, does overwrite the caller ID with “Scam Likely” for what they believe to be telemarketing calls, which is probably the best they can do until we implement a standard that authenticates the origination ID of calls.
In the early days of fighting email spam, that was enough. Every network operator was responsible for receiving spam complaints and responding appropriately. Network providers that couldn’t or wouldn’t prevent spammers from using their networks were blacklisted and other networks would refuse to route mail originating from them.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was far better than nothing.
I'm curious - is this available in a call passed through twilio ?
I would like to log, or pass, the prior network hop using twiml ... or a twilio function, I guess ...
Distrusting one of them and the calls that come from them is something of a non-sequitur since you chose them and intentionally became one of their customers and pay them to receive those calls.
TL;DR This isn't like email or IP traffic where you're interacting with other IPs in a purely untrusted network model. Merely analyzing the previous hop doesn't tell us anything valuable.
This assumes that is that there isn’t some kind of international treaty that forbids doing so. The existence of such has been claimed from time to time in similar discussions but I have yet to see an actual citation.
That's wrong, phone signalling systems always specify the originating number and it cannot be spoofed. The key thing is that only 911 responders and similar lines have the CLIRIGN flag set on their lines which means that the spoofed number transmitted via CLIP is ignored and the real one used instead.
In addition victims of e.g. threat calls can have the MCID flag set on their line which makes the provider systems log all call information for later retrieval by police.
It really annoys me that there isn’t a way of filtering calls based on country. 99% of my junk calls come from Australian numbers, so if I could just block Australia...
Do spam callers really think I'm expecting a call from the same area code, same exchange as my own number? Do most people have friends that have phone numbers with the same first six digits in common with their own?
I feel like this trick can't possibly work on anyone who has already seen it twice, and just based on the number of times I've seen it, I have to assume everyone has seen it at least five times by now, either that or they aren't even paying attention to caller ID at all.
All of the weirdness and strange patterns and methods you see in practice by these actors make perfect sense when you realize their targets are seniors.
In fact, even the ability to keep someone on the phone past the first 2 seconds of recorded intro greeting makes sense if that's the only interaction with a human you get all day/week.
The lives of inactive, retired seniors in the United States - especially in small or rural towns - is tremendously bleak.
And yes, they've spent their entire life with technology wherein everyone they talked to had the same NPA+PREFIX.
> In hindsight it may have helped us work contact lists faster but it did nothing for our survey completion rates. People who were not likely to answer an out-of-state call were apparently also not likely to answer a survey, even once you got them on the phone. To us, that trade-off was still worth it, because we were usually contracted to try each contact on our list either 3-5 times or until we reached a person who (completed or) declined the survey or asked you to stop calling.
> If you didn't want the calls, then we straight did not want you to continue getting them.
Don't chase leads that won't pay off. Do as little extra work as you can, to increase the likelihood of learning when a lead is known bad, so you can stop wasting effort there.
In the US, outside of the dense metro areas, this is a much more common than you think. For non-metro areas, it is quite common for everyone in the area (business and personal) with which you might receive a call has a number in the same exchange as your number.
But it is doubtful the spammers are considering that fact. It is much more likely they simply did A/B testing and saw a measurable increase in answer rate if the transmitted caller ID matched area code and exchange of the number they were dialing. And so they simply started using this trick, because their testing showed it worked.
And I worked for a call center company once, which employed a similar technique. Not down to the exchange, but by area code. We ran the numbers and found that we were much more likely to reach a person if we called through a number that belonged to their own area code, people don't pick up for out-of-state callers.
We were calling for customer satisfaction surveys, on behalf of companies they had done some business with – and almost always with a presence in their local area. So it wasn't technically a deception, unless you think that area codes should reliably represent the caller's location, in which case you'd be fighting a losing battle to be sure...
In hindsight it may have helped us work contact lists faster but it did nothing for our survey completion rates. People who were not likely to answer an out-of-state call were apparently also not likely to answer a survey, even once you got them on the phone. To us, that trade-off was still worth it, because we were usually contracted to try each contact on our list either 3-5 times or until we reached a person who (completed or) declined the survey or asked you to stop calling.
