Robocalls are overwhelming hospitals and patients | Hacker News Reader

Robocalls are overwhelming hospitals and patients

washingtonpost.com

190 pointsjmsflknr177 comments

What I suspect the phone companies didn't plan on is the complete devaluing of one of their only distinguishing features (over cable/ISP), the ability to deliver phone calls reliably. Nobody wants to get a phone call now... they are 90% spam!

I wonder if in the future people will wonder why they are called phone companies? Maybe this is all part if their plan to move us to paid SMS or some other thing, but it seems more like an oops.

I'm intrigued by the idea of simply not having a phone number, but it doesn't seem like we've reached that era yet. My grandparents would have no way of contacting me, nor the doctor's office or any number of other businesses.

But it's still a nice dream.

A contact based whitelist would solve this immediately for personal phone use.

There was a single throw away line in WWDC that suggested they may have finally added this (depending on what they mean by “unknown” caller).

All I want is a contact based whitelist with an API endpoint that allows calls for a small time window (for doordash and Uber to use).

This would solve 99% of the spam issue. All other calls can go straight to voicemail. Allow an option for repeated calls to get through if you must.

Apple’s current call kit api only allows blacklists which work poorly and are a lot less elegant.

This isn't really feasible right now. Your bank, your doctor or a potential employer may all have different numbers each time they call you. Some critical calls may be unexpected and need the immediate attention a phone call gives (example: friend on somebody else's mobile)

I let them leave a message, then skim the transcript. So far it's 100% spam, but I only lose 5 seconds checking and if it's important, I'll see it. I never pick up unrecognized numbers.

You are not alone.

If you are receiving transcripts it means your private voicemail data is being harvested. Even if you may not care, this is a violation of privacy for your friends and family.

Is that fundamentally different to the calls running over someone else's network in the first place? But, good point.

Yes, I long for encrypted voicemail built into Signal et al. One can only hope.

I (and many other people, I suspect) don’t pick up unknown numbers, so whether it’s critical or not is besides the point.

Even better, just get an app that puts everybody who is not a contact right in voicemail. I don't know why this is not a built-in open on iOS and Android. If you're expecting a call from a non-contact just turn it off for 15 minutes or call them back.

Do Not Disturb mode on more recent Androids (and I believe iOS too) effectively does this. I configured my phone to just not even ring for non-contacts, so I only see it if I have my phone open already. Otherwise I only find out when I see a voicemail later. It's been on for 3 months and I think 1 has been legitimate.

The iOS implementation of DND is lacking. It kills notifications for text messages from everyone, for example.

As an implementation of Do Not Disturb, that sounds like the expected and correct behaviour. It is only lacking if you want to (ab)use DND as a technical solution to the social problem that there is no adequate legal protection against spam calls in your jurisdiction. In Europe, I get a spam call maybe once a month, slightly more if you see legitimate (according to the local interpretation of law) market research and opinion polling as spam.

I'm overusing it for the permanent spam-blocking use case, for sure, but it makes sense to me that often when I say "Do Not Disturb", I mean specific groups. My spouse and kids can interrupt me pretty much whenever they want (especially if they know why I don't want to be disturbed - then they can make an educated judgment about if it's worth it or if emailing me is better). Maybe I don't want to be annoyed but I'm on call, so work contacts can get through. If anything more granularity and "contact groups" would be nice.

I've been wondering the same, I recently made MyHumans for iPhone to do just this. I think this works for a lot of people, and it has completely solved my spam problem.

Kinda ironic, since letting your bank/doctor/employer call from the same outbound number is literally the purpose of spoofing.

But they should be limited to only allow them to spoof numbers they own.

This. We view this as a problem for IP addresses, how is this not viewed as a problem for phone numbers?

So those businesses can redo how they handle their outbound calls. When a business emails me, they don’t use a different domain each time.

> Your bank, your doctor or a potential employer may all have different numbers each time they call you.

Then maybe they ought not to do that?

The whole definition of identity is ill-defined in this kind of context. Should your doctor have the same number on their work phone as on their desk phone as at the front desk as...? What about another doctor at the same clinic? What about your doctor's secretary? What about their personal mobile?

But that is not my choice

This doesn’t matter - voicemail works fine.

Services that cared could change behavior to call from a single number.

I just created an iPhone app that uses a whitelist from your contacts like you described. It's available on iOS 11+ and called MyHumans.

I've tested out the "silence unknown callers" feature in the iOS 13 beta and it works very much in a similar way. "Unknown callers" seems to be any call that isn't in your recent calls or in your contacts.

When I made MyHumans (just launched in the last month), I knew there was a risk of something like this appearing in iOS 13, but I'll be adding some more features.

