The DOJ Is Finally Suing US Telecom Providers for Robocalls | Hacker News Reader

The DOJ Is Finally Suing US Telecom Providers for Robocalls

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76 pointsecliptik53 comments

From 2 days ago, over 300 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22175019

I got pretty fed up with robocalls and none of the existing iPhone apps that use a blacklist approach really worked since robocallers and spam callers can just fake their number or use recycled numbers.

I created an iPhone app called MyHumans that takes the opposite approach with a whitelist using your phone contacts. Other callers are sent to voicemail without ringing your phone. It has an easy to access switch where you can temporarily disable any blocking for a time period, like an hour, if you're expecting a one-off call from a recruiter or whatever.

It works really well for me. Spammers rarely bother leaving a voicemail and legitimate businesses leave a voicemail that I can follow-up on later.

https://www.myhumansapp.com

Is that different from Silence Unknown Callers in IOS 13?

I honestly would use that instead if there was a quick way to disable without digging through the settings app.

Maybe through shortcuts?

I foiled myself and missed an important call the first time I used that setting. It was a call I expected, but not a contact.

> Maybe through shortcuts?

Kinda! You can make an iOS shortcut to take you right to the Phone settings, at which point turning "Silence Unknown Callers" on/off is a one-tap operation.

To do this, create a shortcut to open the URL "prefs:root=Phone". You can find more detail and a bunch more interesting options here: https://www.macstories.net/ios/a-comprehensive-guide-to-all-...

Serious question - do you ever worry that perhaps you'll get a call from a hospital about a loved one, or from a school about a hurt child, etc?

they can leave a message, which shows up almost immediately

Checking voicemails actually takes longer and involves more steps than answering calls.

Sure, but in my experience, most robo-calls don't actually leave messages. I maybe get a message every week or two, but I'll have multiple spam calls per day that are sent to my voicemail.

It's also not immediate. I can check my voicemail later when I have time, instead of having to pick up whenever I'm spammed. That's even before I might have a service/feature where it will try to transcribe the voicemail, which often makes it very easy to tell that it's spam.

a tweak would be to the phone OS to ping alerts on new VMs immediately. perhaps VMs user-flagged as spam can be templates for autoblocking such VMs for other users.

But has far fewer false positives. Especially with a workflow.

a possible solution is that hospitals and police might have escalated dial-in privileges where they cause the phone to ring, irrespective of user-set conditions. so long as these privileges cannot be spoofed, this might take care of what is an important corner case. i myself would rather get a call than deal with a VM in a true emergency.

>swipe down notification bar >tap voicemail ribbon

Two touches versus one. Sooooooooooooooo many extra steps, lemme tell ya.

perhaps such emergency VMs can be allowed special tagging by the OS to remove all doubt

i am all in favor of 100% true positives on blocking all spammers and getting all real emergency calls through

This is feasible if first responders and medical offices use SIP/VOIP providers who support SHAKEN/STIR.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/at-t-comcast-successfully-test...

https://transnexus.com/whitepapers/understanding-stir-shaken...

And then it needs to dial in. And then you need to listen to the message anyway. You could have just picked up for less time and effort.

That is unless you're willing to pay for transcription service.

"You could have just picked up for less time and effort."

Or I could be driving, and refuse to touch my phone like an informed and rational and unassuming human being.

Not answering the phone while driving is entirely unrelated to not answering the phone because you think it might be spam.

If I'm driving and you call me, you're spamming for my attention, IMHO.

It's a legitimate thing to consider and something I've thought about. If the call comes from a loved one's phone then the call won't be blocked. If it's a major emergency where the call is from a hospital line then they will leave a voicemail and I'll find out soon enough when I glance at my notifications (although not immediately).

Which is exactly what I do would do anyways. If it's an unrecognized number I send it straight to voicemail and check it later.

That is a major reason why I would never use a white/blacklisting app. The odds of some unknown phone being used to urgently find me may be exceptionally low, but those are also the circumstances when time matters most.

I set up a SIP call flow [1] to deal with this. I was getting upwards of ten spam calls per day. Apparently, the last person with my number owes a lot of money.

In short, it's like Google Voice, with a change: The caller is asked to record their name, my phone rings from the SIP number, and the recording plays back. I can then press a key to pick up the call, another to send it to voicemail, and another to add it to a blacklist with an automated "GTFO" message (with the caller being redirected immediately to this message if they ever call again).

Then, I set my cell to whitelist mode, which allows my contacts as well as the SIP number. 100% reject rate for bots and obnoxious callers, with very few false positives, and anyone important has my direct cell number.

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/5zIo1sU.png (Provider is Anveo)

Cheers for Anveo. They really provide a unique service at dirt cheap prices. Happy customer. If they add a "Shaken/Stirred" ok flag or auto-blacklist, I'm a customer for life.

Doctors almost always block their outgoing number when calling. At this point given how much call spammers have taken to spoofing their caller id, if it says "Private caller" I know it must be a doctor.

I Get so annoyed when I forget to toggle back on "silence all unknown callers," especially when I'm driving/listening to music in the car and oh hey it's call yet not for me rather some scumbag is trying to steal ppl's money.

Another shameless self-plug, this is why MyHumans is better because you can temporarily turn off the call blocking for a time period, like an hour, and it will automatically turn back on.

Cool Apple needs to add that.

Though I only turn it off when I'm expecting a call. If your app can figure out when I'm expecting a call and when that call is done then toggle silence all unknown callers on then I'm sold.

I end up with voicemails from spammers all the time. They'll ring me and while the phone is ringing, they'll ring me again so they get sent straight to voicemail and can leave a message.

