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Comment by rikkipitt | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been getting a lot of automated/unsolicited calls recently. Begs the question if this might be the source of my woes.

Is there a trustworthy phone number version of https://haveibeenpwned.com?

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"Is there a trustworthy phone number version of https://haveibeenpwned.com?"

An "exact" google search excluding adjacent phone numbers seems to work well for my numbers, and culls a lot (not all) of the autogen pages. So if your number was 212-555-1239, search Google with these strings:

  "(212)555-1239" -1240 -1238

  "212-555-1239" -1240 -1238

Good idea, I’ll give that a whirl later. Great tip to filter out those auto-generated list sites. Thanks.

you genius

Dear god, fastpeoplesearch.com is a horribly obnoxious treasure trove of information.

Tried it, you're right. Got 6 of my past addresses, 9 past phone numbers, 8 relatives, all correct. Some incorrect info, but not much as a percentage.

If you reverse search the PO Box address listed on the site contact page, you'll find an Amateur Radio license listed to a person that is probably the owner of the site, based on his past experience.

Also, searching for their Adsense publisher id reveals some other sites they own: peoplesearchnow.com, fastbackgroundcheck.com, smartbackgroundchecks.com

Those sites have new and different PO Boxes in other cities, etc.

I am amazed and horrified at the fact data brokers like that are legal. and the hoops to which you must leap in order to get your information out of them, even with california privacy laws.

Yup. That's why I pretty much deleted all my social media with my real first name, last name etc.

Imagine getting into a facebook argument with someone and that person becomes so emotionally enraged with what you said that they go to your house.

I just tried it on myself and I felt violated reading how much info is out there.

Just submitted a removal request for myself, a flow full of dark patterns (in fact the Remove button didn't even show up until I disabled my Pi-Hole). Remains to be seen whether all I did was make the data more valuable by confirming my email address. The page recommends signing up at BrandYourself to prevent various other data brokers from showing the same data. How is this not extortion?

"The page recommends signing up at BrandYourself"

Is is a link? BrandYourself has an affiliate program, so they are probably making money on referrals.

so if I search my phone number, it brings me to my name and everything. But if I search my name it doesn't get my phone number right. Any ideas why it's like that?

This is just one of the websites. Here is a list of all the websites which have your information with easy links to opt-out from them.

I do not maintain this but don't know where I got this from, however I have notifications when this spreadsheets gets updated to remove my information from another website

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10wzyKEl-fAxjCD42u9HQ...

Yikes. That's the only one of those that was even close to being accurate for me. And I'm not sure I can get it removed because they don't have any of the right email addresses. I don't usually leave much of a trail on these sites, but the info that is correct vs incorrect makes me suspect they probably got it from one of my parents.

Not really an answer to your question, but one partial solution to the problem of having your number leaked or sold is to setup a service like Twilio to act like a phone proxy. You can have Twilio forward calls it receives on a different number ("spam number") to your actual phone number ("real number"). You provide spam number to anyone who isn't a business or personal contact. Every few months, you rotate spam number. If your spam number is leaked, you don't care because its only a transient number which isn't more permanently associated with you.

You can also have more permanent proxy numbers for services or people that may need to get in touch with you long term.

Is this available to people outside of the US as well and is there a guide for setting this up? Last time I used twilio for a basic sms gateway there was a lot of clicking and typing.

I think it is available for people outside the US.

https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223179908-Setti...

I would recommend using the Studio workflow which is GUI based and easy.

https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/115016033048-Fo...

I forgot to mention this earlier, but you can also proxy outbound calls through Twilio:

https://www.twilio.com/blog/make-receive-calls-twilio-number...

I've been using voip.ms in Canada to great success. Even SMS codes from banks and Whatsapp work correctly. Excellent service, highly recommend, especially with voicemail auto-transcription (then sent to email) and SMS from desktop via email.

It's what I have done for years. Only costs $1/mo for the number and a couple hours learning their API.

Your existing cell number can be ported over to Twilio if you are patient.

The only problem is trying to use the number for 2fa. A growing number of banks (like Capital One) block Twilio services from recieving their SMS.

Can you think of any drawbacks of using this for important services like say PayPal? Or are you strictly using this for throw away products and services?