If you didn't want the calls, then we straight did not want you to continue getting them. Another rule we had was, it should not be possible for the person's phone to ring, and when they pick up it's just dead air. That means no predictive autodialers. (And of course that was the first rule to change when the company was sold, barf.)
We also ran the numbers on each area code and did a little cost-benefit deciding whether to buy those numbers or not, based on how many times we'd use them. If we didn't own a local number, we didn't use one. And we made sure that if anyone called back, the first thing they reached was a robot with a single digit to push to be added to Do Not Call list.
Turns out if you make it easy for people to get the calls to stop, you get a lot less angry people calling the reception and less angry voicemail messages, which makes for better call center employee experiences and better outcomes all-around. (I guess another strategy is to just spoof Caller ID with a number you don't own, so they can never call you back, and run the predictive rates so high that you never actually talk to an employee either. Totally unethical and it has to stop!)
The number of calls I receive which immediately hang up seconds after I pick up is absolutely ridiculous. I just imagine this call center full of people with auto-dialers going on full-speed across the room, nobody is wearing a headset and nobody is at their desk, but everyone is just sitting around a cash bonfire telling stories and laughing...
And at work, all company phones are on the same first digits.
Of all of them, I think T-mobile is the most willing to actually improve the industry for everyone's benefit.
When we receive a SIP invite (incoming call) from one of our upstream carriers, the amount of metadata information they're able to provide us is often very limited (largely due to interop issues in my opinion). If you think about IP spoofing, BGP, and the state of egress filtering on the internet, it's a very similar situation.
Since this is related to my work, obviously all of the above is just my personal opinion.
I already use white lists -- I simply don't answer the phone if the person isn't in my contacts list and I'm not expecting a call from an unknown number. I assume this is pretty common practice.
> If every cell phone has LTE and internet connection, why the fuck do we need traditional cell phone number?
I almost never have LTE or even mobile data of any kind when I'm outside of cities (for a liberal definition of city).
> Also, why can't cell phone providers use same spam filtering techniques used in email filters?
Because spam filters rely on contents in addition to meta-data. You can't pick up the phone and listen to the contents for a few minutes.
I'm curious what countries /places these are. My operator doesn't even activate 3G on modern phones, I literally have nothing aside from LTE/VoLTE. Since LTE got deployed on the low frequencies reclaimed from analog TV, the reception is generally BETTER than 3G etc.
Also when there are natural disasters, the voice infrastructure is the first to collapse, but data in chat apps still makes it through
The United States. Not even the western or mountain states! One of the places I regularly go that doesn't have data coverage but does have voice coverage is in a national (or maybe state there?) forest in New York state.
> Also when there are natural disasters, the voice infrastructure is the first to collapse, but data in chat apps still makes it through
I don't have any experience with this, so I'll take your word for it.
https://truecaller.com uses a crowd-sourced model to help you identify PSTN callers and spammers not in your contacts.
Besides, I think WhatsApp had the right idea around personal communication at least when Jan and Brian called the shots.
> If every cell phone has LTE and internet connection, why the fuck do we need traditional cell phone number?
I think with SecureElement now common in Android-based devices, eSIMs would be ubiquitous and may be SpaceX's Starlink would mean the end of traditional PSTN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19680412
I like having my PSTN voicemails emailed to me. And calls logs in csv.
If someone says they called me 3 years earlier, I can find that out without scrolling.
As for your other question - there are still lots and lots and lots of regular phones in the world that call me and that I need to call. As you mentioned in your example - every business, school, government, etc.
They do not intend to fix anything.
This captured FCC would rather everyone use the internet to communicate, since they deregulated that, than telephones which they cannot deregulate. The game is, make money as fast as possible in deregulated industries until people complain of lousy service and the government steps in.
Bonus points if the captured FCC can convince you that they care about these robocalls.
EDIT: Please explain downvotes. You feel the current FCC are saints and would never do such a thing?
