FCC plans to rein in “gateway” carriers that bring foreign robocalls to US

When my last on-call rotation ended in 2018, I started forwarding all calls to voicemail and haven't looked back.

I suspect I could have done so earlier considering voice was a fallback for sms which was a fallback for push, but I was paranoid about missed alerts.

Just today I got two phone calls that showed up as "Unknown". Neither was spam. One was my family doctor, the other a local bicycle shop. If it matters, I'm in Toronto, using an Android phone, with Rogers as my carrier. The first might be due to privacy (of the doctor). The second I can't explain. But in any case, blocking all unknown calls would not be in my interest at present. I can hang up pretty quickly when I hear the boiler-room background and some dude asking me about Air Duct Cleaning.

I answer all the time. My HMO always calls from unknown or blocked numbers. And because of HIPPA they can’t leave a voicemail detailing the reason for the call (I’m not sure if I should be upset at HHS or the FCC here.)

It's not the HN readers that the FCC is concerned with. It's people like my aunt, who through decades of pre-2000 household conditioning, immediately stop whatever they are doing and rush to answer a ringing phone even though 98% of the calls are junk and the volume of incoming calls is 5-10x what they were in the 80s or 90s. No matter how many times I suggest not bothering to even look at the phone, she cannot resist.

Further, this cohort is largely unable to use the tools we take for granted. Many seniors don't know how to block or screen calls, let along apply the phone's do not disturb features. She has been phished multiple times via email, and every time I check her Mac I have to uninstall scammy browser bars and search redirects.

Technology platforms and policy makers have failed people like her.

I'm assuming many people on HN are their extended family's de facto IT support team. It's exhausting.

Personally, almost never. My phone is always on do not disturb with work and family contacts added to my favorites to bypass do not disturb. If an unrecognized number is calling from, say, my dentist's office then they usually leave a voicemail and I'll know whether to return the call. Otherwise, I just assume it's spam.

I have DND on all day/night for exactly this reason. It's set up to allows calls from people in my contact list to get through - which is fine because none of them are going to call me unless they _really_ need to.

What's frustrating is when dealing with a healthcare provider or contractor or something, where they're going to call within the next couple of days, as then I need to turn off DND and open up the potential for the spam calls to make my phone ring.

Fortunately there are far fewer spam calls this year, but there are still a few.

> I think it's basically rude to expect you can just interrupt someone at any point and demand their direct attention to have a synchronous voice conversation with you

I think that's a huge part of it, along with all the new asynchronous forms of communication we have put together in the last couple decades. 30+ years ago, you could visit, call, page, or send a letter. There was no immediate means of sending a fully thought-out message that the recipient would receive quickly and then be able to answer on their own time in the range of immediately through never.

I definitely prefer it this way. Maybe 14-year-old me who could talk on the phone for hours wouldn't be a huge fan, but adult me very happily keeps overall phone time to a few minutes per month.

Sure, I don't but... my spouse helps take care of her parents. They aren't fluent in English, so my spouse handles all the calls and callbacks. That means she gets calls from unknown callers frequently that she must answer.

It's a big issue for people who actually need to answer calls from novel callers.

When I was younger I thought like this. As I got older, and my thumbs fatter, I tend to answer it if I'm expecting a call(windshield replacement at the moment), or a contact, or just curious. If nobody ever answers, then I'd never get to talk to my parents, and I value that time so make time pretty much no matter what I'm doing, within reason.

I don't hate texting, but strongly do for some use cases. I was trying to get directions from a friend recently via text and it just became... annoying. Something like

me - ok, which building is it I'm outside

wait

them - you see the red one?

me - yes, is that it?

wait

them - ok it's two down from that

At this point I called, because I'm not going to text and wait again to ask left or right(above example is not exact, but similar to this).

I think texting is great for saying hi, or asking a question. I do not in any way find it useful for conversation or back and forths. Just my .02.

I do wish phone numbers weren't guessable items but something more like, say, long random addresses so that companies couldn't just flip through dialing anyone and everyone. I haven't thought out how discoverability would work though without something like DNS.