Out of curiosity how did you implement this? I looked briefly to see if I could make something and call kit seemed to require a blacklist (I figured this is why no whitelist app existed).

Do you do something special?

When I first became interested in the idea for the app, I quickly ran into the same limitations with CallKit. What my app, MyHumans, does is relay the call through a backend service which sends it to your phone via a VoIP call using CallKit. CallKit allows the incoming call to act nearly the same UI-wise as a normal incoming call. The backend service is then able to filter calls using salted hashes of numbers from your contacts.

Cool - thanks for the explanation.

My Pixel 3 has spam filtering on by default. I rarely get spam. If you still get spam you can screen calls as they come in. There's a button on the "Hey your phone is ringing" screen where you can send callers to a prompt asking them to identify themselves.

You can also configure Do Not Disturb mode to allow calls to come in from your contacts or from your favorites.

On iOS DND turns off all other notifications from all other apps so I can’t use it for this.

There's apps you can pay a service fee to have them do the spam filtering that comes free on the Pixel. RoboKiller is like $3/mo.

For a free alternative, you could route all your calls through Google Voice. You can transfer your current # to GV and then forward your GV calls to your new number that you don't have to even know beyond configuring call forwarding. GV has spam filtering, call screening, and lots of other useful features. Dunno how/if it would mess up your texting app though.

I pay for and use Robokiller and it sucks, about 30% of spam calls are blocked.

I used GV for a long time, but abandoned it once I learned Google was silently dropping group chat messages (without telling the sender) because they let their gizmo5 purchase languish with no dev work for years and never implemented MMS (this was a couple of years ago). Google had such a head start with GV, but did nothing with it and let iMessage catch up and pass them.

If there's something that I find completely puzzling about Google it's their disaster around messaging strategy.

It's also frustrating to me that all of these mediocre blacklisting applications (robokiller, hiya, nomorobo) only exist as hacks because neither iOS or Android allowed the obvious contact whitelist ability. Though it sounds like in iOS13 this may finally be changing.

> There was a single throw away line in WWDC that suggested they may have finally added this (depending on what they mean by “unknown” caller).

I could be wrong, but I believe a "known caller" is someone whose number appears in your Contacts, or a number that has recently shown up in Mail or Messages.

I hope so - it could also mean an unknown number without caller ID.

How big of a blacklist can you have? Say a billion, minus a few hundred? ;)

Hence whitelisting as a primary strategy.

W/G/B is still the best policy: white/grey/black.

I tried that - a file containing that many numbers is way too large to work.

Seems like a thing you could encode/compress, like continuous ranges between your known numbers...

The callkit api required a list of numbers passed to it that it would check to see if the list included the incoming call’s number.

I couldn’t figure out an obvious way around the api restriction, but if you want to try there was a github project called open call block which was a decent starting point.

...not having a phone number...

I know people who are already there.

When that notion grows, even slightly, it will be the instant death of PSTN (public switched telephone networks), due to negative network effects.

A huge question will be the fight over standards to replace this, and what capabilities (to communicating parties, initiator, receivers, carriers, vendors, third parties, criminals, law enforcement, intelligence agencies) are and are not afforded, intentionally or otherwise.

> I wonder if in the future people will wonder why they are called phone companies?

Similarly, I keep wondering if the word "phone" might annex the word "computer" entirely. If most people call their day-to-day pocket computer a "phone", what's to stop people calling every computer a non-pocket phone?

Some classic "futurism" ads of AT&T from back in the monopoly era (50s/60s) always had that interesting assumption that phones would be everywhere and do everything. We seem to have brought that future about ironically enough, just that the definition of "phone" is changing so drastically, and also that there are a lot fewer AT&T logos on everything.

An aside: AFAIK there is still not a way on an iphone to block all "unknown" calls without at the same time using a contact white list (e.g.: putting the phone on "do not disturb").

Phone calls need the equivalent of SPF and DomainKeys.

No, you just need an FCC that's not a joke. This whole robocall shit is only a problem in the US. On my German phone, 100% of incoming calls are legitimate.

I have my phone on silent permenantly now, and block all numbers not in my contacts. Bliss.

I no longer use phones to call people except the odd family member through WhatsApp (which is only because they're too old to use something more civilized, like Discord rooms).

The telephone network just seems like some vestigial leftover only used by pollsters to scare us with 80-year-olds' candidate picks in midterm elections.

It's pretty weird to see discord rooms being called "civilized".

People may be starting to realize it's better than slack

Robocalls were in the news a couple of days ago here in Finland as well.

The Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority has started receiving reports of marketing robocalls being made, and they issued a notice noting that such robocalls made without the customer's consent are illegal and that they and the Data Protection Ombudsman are currently investigating a case where a company has been using marketing robocalls: https://www.kkv.fi/en/current-issues/press-releases/2019/14....