IIRC, it was also free, but limited to 200 MB a month.
You basically got a SIM card you could stuff into your embedded sensor app and away you go.
That might be a large enough data cap for plain-text messaging, but not much else.
My hotspot gets spam text messages but I'm only aware of them the once or twice a year I log into its control panel.
You don't. Get a hotspot and use Skype instead. Problem solved.
[0] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...
Get rid of unlimited/free/super-cheap rates and make all callers pay by the minute again. Especially inbound international calls.
Let people who want free communication use FaceTime and SMS and Email and whatnot. But make phone calls expensive enough that you know if someone is paying to call you it must be important.
I got my first document scanner in 1997. Because of that I still have all of my phone bills going back to that year. I just looked up my April 1997 Cincinnati Bell bill. A five minute call from Cincinnati to Charleston, West Virginia cost $1.45 ($2.31 in 2019 money).
If we can raise the cost of customer acquisition there will be far fewer scammers.
Incidentally, my total bill for that month was $104.34 -- almost the same as what I spend for cell service today. Except that now I'm paying for unlimited texts and minutes that I never use. The only advantage my phone has today is its mobility, which feels more like a burden than a benefit.
So in Europe, is receiving calls on a mobile phones free? Or do you still have to pay for minutes?
As far as I know this is true not just in Europe but everywhere outside of North America. It's certainly been true in the Asian countries I've been to (I get prepaid SIM cards everywhere I visit). It comes down to the numbering plans - in the NANP (north american numbering plan), landline and mobile phone numbers are mixed together and you can't distinguish them without a database. In other countries, mobile phones have their own "mobile phones" area code which is non-geographic and applies to all mobile phones. This means that callers beforehand know if they're calling a mobile phone or a landline.
US carriers double dip by charging the caller and the receiver.
The downside is you can't really get free services that forward to your mobile.
Your thoughts in light of that?
What about your system is so bad that allows this to go on? It's not a problem here at all.
They seem spoofed because you can see them increment the numbers and try again. Also they come from various countries both in and out of europe.
They always ring 2-3 times then hang up.
I've blocked dozens of them by now, they just come up with new numbers.
I don't understand what the point is because nothing happens if you call back so there's nothing to keep you on the line.
Also nothing happens if you respond.
I understand that these are all things I shouldn't do but a) at one point the numbers resembled those of RedHat in the UK and b) I was curious.
The calling-from numbers usually don't terminate, ie they're "number not recognised" or similar errors. This seems like something the phone company could fix if they cared to, or indeed the industry watchdogs could fix "do not forward a call when the sending number doesn't terminate". Problem is that marketing companies will do things like have ex-country calls with in-country "sender" numbers so they can use foreign call centres and appear to be calling from the UK.
Therefore I don't reply to unknown or hidden numbers.
Also, not many people on the planet speak dutch, so the addressable market is quite small.
The landline gets a few scam callers and surveys a year though, always real people.
However, my parents' landline phone gets several per day, so perhaps it's too expensive to call a UK mobile number for spam to be profitable.
Someone is making money. Anyone who wants a law or regulation that stops someone from making money is a socialist and socialism is bad /s
The phone is kept silent at all times and is on DND mode from the first minute of the day to the last.
The only call that passes through are the ones in the favorites, which will never exceed 10. Even they won't ring but vibrate. (My wife knows how to make my phone ring via Find my Phone.)
This is my No Phone Life - https://no.phone.wtf/
* If it isn't from someone I don't have whitelisted, don't answer it, unless I am expecting a call
* If I am not expecting a call and it is from my area code, answer it if I feel like it
* Otherwise, if it is not important enough to leave a voice mail, then it is not important enough for me to call back.
During emergency I am not be the best person to call for help. There is 911 for that.
Spoofing phone numbers does have legitimate purposes (for example a phone number from a customer service company is able to use their company phone number as the caller ID) but these scammers seem to abuse this. It's quite similar to how SMTP for emails allows the "From" field to be set to something other than your actual email. Email scammers abuse this same thing too but the difference is that in SMTP emails, you can still tap the detailed headers of the email and see what the actual "from" email is. But for phone numbers, this isn't the case.