That seems very American-centric. I answer every phone call I have and only twice in my life has the call been an attempt to sell me anything. Both times I've left my number and forgot to disable the checkbox that said "you can call me once for a sales offer".

There's nothing in "society" that prevents phones from being a normal thing. It's all in the signal to noise ratio of the phone calls themselves, and that's a solvable problem.

Business owners whose numbers have been published have the same problem here: loads of scammers and scummy salesmen spamming their phones all day long. I'd consider it a mistake to use a publicly listed number as your always-on contact method, but that's victim blaming and not a real solution to the problem.

My point is: with some proper oversight and enforcement of decent laws, there's nothing wrong with phone numbers.

Every major chat app and mobile platform has some kind of (video) calling functionality for a reason, interrupting people for a realtime conversation is a feature people want and use. The failure of the American telecommunications market doesn't take away from that elsewhere in the world.

My phone has a setting to not ring or vibrate unless it’s a recognized number. That alone has largely solved the issue for me. Fortunately I don’t need to answer calls from unrecognized numbers my job.

I answer calls. My family still often calls, and I know people who can't take a phone to work so they have to use a landline to call.

The spam call detection on Android works pretty well for me, it seems to catch and block at least 90% of the spam calls.

The one problem with this is we still have a landline. All the time people will complain that we didn’t answer their text. They don’t seem to know how to respond when told it can’t receive texts. Then they promptly forget because the same people try texting us over and over again. I wish there was some way a number that can’t receive texts could immediately respond and let them know.

An older relation has gotten sick and my wife and I have to track their medical care. the hospital and doctors will ONLY talk on the phone, and only do things like callbacks.

So after 21 years of essentially never answering the phone, I now have to answer from a variety of unknown numbers. it is frustrating, I'd much prefer text messages.

I definitely call a lot. Whether it's talking to friends, relatives, or dealing with appointments (doctors, car, etc.) there's lots of calls all the time. I travel a fair bit and often find calling is the only way to get airlines to fix certain problems.

I tend to screen by area code. My cell is from a place where everyone I'd want to talk to is in my contacts list. So only calls local to where I live I actually answer. Also if it's urgent people leave a voicemail or call again.

My landline phone has a very loud ring, non-adjustable. If I’m sitting near it, it is quite annoying. I frequently get calls when I’m asleep. I also get them in the middle of work video calls and since the ringing won’t stop, I have to pick them up. I get dozens a day, every day. I have reached a tipping point where I actual feel as though I’m being tortured. I seriously wish the phone companies would be held to account to fix this problem. I suspect the vast majority of phone calls to be illegal telemarketing calls which should revoke the telecoms common carrier status. They should not be allowed to profit from massive illegality.

> Personally, I pretty much never answer calls from unknown numbers, unless I am specifically expecting a call (eg: from a service company coming to the house, or calling back about an inquiry I made).

That is my personal choice, alas many Doctors, government departments, companies etc etc alas withhold there numbers and a right PITA it is as well. This is in the UK.

yeah, outside of a tech job people still heavily rely on phone calls to get their jobs done. Sales, HR, field services, etc all call people directly since a text message could be missed for hours. And a lot of stuff is still based on legacy systems (manually inputing info or hand writing records)

Pretty much everyday I get 5+ spam calls, almost all from numbers with area codes in Texas (no idea why). The calls start at 7:30am.

My number is in the federal do not call list. I used to manually block every single number from spam calls, but now I gave up.

I’ll just never answer a call unless it’s from a known number and I’m expecting it. Otherwise I’ll just return it later if it’s important enough.

My guess is that phone network operators don’t care because they haven’t figured out a way to make money blocking these calls.

At the same time, the same carriers are going out of their way to block text messages from businesses that legitimately use services like Twilio to communicate with their users/customers. Why? Because the alternative for these businesses is to pay about $3k setup fee + $3k/quarter to get a shortcode for the privilege of texting the carriers customers - the same customers the carriers don’t care about protecting from spam phone calls.

My phone doesn't even ring if the # isn't in my contact list. Just goes straight to voicemail. Easy to do with Android "Do Not Disturb" rules.