Legality doesn’t matter when the callers don’t care about the law.

What I don’t understand is how providers haven’t a clue which providers are even sending the calls. We know of rogue servers or countries, but not phone numbers.

> What I don’t understand is how providers haven’t a clue which providers are even sending the calls.

This is how it works. The scammers are using $SCUMMY_VOIP_PROVIDER, which is a service that's pretty much marketing to illegal robocallers and making money off of it. The recipient phone companies only know that the calls are coming from $SCUMMY_VOIP_PROVIDER, and are unable to do anything about it because... they don't want to. They're not suffering from it, it costs money to build the systems to work out exactly how scummy $SCUMMY_VOIP_PROVIDER is, and trying to refuse calls from $SCUMMY_VOIP_PROVIDER might land them in legal hot water (which would cost them money even if they won).

There is a very effective solution, reputation, which is how spam mail exited the picture (from most users' perspective). Essentially, you rate your counterparty provider based on what fraction of their userbase is spam and make life worse for them the higher it is. The big email providers worked out the technical solution largely because spam is actually rather expensive to deal with (storing all spam email would increase your capacity requirements by ~10×), and the solution of screwing spammers over incrementally is easy to implement (effectively, you can throttle email since retry is builtin).

This is why my personal preference is to make the telcos more liable. If you get a spam call, I think that your telco should pay up under the TCPA if they can’t collect from the next company in the chain, etc. All these companies will shape up very quickly.

I could barely care a rats ass for telcos. I want internet provider I can trust. I have very little use for a voice phone provider except for authentication.

If I could transfer my main number to something that only accepted sms and voicemail I would immediately and move my iCloud account to an email address.

I don’t believe in at&t, Verizon it any of them. Something better is coming.

ATT and Verizon (and T-Mobile and Sprint) own all the mobile communications infrastructure. ATT and Verizon own a lot of the wired communications infrastructure. They are not going anywhere.

But legality matters for the telco. I keep repeating this, but the solution is fairly simple: either you're responsible (in real money) for the call or you need to point at who sent you the call (and repeat). This would kill almost all domestic spam.

The international situation is harder, but if you apply the same rules, local telcos will have to start dropping foreign partners who don't filter their calls. No foreign telco will want to be in a situation where they're dropped so they'll be forced to comply too.

>What I don’t understand is how providers haven’t a clue which providers are even sending the calls. //

They must know: they're surely not forwarding calls just on the hope that they get paid, they're forwarding calls from providers who are paying them to forward those calls.

They get/got more money if they don't bother to check legitimacy in the short term. The phrase is something like "the chickens are coming home to roost" (ie the result of their bad actions are going to return to them).

I see no reason that my supplier can't add, say, a "0091" code to calls from India, or wherever. Or send a callerid prefix that indicates a spoofed number if it's a domestic call.

I think the caller would care. I never got a robocall. I think it is because B2C cold calls without customer consent are illegal in Germany.

Yepp, just realized how good this works. Started to work I a company with a landline and we get lots of marketing calls, no robocalls though.

I was quite irritated in the beginning and always thought that my company as some kind of a business relationship with the caller. I got used to it and my first question is always if we have an ongoing business relationship of another former point of contact. If not I hang up.

>Legality doesn’t matter when the callers don’t care about the law.

A couple jail sentences would go a long way.

The threat of jail sentences won't always work: The problem is when the calls are made from another country where the law doesn't apply, or else the law is very hard to prosecute across borders.

There's already work underway to authenticate the actual source phone number of a caller: https://transnexus.com/whitepapers/stir-and-shaken-overview/

And to make sure the source is set to a value that the caller is allowed to possess. The problem isn't spoofing of numbers--because the utility is quite high for legitimate uses, like PBXes and after-hours doctor return calls for two examples--but the ability to spoof any number, not just numbers a caller is permitted to use.

I don’t see the utility being very high.

PBXs? Surely you can get a block of numbers you’re allowed to have and use those.

After hours doctor return calls? Route the call through the physical office, or just call from a different number.

A system that’s overrun with spam is as useless as having no system at all. We got close to that with email in the late 90s and we’re getting close with phones today. Requiring some minor, inconsequential changes to how a few people use the system should be easily acceptable.

I have a PBX (Asterisk) I setup as my main/primary/only personal number. That number is given out to anyone who needs it. The beauty of this is, no one has my personal cell (or other) numbers. This makes it very easy for me to block any spam numbers. In fact, I inject the FCC telemarketer spam caller list into the system blacklist. I also have it setup that the caller needs to 'press 1' to reach a human. It's not exactly hard to setup, but is certainly not for non-technical folks. However this system has given me the control over my phone number, callers, and spammers.

