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nobodyandproud

Yup. It’s amusing to see people think there is some hard technical problem here.

Tie the problem of robocalls to the telcos losing money, and this problem will solve itself in months.

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And then they'll add on a monthly robocall prevention fee to your bill. :P

They're testing the waters for that already, https://www.zdnet.com/article/at-t-to-auto-block-fraud-roboc...

These new telco blockers only work on VOIP lines, not copper-wire POTS phones. The service is not even available for POTS, it's only the major telcos creating a /r/selfhosted RoboKiller who make it available for the kinds of phone lines that go down in a power outage..

I got two unwanted robocalls in the last twenty years (central europe). This seems like a profoundly american issue.

Lucky you. Approximately no one in the countries that these calls originate from speaks any central European language, so they don't call.

AFAIK they're not a problem here in Australia either, and the language here could (charitably) be called English. I've never received one of these calls.

Aussie here, I get the odd one on mobile, but get a couple a week on my land line numbers.

Land line numbers are also registered with Do Not Call, but doesn't make any difference.

Answer the call and there will be either:

1) a few second pause and then a person will drop in with the call centre voice noise in the background.

2) a few second pause and if there is no sound (you saying "hello") it will hang up.

Those are usually from international call centres. In terms of locally based ones, got a couple during the election with a recorded voice saying "this is an important message from XYZ politician".

Unwanted calls are an issue in France as well afaik. Not necessarily robocalls but the fact that there isn't a way to opt out from advertising calls (in contrast to Germany's Robinson-Liste) is very annoying.

There is a do not call list (i don't know how it compares to Robinson). It's called Bloctel. But it's not really effective.

Americans are not uniformly harassed, and I am sure people in your country aren't either, so your sneering conclusion is baseless.

#robocall complaints (USA, 2018): 3.8 million

#robocall complaints (Germany, 2018): 13375

https://www.ftc.gov/policy/reports/policy-reports/commission...

https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/All...

The word "uniformly" is key here, and why many generalizations fail, as well as being unfair and offensive.

I'd also doubt assumptions such as people are equally likely to report, it's equally easy to report, counting is done the same way, etc., so I don't think your response is sufficient to characterize the average.

I'm in the UK. I get about 2-3 a week on the landline, 1-2 a week on the mobile. 30% "This is Microsoft/your ISP, your computer is hacked", 30% "You were involved in an accident that wasn't your fault", 10% oven cleaning services. I suspect that English speaking scammer call centres are a reason for this.

It would literally be a day. They pass the legislation and they would stop.

The lack of political will and the form of legislation are the questions.

If the rule is that telcos must eat the cost of a scam, they will drag it out in court and the consumer must still prove it.

If the rule is that each robocall that makes it through must be paid by the telcos (take the consumer out of this), then telcos will battle each other to try and insist that the other party is responsible.

At some point they may even come to a consensus and protocol that protects the customer.

I prefer this option.

There may be other options. Just don’t put the burden on the individual customer.

Edit: Even better, allow bounties so that lawyers can start hunting for robocalls that went through.

Set up a government department with a dozen people and a thousand phone lines distributed around the country and with different telcos. Record every call received. Fine telco $100k for every robocall. Increase fines steeply over time.

Way too complicated. Much easier would be to get a warrant for a trap and trace on the line known to be receiving these calls. Then disconnect the robocall lines.

> If the rule is that telcos must eat the cost of a scam, they will drag it out in court and the consumer must still prove it.

> If the rule is that each robocall that makes it through must be paid by the telcos (take the consumer out of this), then telcos will battle each other to try and insist that the other party is responsible.

I don't necessarily see these as guaranteed outcomes. You don't see this kind of behavior for banks, which are generally the ones liable for credit card fraud.

> It’s amusing to see people think there is some hard technical problem here.

One of the primary users of robocalls are politicians. I'm sure they'll get right on legislating against it. /sarc

(US) Politicians already gave themselves a loophole into unlimited unsolicited spam. So cleaning up other spammers would strengthen the quality of their spam channel, as consumers would be less jaded/more likely to pick up.

Does that loophole also apply to political action committees?

Yes. If the content of the message is "political speech" it is exempted from CAN-SPAM (which also covers cell phone calls) as an extension of first ammendment rights, regardless of who is doing the speaking.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2015/08/...

> (which also covers cell phone calls)

No, you are absolutely wrong. CAN-SPAM law for email is under the FTC's regulation and does nothing to restrict the ability of marketers to send initial unsolicited mailings. This isn't a first amendment question of exemption, the FTC is not authorized by statute to regulate noncommercial activity like a political campaign.

TCPA regulations for cellphone marketing are under the auspices of the FCC. You cannot send unsolicited commercial SMS and calls legally (there are some exemptions for pollsters and nonprofits). TCPA law also applies to political campaigns: https://www.fcc.gov/political-campaign-robocalls-robotexts

My non-tech savvy 82yo father has made a similar point to me: all these garbage phone calls that I get every day make me not trust ANY phone call that I receive. You'd think this would upset legitimate businesses that need to make calls.

Business would be a bit better if there weren’t robocalls. But free-rider/coordination challenges make it difficult for the diffuse category of all businesses to group together and fight it.

Architecturally there's no binding between phone number and subscriber identity except at the very edge of the network, for the very smallest retail customers. There is a design to federate this binding throughout the ecosystem using a PKI called STIR/SHAKEN [0], but it's absolutely a hard technical problem to get that rolled out 100% without breaking things.

[0] https://transnexus.com/whitepapers/shaken-as/

To do that they’d have to turn the open system into a walled garden. They’d simply stop taking incoming calls from networks they didn’t trust. This would be exactly the same as saying ‘email providers can easily solve the spam problem, they should just adopt the Facebook Messenger model’.

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