I've been getting a lot more recently as well and I figured it was due to the phone companies promising to get rid of caller id spoofing this year so scammers are working overtime until they can't anymore.

Oh, is that a real thing that's happening? Caller ID spoofing is the main reason I hold onto my phone number from [small town] Texas, since only my immediate family ever calls me from there, so I somewhat reliably know anything else from that area code is a scammer.

I hope so. I believe it's this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN

intelx.io

Can't say too much about trustworthyness though.

U could also just download the set from e.g. raid forum to check for yourself.

Might have to I think.

European here. What are these bot calls exactly? Never had one as I guess it’s forbidden where I live.

Telemarketing or political campaigns. Check out the Robocall article on wiki. In Europe it depends on the country. In Poland I receive a few calls daily but they are people calling me, not bots. Never received a robocall here.

In the US, the vast majority of them are simple frauds. For a year I got a robocall every few days from a Chinese woman (in Chinese) that a friend of mine said is a threat to get (the hypothetical Chinese immigrant) me deported unless I pay them.

Right now I'm getting a fake credit card debt collection call (I've never had a credit card in my life, only debit), and a call telling me that I'm eligible to have my AT&T (phone) bill halved (I don't have AT&T phone service) and all I have to do is call the number "on my caller ID." I think those two are both being read by the same woman (not the Chinese one.)

I'm more of a texter than a caller, so the vast majority of calls I get are robocall frauds. I'd love to get a robocall that was just annoying for a change, rather than completely predatory.

I recall there were a ton of them in France. Usually pretending to be DHL or another courier asking about a package. Nobody I knew interacted much with the calls.

If you're in Europe, but don't share a language with a much poorer country, you're safe from these.

Same here, i started recieving both calls and SMS which the last i find more annoying. I do use Android and these ones haven't been able to be detected as spam

I’m on iOS and don’t think there’s a way of blocking unsolicited calls until after the fact... I hope to be proven wrong though!

The odd thing is, the calls often come through having a caller ID very similar to my own number.

Those are usually generated, they call numbers in area code/exchange randomly, assuming you will pick up something that seems familiar. Jokes on them, I moved to another state, easy for me to tell.

on iOS there is a lifesaving phone setting of sending unknown callers straight to voicemail.

I toyed with that for a while but I kept missing important work calls. I might have a look for an app later, but I have a feeling it might not exist...

Yeah. I tend not to pick up calls that are in the "Who would be calling me from Texas?" vein. But while it's annoying to have to look at my phone when it rings, I do get calls from locations that seem plausible and they usually are legit. I'm not really willing to make myself harder to reach for legitimate and even important reasons because of the occasional junk call.

I wonder if you can get a VoIP number from a different country (where good regulation means spam is less prevalent) and use that for work calls?

I'm almost 100% sure your employer wouldn't want to make an international call every time they wanted to contact you by phone.

Work uses slack/teams/Webex. One person sends me Signal. No one has ever used telephony, except I use it to call he dial in numbers because my phone audio is better than Bluetooth / virus agent laden laptop displaying ten videos of peoples homes thru vpn.

Not natively, but there is an API that apps can use to do it for you. I use Mr. Number because it’s literally the first one I found and it’s worked good enough for me.

The best I’ve found is to simply reject all calls not in my contacts. Real callers leave a voicemail, which gets transcribed.

Doesn't work so well if you're on-call or running a business.

Best thing I ever did for myself was to get a Google Voice number in an area code I've never lived in.

A lot of these fake calls rely on people assuming "local number = neighbor" kind of mentality which rarely comes into play these days as we're much more mobile than we used to be. Plus area code splits, separate area codes for cell vs landline services becoming increasingly common.

If my GV number were: AAA-BBB-CCCC

And my actual home area code is DDD-EEE-FFFF

Any and all numbers from AAA-BBB-xxxx can be ignored.

I never answer calls that come in on my cell carrier provided number, so that eliminates that issue. Silent ring, no forward to voicemail.

Anything left, about 95% of the time, tends to be legit.

With regional calling being a thing of the past and most cell plans being unlimited text and talk, it makes very little sense to keep a local number. Especially now as it's SOP for roboscammers to fake Caller ID and try to match the first 6 of your 10 digits.

This also started a few weeks back for me, more unsolicited calls/texts.

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