I've been looking in to doing so myself; but then the hassle (for me) is all test based communication. How can you keep your personal cell number a secret, while having access to texts? (I need to give my phone number to a number of companies so that they can text me)

Better yet, why not just scrap the whole system and implement IP addresses and security certificates for the phone system. We seemed to have already solved pretty much every analogous situation there that the phone system is dealing with.

I suppose it depends on whether a partial restriction is actually effective.

As useful as those examples may be, I am very much okay with cutting them off if it means we can greatly cut down on spam calls. People will adapt.

Unsurprisingly, that was one of the many iOS 13 features announced by Apple at WWDC this year: the ability to silence all calls from unknown numbers, sending them directly to voicemail. I'm sure someone running the beta has investigated and published the full details of the feature beyond the sound bite announcement. E.g. is it possible to _categorically_ block these calls, not even sending to voicemail? I wouldn't use such a feature, but some people might.

FWIW, I recently took the measure of setting my default ringtone to a "silent" sound file, and setting vibration to "none". Then I reenabled those settings manually for known-IRL contacts. A hassle to do, but absolutely necessary given the uptick in phone spam.

I'm not that familiar with IOS, but 'Do Not Disturb' mode has been standard on Android for a while and includes a mode where there is only an audio notification if the number calling is one that is in my contact list. I'm surprised if IOS does not have something similar.

iOS has "Do Not Disturb", but it has a broad silencing effect across notifications in general. It's too big a hammer for just shutting down spam callers.

With Apple's Do Not Disturb, callers in different groups (Contacts, Favorites or a specific group) can ring through if you allow it.

It also blocks all notifications making it not a suitable way to do this.

That one line in WWDC was a huge deal to me, but it was unclear if unknown meant not in contacts or a literal “unknown” caller ID. If it’s that latter it’s pretty useless.

I really hope it’s a contact based whitelist.

Not in contacts.

Yes! That’d be amazing, do you work at Apple or are you using the beta (or both)?

I haven’t seen anyone write about this yet.

> * silence all calls from unknown numbers, sending them directly to voicemail*

How about not sending them to voicemail?

I have literally _never_ used voicemail. I _will_ never use voicemail specifically because it has _always_ been riddled with spam. I even demanded T-mobile to disable my voicemail account. Not even six months later I started getting that annoying little icon on my phone again.

For contrast, I very rarely get spam voicemail. The overwhelming majority of robocallers drop without leaving a message. And for many people, myself included, that's the only way to screen legit but previously unknown callers.

I suspect that a lot of people in the "Just don't answer the phone camp" don't have elderly parents, children, run a business, etc. that sort of prohibit you from taking the attitude that you won't respond to anyone other than a known contact.

So, when are we going to actually take away the ability to spoof your phone number?

Whatever utility that feature may have is clearly outweighed by all the harm it's causing. It's past time we get rid of it.

Original spoofing made a little sense in the context of a limited capacity PBX, and a limited capacity exchange providing line grouping and hunt groups. It made sense when it could only spoof to the extent of the branch or local office going out on one consistent number for all the work groups. Sales could always give the number of the local office rather than their desk. A big office might have to have a group of sales numbers. That's the world spoofing came into, and it is long dead.

Most of the responses I see so far don't seem to realise that world ever existed.

The bank/doctor/employer used to call from the local visible office. You'd know if it was the local bank branch, the nearby business office, the card, loan or mortgage centre as they'd all have different PBX spoofed numbers as it was constrained by the line groups. You wouldn't get to know from caller ID whose desk it was.

Let small businesses spoof the least significant digit - yes just ONE, and large businesses two digits. Then it can work like it was meant to, and we can have customer service again.

I wonder if there is way to get a personal 900 # and cost the spammer $10 per minute.

For $600/hr, I wouldn't mind to receive the spamming calls from them. Maybe some robo dialer might just be stupid enough to call? $$$$ :-)

That's a thing in the UK: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23869462 7p/minute, but still not bad.

The whole problem with robocalls is that your provider gets paid some small pittance to terminate the call, but gives none of that to you. Because they don't want to change, they drag their heels and complain and complain.

> That's a thing in the UK: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23869462 7p/minute, but still not bad.

> The whole problem with robocalls is that your provider gets paid some small pittance to terminate the call, but gives none of that to you. Because they don't want to change, they drag their heels and complain and complain.

This must be the same logic used to allow for spam physical mail but laws against the virtual sort.