Yeah, the "Telephone" app is the worst feature on my phone.

I totally agree on the point that any random individual trying to inflict "sync" voice interaction on anyone deserves to be ignored for good.

That said however gateway providers are consciously funneling malicious crap to citizens. And they ought to be held responsible for that by the law. This will fix the problem.

I just think this is uniquely American problem and for some reason American carriers are completely uninterested in dealing with it. Here in UK I get maybe....1 spam call every 3 months? If even that. And it's always the same robo-voice that you can recognize within 2 seconds and disconnect. I have absolutely no issues answering my phone.

I started answering scam calls. And pressing 1 when it said so to speak with someone about my microsoft account, apple account, car warranty, etc. And telling the person on the other end to kindly fuck off. After a few rounds of this, the calls stopped calling, as I'd gotten on enough of the spammer blacklists of someone who will waste their time. It took a while to build up the courage to do so, but I'm glad I did, because when the phone rings now, I can be reasonably assured that it's someone who I actually want to talk to.

I do. If it's an unknown number, it's probably someone from work not on my contacts list trying to coordinate someone.

> I don't know if society as a whole is there yet, but I think it's basically rude to expect you can just interrupt someone at any point and demand their direct attention to have a synchronous voice conversation with you.

This is why I drifted away from my friends and family until I set up an account on https://calendly.com/ where they could book time to talk with me.

One of the many things I despise about the NHS’s (UK universal health system) bureaucracy is that for some brain-dead reason they insist on calling on withheld numbers. I’ve been conditioned into ignoring withheld numbers by years of scammers, spammers, and even a nutty ex who’d use it to try getting around my call blocking. They also seem to have call waiting systems designed to be as frustrating as possible so people give up and just suffer with their ailments without deigning to bother the NHS about them.

I’m so glad the world seems to be slowly adopting a policy of “text before call” even if a few family members have picked up an irritating habit of using recorded voice messages rather than texting (I disabled my voicemail a decade ago for a reason). It should be considered rude to call people without warning them I think.

>>texting is faster and better than voicemail.

Personally, I find voice coms higher bandwidth and overall faster then texting/email. And email with sorting, filtering and searching capabilities is miles better then texting for me.

People outside of the United States also read HN. I answer my phone here in The Netherlands.

I understand how bad it is in the US, but don't assume HN is just US.

> How many HN readers actually answer their phones anymore?

Everyone that works for a large company and has any kind of corporation-spanning responsibility. Phone calls are almost always the last fallback if someone really needs to reach you for something critical.

I don't answer the phone anymore. I don't think I ever did to begin with. I hate phones. I have a subscription because it's impossible to get mobile internet without it and nearly all mobile software uses phone numbers for identification and authentication. Wish I could turn off the calls. I don't want people to call me! I want people to message me. It used to be easy to ignore. Now with all these automated calls the system has become unusable and unbearable. Every single day I get at least 5 automated calls and my phone always thinks they're the most important things in the world, worthy of my immediate attention and warranting the interruption of anything I'm doing. It makes me wish I could delete the telephony app without breaking the phone!

That's what phones are, most fundamentally. They're human interrupts. When I call people, I'm interrupting them in order to make them talk to me. There's this underlying assumption that the call is more important than anything. People will ignore other humans in front of them in order to answer calls! Hard to think of anything more disrespectful. That may have been tolerable back then when phones were the best technology we had but they've been obsolete ever since asynchronous messaging became a thing. Why can't phones just disappear? What's keeping them alive?

I have lots of family with landlines. Older people who still think of phone lines as something valuable just because they used to be worth a ton of money decades ago. 95%+ of the calls they receive are nothing but a waste of their time. Banks offering them credit cards, loans, scammers. Yet they keep those lines around "just in case"! I simply can't fathom putting up with an advertiser who's brash enough to actually interrupt me with a phone call. That's an unfathomable level of abuse to me.

> It will just block foreign phone companies from pretending to have US phone numbers, which seems like it should have been done long ago.

That sounds potentially useful for legitimate business process outsourcing.

How hard is it to migrate to IPv6?

