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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> It's not the HN readers that the FCC is concerned with.

I hope it is. I hope it's everyone they are worried about. I remember in the way back of the late 90s/early 2000s I always picked up the phone, and if I missed I'd actually call back an unrecognized number. Can you imagine? And believe it or not it wasn't just me, it was a thing people did. Odds were that the person at the other end was someone you wanted to talk to.

Now a few years later when the phone rings all I'm looking to do is silence the damn thing. Literally 9/10 (maybe more) calls I get are just spam, and that's letting Google filter the calls it knows are spam. It doesn't have to be this way, and I hate that we've just thrown up our hands and accepted this. I really hope that we can get back to a place where the phone ringing is a precursor to human contact and not just another annoyance.

Robocalls and support scams only really arrived with a vengeance last year in Ireland. Even still I would answer and call back pretty much every call from an Irish caller id today. I reckon at least 19/20 calls are legit... I suppose we've been flying under the radar up to now...

That said, there has been a definite deterioration in the last 24 months...

I get surprisingly few junk calls. Mostly AT&T trying to sell me DirectTV. I'm on the Do Not Call list, which seems to actually work.

Whereas I'm on the Do Not Call list as well and get way too many junk calls... so "your mileage may vary"...

Older folks with declining cognitive abilities are especially targeted.

I have a friend whose grandmother had severe dementia and sent 400k to scammers via wire transfer.

I have nightmares about my father, who has shown a tendency to put credit card numbers into pop-up windows. I found a coin miner on his laptop recently.

This is a real and growing problem.

I have a few clients who are getting up in years. Talking to them one on one, they seem as sharp as ever. And yet both of them have recently called shady 800 numbers from obvious (to me) scam emails.

Thankfully both spoke to me before completing the money transfers, but it was close. As one of them was explaining to me after the fact, they got so startled by the (fake) expensive invoice, they felt overwhelmed, and just didn't even think to think that it might be a scammer.

For your father, maybe a Chromebook wouldn’t be a bad idea? They’re easy if you’re coming from Windows.

If your aunt is using a wired phone, I recommend getting a model which has Caller ID with voice announcements. This is great and does not require any effort to learn -- phone says "RING RING CALL FROM 1-800..." and you just tune it out.

> If your aunt is using a wired phone, I recommend getting a model which has Caller ID with voice announcements. This is great and does not require any effort to learn -- phone says "RING RING CALL FROM 1-800..." and you just tune it out.

I would normally say "n=1" and "YMMV", but in this case n=everyone I've ever had this discussion with and the mileage has not varied. I don't know about you, but I have received exactly one phone call in the past year from a 1-800 number, and it was legitimate. You know how many calls I receive daily on average from people spoofing what they think is my local area code? Seven. Sometimes it's none, sometimes it's 12, but I have been tracking it for this exact purpose and the average is 7. That's too many.

Do you think anyone would have adopted email if the only two options to deal with spam were 1) read the text in the body and manually delete it if you can recognize the scam or 2) disable incoming mail from anyone not already in your address book? Of course not! And it's high time that the company charging me for my expensive phone and my expensive service plan do something about the expensive attention I waste when getting interrupted with these extremely preventable attempts at exploitation. Not to mention the poor victims who fall for these scams and lose their retirement savings because they grew up in an era before incoming calls became synonymous with massive social engineering dragnets.

I apologize for ranting- I recognize you were offering a workaround in the meantime for the parent and I've upvoted you for that; I rarely rant on HN, but this topic and the apathy surrounding it really ruffles my feathers and I needed an outlet.

> You know how many calls I receive daily on average from people spoofing what they think is my local area code? Seven. Sometimes it's none, sometimes it's 12, but I have been tracking it for this exact purpose and the average is 7. That's too many.

I'm grateful I've been able to keep my number from my first cell phone. I live in a different state now and all the numbers from that area code that I'd get a legitimate call from are in my contact list, so I know not to answer any other number from there.

For me it's an average of one a day (though clustered towards the start of the week), and the only reason I haven't already turned on the toggle that sends all non-contact callers straight to voicemail automatically is that most of the calls come in during work hours when my phone's already set on do-not-disturb.

The scammers all forge local numbers into the call headers because phone infrastructure is traaaaaaaash.

Is SHAKEN/STIR supposed to reveal the originator info for real now? I have noted I've been getting slightly fewer random phone calls recently.

I got my parents a call blocking box that has a big red button. If they get a robocall they just push the button and the number is blocked. It's dramatically cut down on the amount of junk calls they get. They too are a lot less likely to answer a call from a number they don't recognize, letting it go to the answering machine where if it's a legit call they can just pick up and interrupt the machine.

Answering machines - how quaint (yet effective for call screening!)

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