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Comment by lprubin | Hacker News Reader

Thats a good start. What about telling them to never answer a call from an unknown number. Any legit call will leave a voicemail and that will weed out a large number of scammers.

Next, if the voicemail is clearly a robot voice, make sure they don’t respond until checking with you first. That should weed out another big chunk.

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> What about telling them to never answer a call from an unknown number.

Just yesterday, I got a call with caller ID for Chase bank, audio in Chinese. Trusting caller ID is a bad choice (at least currently)

Exactly! Telling people to "only pick up from numbers you know" is not good advice. The whole point of this article is that caller IDs can be spoofed. That's what these new protocols are all about.

2 or 3 weeks ago I got my first call from "Comcast", which I do not have a contact for. I was surprised because I didn't even know the system as a whole was capable of that. I've never seen a non-contact name come up in my phone UI before, only phone numbers, or phone numbers mapped to my contacts.

On the plus side, when I get a call from a textual non-contact number it's a heck of a strong signal I don't need to pick up.

Many telemarketers have switched to "soundboards" which use responses pre-recorded from native speakers. It's increasingly difficult to recognize that a robot is talking to you. You can ask them if they're a robot, and they have a pre-recorded answer ready for you.

They have a finite set of responses, though. Ask them what the difference is between a burrito and an enchilada.

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