Some guy in the UK did this. It's fairly hard to manage however, because there is a lot of regulations around his legal requirements i.e. needs to disclose that it's a paid number, etc. He make a bit of sidecash off it and a surprising number of spam callers are happy to pay.

I wonder if people will try to start moving to app based calling as a default : Zoom, google hangouts, whatsapp, fb messenger etc.

I have already. Its shame you have to get a phone number with cell phone data plan.

Phone gives you QOS, data does not. Until my zoom packets get prioritization, nothing beats POTSoIP

FB messenger call quality is much clearer than any cell phone call I've ever had.

Not guaranteed packets. It’s clearer because better codecs and more bandwidth is used but your data packet will get reprioritized before that low quality voice packet

I've been getting a lot of spam calls from alleged European numbes (and the scammers appear to be speaking Spanish when I overhear them) since my son foolishly entered my number into a website to "win some Robux!" (a very teachable moment about Internet scams) - they list an overseas premium number as the calling number, then hang up before you can answer, in the hope that you'll return the call and end up paying 20 euros for the privilege.

I made a deliberate effort to answer such calls on the first ring, thus costing them money by connecting the call, and after two weeks of that the calls stopped.

> So, when are we going to actually take away the ability to spoof your phone number?

When we burn SS7 to the ground and start over, which will never happen in an era of WhatsApp/FB messenger/telegram/signal

Phone companies should be required to forward the originator information to the users receiving the calls. Then people can collectively block callers, adblock style.

This won’t work. VoIP providers would have to be comprehensively banned.

You can pass the fines the other way. Maybe some VoIP providers decide they do want to be good citizens after all and stop spammers using their service, maybe some decide they like the robocall provisioning business and they'll eat the fines. Adjust the fines until the problem is reduced to acceptable levels.

"Hi, thanks for your enquiry about VoIP. Yes, we have a No Questions Asked policy and it'll be $5000 pcm plus $0.01 per second calls, we need the first $10 000 up front and you need to stay $1000 in credit or we pause service. OK?"

"What! That's crazy, we can't pay 1¢ per second, your competitor is ten times cheaper"

"And my competitor doesn't like spam. Either 1¢ per second is fine or you are wasting my time, get off the line. No questions asked is what you need, and that's what it costs. I paid $25 000 in fines just last week, that's a lot of seconds at one cent per second"

"I'll have you know we're a market leading direct sales business and every one of our calls is based on a legitimate sales lead, but I see your point, the $10 000 will be in your account first thing tomorrow".

They have to provide the IP address of the caller. If it's untrusted it gets blocked. Simple enough. No sympathy here.

> So, when are we going to actually take away the ability to spoof your phone number?

Around the same time we can no longer spoof the From: in emails.

These 2 technologies are quite different, but similar in the way the architecture treats the originator. (i.e. there's no authentication or validation of the originator required)

I'm beginning to wonder whether some regulatory authorities are tacitly accepting the current state of affairs. It wouldn't be too hard to imagine someone with deep pockets coming out and saying to get rid of it would restrict "free enterprise".

The networks do have unspoofable numbers which they use for reciprocal compensation, rural termination fees, and other fees/assessments. They are "bill to numbers" and how the carriers figure out payment between each other.

> Whatever utility that feature may have is clearly outweighed by all the harm it's causing

I'm curious. What utility does spoofing a phone number have?

People calling from company phones, but wanting callbacks to the switchboard.

People with multiple phone cards, but wanting callbacks in one place.

People with phone numbers belonging to another country.

Doctors responding to out of hours requests, but not wanting to share their direct contact.

One legit use is for companies/organizations that have a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) where each desk has it's own external telno. They can make all the calls appear to come from the corporate main number. So instead of 415-555-9xxx for whoever's extension it shows up as "415-555-9000". This is useful for both not revealing a personal extension and for branding

Of course, why it was designed to allow spoofing of any number in the world, instead of only numbers in the same block...

Any business with multiple outbound lines might find it handy.

There’s probably a better solution.

Think of every company that wants all outgoing calls to show the same phone number. Not just call centers, but also doctor's offices, corporations, and even the mechanic down the street.

No more Skype voip calls, no more business pbxs. Won’t end well.

Odd thought, but I wonder if the current robocall plague is (and will be) affecting polling during this election cycle? The result of relentless robocalls for me has been that I simply never answer calls from unknown numbers anymore. When unknown numbers were telemarketers and telephone survey people, I'd answer unknown callers because I could politely decline.

538 did some good analysis and explinations about this exact issue, but the articles that I can quickly google are from a while ago [0][1]. You can look over their analysis of different pollsters that they use and get a feeling for what 538 thinks is bias [2]. Despite some negative press in some circles, they tend to do a very good job of making sense of the maddness that is polling and they are very upfront about their own biases and issues.

