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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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.

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

I'm getting multiple spam calls per day in Russia

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