Now imagine the phone network, which hasn't seen a major core upgrade since SS7 in the 70s.

It's Hard.

> How can it be that hard to force authentication

Without partitioning world telephone connectivity? Easily.

> and permanently block malicious carriers?

By any reasonable definition involving unwanted traffic, ATT is a malicious carrier. Do you see the problem?

I cannot attest as an expert, but I learned something about your phone carrier would actually be punished by the FCC for not connecting the call of a scammer. It’s possible your carrier knows it’s fishy but has to let it through due to large government getting in it’s own way.

Is not that they can’t, is that there’s no money in it for them, at least not yet.

At the same time that these companies don’t do anything about spam calls, they formed a consortium to push something called A2P-10DLC on services like Twilio, to force smaller businesses to pay more money for the privilege of texting their own customers. They say it’s for protecting the end users from spam, but clearly they don’t really care about that, instead they realized they were not getting a big enough piece of the pie of texting services and want to get more.

It’s not ineptitude but limited power: the major phone companies profit from spam and they’ve made it clear to their Congress members that they don’t want action – and the previous guy was famously a fan of any approach which involved hoping that they really meant it this time.

Note also that this is not terribly different than email spam: Gmail is a bit better but they also have major false positive problems so to me this looks an awful lot like what happens when you have a smart adversary and limited will to change the system.

Not only that, this should be one of the most bipartisan causes for lawmakers to rally around.

FWIW, there was a multi-year period, just after the do not call list went in to effect, where the amount of spam phone calls I got dropped to zero.

By that standard the most unsuccessful agency would be the DEA.

Great until you realize some of them may later use your voice to create a voice profile and then blackmail you.

This assumes 1) The scammers talk to other scammers buying the same list of phone numbers 2) The scammers bother to clean up the list of people to call.

I keep getting the same "You have received a parcel in the mail that contains illegal drugs" call many times a day, talk to an "officer" every time, and they keep calling me again. Either there are multiple gangs running the same scam (including the same tape), or they just don't care that this mark has already been called a few times with little luck.

Good news! I have an opportunity for you.

You still can .... but you can reliably block them

The FBI and CIA are after me ... but for some reason can't find me.

But they did know where to mail my checks.

I got 7 "final notice warnings" on my expiring warranty just yesterday.

What about the legal enforcement actions from the social security agency?

What about all the car accidents that weren’t my fault I’ve apparently been involved with (yet apparently caused me total amnesia of the event)?

I still think the carriers should just reject calls with obviously fraudulent caller-ids.

Call coming from an external interface, but presenting an id owned by the carrier? Reject the connection. And tag the network partner for follow-up investigation.

Conveniently, my phone number is from when I lived in another state. So now I can use a call being from that state as almost a 100% sign it's spam.

Why won't it change things? My team was responsible for implementing STIR/SHAKEN at a large Telco. Customers could, in the future, block calls for which the number is inaccurate (B/C attestation). If you get a call from a number, you should be able to know the number owner actually made the call. Then, robocall laws could be enforced, since you can actually find the responsible party from the number that dialed you.

Perhaps they need to give us all the hops, and let us block calls based on that. I'd just filter out anything that has any non-US hops, that should eliminate most if not all of it.

STIR/SHAKEN reduced the number of spam calls originating from the US from zero to zero.

One factor is simply that there are many more people who speak English than German in the world, and the same is true among the fraction of people who operate scams. But I'd imagine there are also some regulatory factors that make a difference.

The vast majority of spam phone calls are made with false Caller ID information. Blocking these calls based on their Caller ID would at best be useless, as spammers can easily change what false Caller ID they're using, and would risk blocking legitimate calls from the real owners of those numbers.

The obvious comparison is spam email. Nobody seriously recommends using "From" headers to block spammers. Caller ID is effectively the same thing, but for phone calls.

I just wish I could *7726 to report that the last call received was spam. Let the carriers figure out who to block since they connected the circuit. I’m sure if I called the Whitehouse with fake caller I’d and made a threat the secret service would track me down in a heartbeat. The problem is not that they can’t, it’s that they make money by not doing it