[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/study-excluding-cellpho...

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/polling-bias/

[2] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/

While the desire to enable carrier level and carrier determined blocking of calls seems appealing for functionality, make sure to strongly consider the significant power that such authority would create. As a change would revert a base requirement of being a carrier which is connect all calls, in the same vein as net neutrality.

I wouldn't mind if each call had a connection fee, such as a penny to try to connect to a number. That would (might?) align the carriers with the changes necessary.

I also find it really annoying how cellphone and smartphone companies don't give individuals the tools to redirect unknown callers to voicemail or do some sort of basic algorithmic/call screening things. On iphone the most beginning programmer could come up with something better than do not disturb.

I would mostly disable my inbound calling capability altogether if I could. There is just ever so slightly more than zero benefit to receiving voice phone calls.

iOS 13 does have this. You can silence unknown callers or callers not in your contacts. This is independent of Do Not Disturb.

In its current state the telephone system is unusable. Whatever emerges from the ashes of our current system, we will have to judge on its own merrits.

What I’ve found with the Mandarin calls is if I press a number (usually 0), I get connected to someone.

But I don’t speak Mandarin, so all I can let out are some Nihao’s and can only waste up to 15s of their time.

I really need a Mandarin soundboard on a webpage to do some It’s Lenny time wasting.

hmmm, these mandarin calls sound useful for practicing my still developing mandarin. Online, you have to pay platforms to find a native speaker to practice with but it sounds like these guys give it for free. j/k.

Just set up a bunch of Toronto or Vancouver DIDs and let them roll in. Voip.ms charges you less than $1/month/DID.

Anybody know what these calls are even about? I'm curious.

Most of the calls here are scammers claiming that your relative(s) have been arrested in China, then offering to help get them released. There's plenty of first generation immigrants who (a) have money and (b) worry about the parents or spouses they left behind in China.

Harassing people into giving out their personal details by claiming they're from immigration, at least according to some articles on the subject.

I got one of these while applying for a Chinese bussines visa. Scared me a bit because the only person I knew that speaks mandrin only really understood enough to tell me it was was "Chinese immigration" wanting money and info. Ended up forwording it to our immigration lawyer who told me what was a scam.

Calling from immigration... in Chinese?! This is supposed to be US immigration?

One must look under the lamppost. This is a sales funnel, and the undocumented Chinese immigrants who fall out because they can't understand English will outnumber those who don't believe immigration can speak Mandarin.

I'm not sure why they singled out hospitals (and particularly patients) for this article. This is a problem for any business and indeed anyone with a phone. I get the calls constantly. While a hospital emergency line getting one of these calls is annoying, and perhaps more detrimental than another business getting calls, it still doesn't stand out enough to warrant any specific focus like this. Police, fire, and ambulance services are all affected as well. Aside from the hospital's emergency number, they're just a big business, and the disruption to their administrative staff is no more harmful to society than the disruption of any office's administrative staff. And the patients are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

The FCC just last week started tackling this. They're working on allowing telco providers to implement blocking and also whitelisting. I haven't read all the details, but it seems like there were regulations preventing them from acting, and they're trying to remove those regulations.

In the end, this is a technical problem. It simply shouldn't be possible to spoof phone numbers this way. Surely the major telcos know where these calls are originating, at least on a network level. If they're all coming from China, clearly they're not going to block all of China, but they could ensure that calls coming from China's telco(s) are not routed if their source caller ID info is spoofed to indicate a US network. That might not stop the calls, but at least they wouldn't show up as coming from US numbers.

If you've never been a recipient of one of these calls, one of the hallmarks is that the caller ID will show it coming from the same area code and exchange as your number. So if your phone number is 917-555-1212, the calls will usually appear to come from 917-555-XXXX. Surely the phone company has a way to identify and handle this situation, at least better than they do now. Mobile phones probably complicate this. Maybe someone who knows how the networks operate can speak about the technical barriers?

[1]: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-19-51A1.pdf

What I have noticed is that these spam calls follow my geolocation as well. I recently took a trip to Washington DC and within minutes of checking into the JW Marriott downtown I get an insurance spam call from a DC number. I have a Georgia number and I always get spam calls from Georgia numbers. Coincidence? Maybe but, this tells me that either 1) they spam call phones in a LAC with some sort of SIGINT equipment , 2) my Gmail calendar is compromised or my Gmail data is being sold and purchased by these folks so they know where I am or 3) JW Marriott is compromised. I may sound like a conspiracy theorist but I think there is something to it. Honestly I would not be surprised if it was 1 or 2 since it would be easiest to target a large set of people.

FWIW, the elevators at work have been spammed pretty regularly now. It's about once a week that someone gets through to it when I'm on an elevator.

