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Comment by ozmbie | Hacker News Reader

Is this a uniquely American problem?

My Australian mobile phone receives maybe one spam call per year. It’s my single phone and I give out the number to various businesses and people.

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It is an increasing problem. I've defaulted to never answering numbers I don't have saved unless I expect a call. If it's important they should leave a voicemail. I wanna say a few years ago it wasn't this bad, then I realized I had missed a lot of spam calls cause I had my number behind Google Voice (free with Sprint) and now it is just ridiculous.

Also idk about other states, but in FL everything is public record, so after I bought my house I've gotten spam letters and calls like crazy.

This year I've been getting three types of spam calls (in Australia):

1. Spam call from new 03 8xxx xxxx range, I was sure these were VoIP numbers handed out by MyNetFone but haven't been able to prove anything. I can't remember what the content of the call was

2. International spam call from Mozambique (?). The call never connects if I pick up.

3. Private number, recorded voice in Mandarin. I think this is a tax scam.

I'm sure I'd seen some changes in the laws regarding caller ID this year, but I can't find it.

Yes, it's much, much worse in America.

In Denmark, phone sales to consumers are generally illegal though strangely insurance and newspapers are excluded.

There's a national "do not call" list you can sign up to as well. This is amusing called the "Robinson List", presumably after Robinson Crusoe. The same concept is used in a dozen other countries.

I guess the penalties are severe enough that it generally only very shady people call, such as those pretending to be from Microsoft and calling to fix your computer.

Rather off-topic, I was surprised by how readable this was to someone who doesn't speak a lick of Danish (me):

> Robinsonlisten er opkaldt efter Robinson Crusoe, som er en fiktiv person, der optræder i romanen Robinson Crusoe af Daniel Defoe. Han strander på en øde ø og lever isoleret.

True but if a Danish person was to read this to you you would not even recognize the individual words...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

EDIT: Just FYI this is a clip from a Norwegian comedy program. Danish and Norwegian have very similar written languages but sound very different when spoken. In reality with some practice Danes, Swedes and Norwegians can speak together and understand one another.

It's also illegal in the USA, and we have our own national do not call list. The problem is the spammers are mostly using spoofed numbers (I get calls from my own phone number quite often) and are not actually physically located in the USA. It's difficult to prosecute some call-center warehouse located in Asia.

It's primarily an American problem, but I've seen in the last year or two an uptick in certain kinds of Spammy activity to my Australian mobile number.

The most prominent type, and have appeared in the last two years are the one-ring-only calls from some foreign country. They're trying to get you to call back to some premium-rate number.

The second are SMS based random spam. Just an hour ago I got spam from "JbHiFi" (even though it's not them, I've never given JB my number) with phishing/spam "you won a contest". I also get random SMS spam from other sources.

Then again, if you have any kind of landline in a regional area you're going to get a ton of fake NBN/Telstra/ATO/etc scammers.

I think so. I never had this problem in Canada but it's been terrible since moving to the US.

Basically get no spam calls in Germany, sometimes from companies where I'm a customer.

I'm in Australia. I'd say I get between 5-10 spam calls a year.

The downside of inventing it is the US has a massive amount of legacy in telephony that few other nations have to deal with. That opens up tremendous opportunities to break the system. But, hey, we get +1 as our international code, so there's that.

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