I think, the best way to solve this phone scam issue would be by modifying the phone protocol (I am not sure of the details) to allow users to be able to see the "Real" underlying phone number.
(which seems a US focused initiative, which I guess makes sense as the problem seems much worse there than in other countries... but I wonder if that means that you guys will be getting lots of robocalls from unknown foreign numbers in the future ;)
I see twilio at least mentioning shaken/stir:
https://www.twilio.com/blog/your-phone-your-call-eliminating...
... but I am curious if anyone knows: can this be interacted with, currently, with either twiml or twilio functions ?
In China, we call this type of scam "响一声". It was very common until phone screen softwares started marking this kind of calls[0] so people stopped calling them back.
Maybe use one of those call screen app (offline one is better) until phone companies figured out how to resolve this?
There are many cases where people will find it unacceptable. You don't want someone to dial directly to someone's desk at a corporation rather than front desk. You don't want someone to call a doctor on their private phone (they call out via practice's number from the road). Etc.
You can't solve this issue by providing the two number. It's only solvable by making spam calls expensive for the callers, or punishing telcos for unverified spoofing.
Couldn't this also be said about emails from companies? Similar to how they have the "donotreply" emails, can't they also have "donotdial" phone numbers?
However, Microsoft has a patent that stops a few additional measures from being taken against certain spoofings (SPFv2), you can thank them for that.
My friends on that network never paid to receive my calls, even while roaming.
If we were to acquire a phone number from say, some small town somewhere you have no business with, then could we block all caller ID with that area code and avoid all such robocalls?
Most of my spam calls copy my area code and the first 3 digits of my phone number. In fact, I installed an android app called Calls Blacklist solely to make any call that began with the same 6 digits as me to not even ring - and now I get about 1 spam call per month.
YMMV.
The phone system we once knew needs to be obliterated!
I recently had to leave my car parked in front of a stranger's house, so I rang the doorbell to let them know, but they didn't answer even though they were clearly home. Capitalism might be great and all, but door-to-door marketing and phone spamming have killed reasonable methods of communication.
I refuse to let these things die, so I still open the door if I don't know the person (I have a hotel-like door latch now to help prevent someone from kicking in the door or shooting an arrow at me). You just have to learn to be aggressive and say "I'm not interested" if it's a salesman or Jehovah's Witness.
That's not aggressive, actually you're helping both parties.
Even worse.
It's not really an "attitude" as much as it is a solution to a problem. The problem is door-to-door salesmen (whether they're selling phone service, vacuum cleaners, Girl Scout cookies, or religion).
There are ways and places to meet your neighbors that don't revolve around knocking on my door unsolicited. Once we've met, you're no longer a stranger and the "attitude" doesn't apply.
Only allow my contacts to call me and anyone else hears a message saying they must text me first to be added to the whitelist.
From what I gathered, it seemed that none of the tele marketers were really all that interested in really landing a sale. Most of them are quick to hang up at the first sign of a troll, even if its minor. There are no hard sell tactics that Ive encountered. It makes me wonder who is spending the money to make these things profitable. Seems to me that its really just a vetting to see if the number is active so they can sell your contact info to another spamorg.
Note the ANI check. There are a couple extremely aggressive callers that I’ve had to blacklist their exchange to keep them from leaving weekly voicemail. The most recent is a company who calls monthly insisting I won a car, that this is their final attempt to reach me, that they aren’t a telemarketer, and that they are aware of the Do Not Call list.
For my cell, Google Voice seems to be working well enough for now. I do wish iOS had a voip app that was worth a damn, and that iOS would let you choose a custom app for outbound dialing. The Google Voice iOS app frankly stinks.
Unfortunately, I called one of them back before I realized it was an international number (Android's dialer, for some reason, seems to record everything as an unbroken string of numbers before updating them several minutes after the missed call, so I just thought it was a US number with area code 232. It wasn't until after the callback that it resolved to a Sierra Leone number, so I asked about it on Facebook, and I got a link to an article on the scam.