It's not just hospitals, it's any phone at all. I've deleted my voicemail and that seems to have helped a small bit. I'm on the job hunt and as such I get a lot more spam than when I was not in the market. Yes, some recruiters and HR people may fall through the gaps and I may not call them back, but generally anyone that wants to talk to me will send an email as well. I'm kinda using a crummy 2FA for the job hunt.

It isn’t that I disbelieve you. But why do you think they originate from China?

Almost all of mine are related to health insurance or small business loans. Is this what you think comes from China?

Literally all the spam calls I receive are in Mandarin. I don't speak Mandarin, but from what I've read, it's a scam targeting Mandarin speakers, telling them that they or their loved ones back in China are in some legal or immigration trouble, and demanding that money be sent to someone in China.

As I don't speak Mandarin, I can't confirm that all my calls are this specific scam, nor does that necessarily mean that the calls originate in China. The "block China" comment was more of an example. For all I know, it's a scam organized and operated from inside the US that just happens to target Mandarin speakers.

My comment was for illustrative purposes, with some assumptions backed by various news articles (a few random ones linked below). I should note that I have a NYC phone number and this specific Chinese-targeted scam is the source of basically all spam calls to New Yorkers (anecdotally, but strongly so based on everyone I know in NYC getting the same calls, and on the reporting indicating that SF and NYC are the prime targets).

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whats-behind-all-those-chinese-...

[2]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/367491/chinese-embassy-robocall-s...

[3]: https://www.npr.org/2018/05/10/609117134/chinese-robocalls-b...

About half of my spam voice mail messages are in Mandarin but I assume they are targeting me because I have a northern California prefix (there was a huge phone scam involving elderly Chinese in San Francisco recently), and have no clue of the country of origin.

I feel bad for the hospitals that replaced their pagers with on-call phones for their staff.

Should’ve stuck with the pagers.

> For most Americans, such robocalls represent an unavoidable digital-age nuisance,

No, I'm pretty sure this is very avoidable if phone companies put some effort into it.

Or if the practice was simply banned. In Germany companies cold calling private individuals carries a heavy fine (up to several hundred k), and I haven't had a robocall in 20 years.

Having a German (as parent poster) and Spanish phone for many years, I have never had a robocall. It's really surprising to me that this is a problem at all.

I think it’s interesting just reading this thread how everyone gets different types of calls. Mine are almost exclusively either: 1) Hilton/Marriott/Hyatt scam calls from Mexico trying to get me to give up a credit card for a “free vacation”, or 2) lower your interest rate on your credit card scams from India. Every now and then there’s a social security scam from I’m not sure where.

Sometimes I just google “test credit card numbers” and read them off the dev documents for various processors. They almost always hang up the second it validates. I wonder if they realize the transaction won’t actually go through.

I'm surprised this isn't a bigger issue in the election, actually. I realize that there are bigger issues at stake, but robocalling seems like a tangible thing that basically all Americans deal with every day and absolutely loathe, across all party, class and racial lines. It's also something that politicians actually can do something about. I figure the first candidate that goes up on a stage and says "I will end robocalls" will get massive applause.

In previous threads people have mentioned implementing captchas that require users to input a number. This feels like a great solution that should be implemented at the os level.

This is called an IVR, and any company that uses one blocks 100% of spam calls. The robots simply cannot dial the extension to get through.

Almost any company can get one, and any person can get one on a VOIP line. (Yes, ironic.)

Legitimate use for spoofing: A call from outside the office comes into the company phone system and my extension is set to ring multiple phones simultaneously, some external to the phone system (e.g. mobile phone). I want the caller ID info coming into my mobile to be that of the original caller, not that of my phone system. If I couldn't spoof the caller's number, I would see the phone number of my office.

This is something that is already easily be handled by the office PBX system. The call coming into the PBX from the phone company should be unspoofable to the extent possible.

You can do whatever you want with your non-public phone system.

An "on behalf of" feature would be far more robust.

after I starting using the Google Fi phone service I have never received a single spam phone call Period. ... evidently Google has mastered art of shunting spam calls ... its an incredibly valuable benefit and my bill is half it was with ATT or similar ... so this problem is solvable given sufficient tech savvy ... Google should peddle this service to land lines too so places like hospitals can benefit

I have been using Fi from the start. I can't say the same. I get spam calls all day long. I always tell Fi it was spam, but it just comes in on a different number the next time.

What I am saying is this -- I don't think Google solved the problem. I think you are just lucky.

I'm on Fi and get them all the time.

Yeah same. Tons of spam calls on my fi number.

Early FI adopter. I still get a fair amount of spam calls, but the number of calls does seem to have gone down recently. So maybe they are making some progress.