> I created an iPhone app called MyHumans that takes the opposite approach with a whitelist using your phone contacts.

iOS 13 now does this: https://www.macrumors.com/2019/06/06/ios-13-silence-unknown-...

The only reason I know about this feature: My iPhone prompted me to turn it on yesterday. I turned it on, and it is working admirably so far (multiple spam calls blocked, and my dad got through as expected.)

Wow, finally. These calls are driving my grandma crazy, I showed her my Pixel has been able to block spam calls for at least a year but that iPhones somehow had no equivalent. She was trying to block one number at a time but obviously it wasn't effective.

The major difference is you don't have an easy way to turn off the call blocking with the iOS 13 setting if you need to accept a call from an unknown caller (recruiter, scheduled call, whatever). On iOS 13, it's hidden in the settings app and there is no way to temporarily disable for a period of time so you don't forget to turn it back on.

Reminds me of the time I went to career night at my high school. I went to the seminar on running your own business, and the speaker was a guy who ran a telemarketing shop.

This was the 1990s when telemarketing was new, and there were still a lot of people in the US who tolerated it.

The speaker had absolutely no shame about what he did.

Anyway, halfway through his session he went around the room soliciting business ideas. My idea was a telemarketer blocker. He quickly interrupted me to move on to the next kid.

If I was a little older I would have raised a huge stink.

These days, my voicemail greeter is quite literally a CAPTCHA:

"Hello! Due to the number of robocalls that have been spamming my phone, I will not answer any call I receive if I do not recognize the number. Please prove to me that you are a human by leaving a voicemail, and I will call you back!"

Surprisingly, I have missed very few important calls. Real people are more than happy to leave a message.

What if we built an app in Twilio that is like the "firewall or Cloudflare for phones". Unless you are whitelisted or in the contacts, the call will be routed to voicemail automatically. You can get creative with that and may be even add things like voice captcha. "Thanks for reaching out. Since I don't know you, please press 1 to proceed further". This will weed out the auto callers/robots ?

I just met a founder in StartupSchool who is building this exact thing.

Here is their product: https://www.callstop.com/

I look forward to a future when I can answer my phone when it rings.

It seems to me like such a uniquely American problem for some reason. I've gotten maybe a single spam call in my life in the UK, most people I asked also say they either never got one or got very few. But you go on HN and it seems like people get a deluge of spam calls all the time.

It is a major problem in America for the past 4-5 years. It wasn't this bad before then but nowadays, you get like 2-3 spam calls a day at the minimum. The worst part is that the spammers use your local area code and sometimes even matching up to the first 6 digits which creates more doubt if it is coming from someone local or not. Absolutely hate this. I don't ever pick up an unknown number anymore. If is it really important/urgent, they will leave a voicemail and I check that immediately to ensure it was not a genuine/emergency call.

The best part of having an area code from when I was a kid is that if someone calls me from that area code I immediately know it's spam.

I have to wonder why. I would expect that the technology and mitigations are fundamentally the same. Perhaps the difference is cultural.

Occam's razor would appear to suggest otherwise.

US population is ~5x greater than the UK, while UK GDP per capita is less than the US. More generally, the per capita economic posture of the US is strong compared to the top 10 most populous countries in the world. If you were an opportunist robocalling scammer operating on a purely probabilistic model, the UK would be a pragmatically irrelevant target. The situation in the US isn't helped by regulatory capture either.

Sounds similar to the reason MacOS has much less malicious software than Windows.

It seems to me like such a uniquely American problem

Only if by "uniquely American" you mean also British: https://www.verdict.co.uk/robocalls-malicious/

And Canadian: https://globalnews.ca/news/6136318/canada-telecom-robocalls-...

And German: https://hiya.com/blog/2017/12/01/one-ring-scam-makes-way-to-...

And any other high-value target.

No matter the scam, scammers go where the money and the people are.

I've lived, worked and have numbers in the UĶ and Germany and the main spam I've had has been from LinkedIn. Robocalls happen maybe 10 times total per year for me in Germany, maybe a bit more in the UK and at least on a mobile number. Still annoying but hardly a dont-answer-phonecalls kind of thing.

I'm getting multiple spam calls per day in Russia

Terminating a call in the US can be dramatically cheaper than the rest of the western world.

Based on the research I've done over the past year, the solution here is a few different features:

- Whitelisting, with the ability to request to join someone's whitelist, which sends a push notification within the app to the recipient.

- The ability to toggle filtering off and have it automatically resume

- Easy usage of PINs you can share with loved ones or groups.

- The ability to send via email call invites, where the recipient can only call you starting 5 minutes before and up until 5 minutes after the meeting time is over.

This is why I built CallStop, which is Superhuman for your phone number: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/callstop/id1455892856

Recent discussion of DoJ cases:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22175019

I have a phone with an area code far away from where I live. If I get a call from my phone's area code or one in the surrounding area not in my address book, it's spam. If I get a call from an area code where I actually live, it's usually not spam.

+1 for trying to do something about it

If anyone from DOJ is reading this, could you sue the broadcasters next for continuing to present TV advertising at a higher decible level than the content it is embedded in - even after AFAIK law(s) were passed to try to combat this... what did they do to get around the legislation ( that you probably let them "help" you write ), say they were "decreasing" the decible level of the content instead of "increasing" the decible level of the advertising?

I predict a lot of people calling the DOJ telling them to leave the poor telecom providers alone.

From the article:

> The US Department of Justice has filed lawsuits (PDF and PDF) against two small telecommunications providers that have allegedly connected hundreds of millions of fraudulent robocalls from Indian call centers to US residents.

I wonder if this could be used as precedent to sue ISPs that deliver spam from foreigners.

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