I immediately felt like a heel, and then I blocked the number, just in case I forget to never call it back. When my statement comes in at the end of the month, I think I'm going to try to contact my carrier and dispute the charge. Though I'm not holding my breath: I'm on Fi, and Google's customer support is notorious for being virtually nonexistent.
Heck, we constantly receive calls with invalid phone numbers. And it's not always on purpose, sometimes it's just crummy or small-time carriers in rural areas (no disrespect intended, this is just an honest statement from experience). If we ingress filtered all invalid numbers, it would almost certainly be devistating to our customers.
This is like with email. First we need an integrity mechanism, then we can start doing reputation and identifying bad actors.
I get calls from international numbers, 'private numbers' and 'unknown numbers', (I'm not sure the difference between private and unkown, it's what android displays in caller id). The calls ring once and hang up. I've managed to answer it a few times but they usually disconnect before I can. When I answer I hear a few sentences in a language I don't recognize then they hang up.
The unknown and private numbers don't match the 'One Ring' scam because you cannot call back a private or unknown number.
Back in the day, did this with the apps for local.ch in Switzerland ( some fluffy details here: https://tel.local.ch/en/advertising-calls ) which something like 40-50% of the Swiss population have installed on their phones.
As a Yellow pages phonebook app we provided an "Incoming Call" lookup service against our search engine of Swiss business phone numbers, so we could see who you received calls from (data which we treated as strictly private).
These types of robocallers (and telemarketers in general) were really easy to spot in logs - you see a number that's been calling many different people but _wasn't_ in our official database of businesses (we had good coverage of all businesses in Switzerland), we'd flag it our users with "We don't know this number but we suspect telemarketing" leaving the user to decide whether they wanted to call back or not. The Google Places API or the Yelp API ( https://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/v3/business_se... ) would probably suffice for the same purpose.
The only way to get round this is for robocallers to rotate the numbers they're using with a very high frequency so they don't "peak" in the logs but that can get expensive for them.
What's nice is this approach is also dynamic - you don't need an official database of blacklisted numbers. You just need a big enough sample of users with your app installed and you'll catch Robocallers as soon as they start peaking in any logs.
Apple and Google have way more insights into who's calling who than this (e.g. number of rings, email signatures, the users address books, which numbers have been blocked and a ton of analytics) which could be used to kill telemarketing for good. Given the solution is so simple, it really surprises me they don't.
Plus the type of robocalling described in the article where they ring once and hang up wouldn’t work if you fake the callerid - you’d just get them to call back someone from their contacts
I'm guessing the average hacker news user is unlikely to get scammed by this one, but it's a common one and it works.
Recently, I had a payment service call me on behalf one of my customers—from my area code. I nearly told them to beat it. I was sure they were spammers.
Anon Phone calls are approaching completely spam bucket status. I doubt they will recover.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium-rate_telephone_number
But of course carriers wouldn't want that, not only because it would make consumers painfully aware of how much their calls cost, but also because they are profiting from these scams.
Why? Who does that benefit? It's pretty common for phone plans in both the US and Canada to treat the US/Canada as a single region for the purpose of long distance calls and texts.
Its not just "kick everyone out of the US country code", it's protect consumers by principle of least surprise sorta. But again, this only protects against toll fraud and not all of the other "Appear to be in a nation you aren't" scams.
Otherwise, we need to set the rules and pricing conditional for being a part of +1 to mitigate this issue.
No disrespect to Canadians, but I wonder if most Canadians are aware of how much fraud operates out of Canada and takes advantage of the +1 area code plus the protections of being in another nation. This isn't just Carribean Island nations as people tend to stereotype.
(Please miss me with the whataboutism, I'm not throwing stones simply sharing information and experience.)
Just kidding, we will pay more for slower internet. But hey, you alerted us about robocalls, so not your fault right?
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/14...
EDIT: Please explain downvotes. You feel the current FCC are saints and would never think such things?