Anecdotal, but I have Google Fi and I receive about 5 to 10 spam calls a day.

The google is the problem on itself

I know the proof is the simple fact that the robocalls exist, but I can’t imagine a situation where people gather in a meeting and say “I know how we can make money! We will set up a call center and sell fake car warranties!!!” When I think about it I hear Brian Regan’s voice. Probably the bit he did about kidnapping Russell Crowe.

I just looked at my call log. It ranges from around 90% real calls to 90% spam. The net effect of all of this is that I never answer a call that isn’t a contact anymore. It’s kind of hilarious that my Smartphone is now mainly an answering machine.

you'd love ios13

Is this not just an alternate form of DDOS? Imagine if you're operating emergency services, and your phone rings non-stop.

When someone actually has a legitimate emergency, the emergency service provider is essentially overwhelmed by the volume.

I live in a central European country and receive 0-2 spam calls per month. And that's because my phone number was used by someone else before (it's a company phone).

Why is this such a big problem in the US?

US has a lot of rich old gullible people speaking the same language. Central Europe doesn't, so it's not as cost effective to target. It doesn't help that you can hire a lot of English speaking people for pennies in India to staff the call centers.

Legibility-as-weakness.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...

Rules, regulations and fines. In the end - so called cold calling is forbidden by law (at least in Germany) and it more or less works okayish to fine.

Because of robocalls I normally ignore caller IDs I don’t recognize, which is a disaster when my home alarm goes off and they notify me. The alarm company has some numbers I haven’t noted yet.

If someone creates an adBlock/uBlock for phones (s)he will get rich.

Imagine having a community-curated whitelist of numbers (plus the ones from your friends/family).

I recently just created an iPhone app that basically does this. It only allows calls through from your contacts, all other calls go directly to voicemail that you can review later. Most other apps out there attempt to use a blacklist, which is basically useless as it's trivial to recycle phone numbers or just spoof phone numbers. Imagine if social media worked the same way phone calls do, where anyone's effortless contact is treated the same way, regardless of their degree of connection. I think for a lot of people, this is a great solution, and pretty much eliminates the constant distraction of spam calls. https://www.myhumansapp.com

How would the adBlock-like software obtain the real phone number of the caller?

Serious question.

Wrong problem. Only needs to determin intent and spamminess.

Most calls are known. Good calls can be classed at aggregate (for crowdsourced tools). Bad or suspect calls are either known or unknown and can be subjected to workfactor remedies.

How about we separate the phone network from the Internet. I see no reason why VoIP should exist to be honest.

How about we make phone calls a whitelist-driven system with cryptographic tokens and use software to give your phone number to others. When this exchange happens, it comes with a token, and your phone does not ring if the token is not included.

So when someone calls you and you expect it to be bob, but it is steve the scammer, you can revoke bob's token and text him with WTF bob? How much did steve pay you?

I already do this with email. Anything send to @mydomain.com gets to my catch-all, and the token is whatever is to the left of the @ sign.

I've caught so many companies either breached or selling data that it is not funny.

There needs to be ReCaptcha for inbound calls.

Google rolled out a call screening service for android that is basically that. But I don't use it much. If it happens to be a legit call it is a fairly awkward interaction - just letting it go to voicemail and calling back seems nicer, and less surprising to the caller. If it is a robocall it really isn't better than voicemail.

Now I can't even use Incognito to surf the WP or I get blocked? Man, this website may as well die.

Disable JS.

Anyone have an archive link?

https://outline.com/nUTtY2

Thank you. But:

> Something went wrong

> We're sorry. This page failed to Outline.

I've noticed that a lot, lately, with Outline links posted on HN. Maybe sites have figured out how to block it?

Worked for me on iOS with safari.

Thanks. I somehow missed the need to enable the API in NoScript.

The Washington Post offers a limited number of articles for free, have you tried a private window?

Hell; I pay for WaPo & get blocked because their login system sucks so hard. Luckily, canceling is easy.

> You consent to the use of cookies and tracking by us and third parties to provide you with personalized ads

But I don't.

If you're worried about tracking, just disable scripts and cookies on that domain. Much less tracking, and as a side effect, the paywall stops working.

In Firefox with NoScript, that gives me a black page, headed with their name/logo and (ironically):

> Democracy Dies in Darkness

Well, there must be some combination of subdomains and assets to block to get it to mostly work, at the expense of running some JavaScript, as it's been stable and working for me for at least a year. It even works on mobile.

As another side effect, the entire site stops working, because it uses JS to serve the content.

JS on, block pretty much everything else. You can read it all 4 free. I'm sure you are being tracked via js though.

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