Hacker News Reader

Comment by deadalus | Hacker News Reader

Spam Callers must be identified and banned (preferably) by a global task force that is funded both by the cellular service providers and the governments.

This is a global problem and no single country or company can be expected to fix it on their own.

View on HN

Or neighbors need to agree on policing, for example any company/country that lets 10% of its phone traffic be spams just gets disconnected from the network flat out. Want your service back? Fix your house first.

I'd be shocked if most of the US's spam doesn't come from within. I'm not against attempting a global body to regulate, but I doubt it would work. We can't even get internet providers to ensure their traffic isn't spoofed, and that's just firewall rules.

Edit: maybe not shocked, but personally the only out of country voices I hear now are when I call GoogleFi support.

The question is, are phone operators even interested in doing this? Marking robocalls as such - sure, but blocking altogether - I don't think so.

Something interesting happened I think a few years ago, when a hosting company in the US that turned out to be the major hoster for spammers went down for technical reasons and the world went spam free (by 90%) for a couple of days. You'd think it was obvious what to do... but nope, once the hoster was back everything was back to normal like nothing happened.

I agree, I don't think they have any incentive to, and it would take strong regulation to force them. We would also have to stop pretending that calls are some 'divine message' that can't be interfered with, and be morally ok with cutting off an entire country if they won't curb spam.

It seems easy to me, pass a law that says if a telecom can't trace the source of a call to where it entered their network, they are legally liable for the content of the call.

In my limited experience as an American, most of the callers sound like they have American accents to me; maybe 10% that actually get through sound like they're from South Asia, which is what I used to associate with spam.

I also suspect that a lot of spam calls are coming from within the prison system - not prisoners trying to run scams off payphones, but actually working from a phone bank at a prison for a nickel an hour. It's the only thing I can think of that explains their dogmatic adherence to the script in front of them. Free scammers from overseas will start insulting you once you're onto their scam; free scammers from the U.S. will typically just hang up and try again; but if you're a prison worker, the punishment for going off script is much worse than just losing your job.

Wish I could prove or disprove my theory.

To be clear, your theory is that these calls are coming from operations run by American prisons?

Yes.

Not all of them, but enough that I don't think messing with them is morally justifiable.

I answer and talk to the scammer every time. I ask them why they do this for a living and generally try to make it psychologically hurt for the scammer. I've done this more than 50 times at least. The vast majority have Indian or Pakistani accents. A small percentage have south American accents. None have had American accents.

I'm curious if they have ever divulged their actual location to you? Obviously with a big grain of salt.

A few have told me they were from Pakistan when I asked them questions like why such a high percentage of the country defecates in the streets.

It’s funny that you could ask the same question to anyone living in San Francisco, particularly Tenderloin.

Weird! I wonder why there's such a difference in our experiences.

I also don't think making it psychologically hurt is going to make any difference, especially not when you're asking them why their fellow countrymen shit in the streets. Based on what I've heard and read, a lot of them justify their work by villainizing us in their eyes. Which isn't unfair! We're vastly richer than them, and they don't see any particular problem in what they see as being a Robin Hood-like character. Insulting and abusing them just further justifies their actions in their mind.

I used to try to waste their time as well, but after I postulatede my prison-work theory, I no longer do that - they don't have a choice, and it's cruel to put them through that.

It's not always insulting or abusing. I've noticed considerably more psychological damage from normal conversations. Questions like "do you think seeing yourself as a scammer is going to cause long term effects on your health?" Abusive questions only get a rise out of them and then they either stay on longer, incoherently angry, or they drop the call quickly.

Apples iOS contact whitelist (silence unknown callers) fixes this.

I’d request two features.

- Some API that allows apps to get through (like door dash)

- Ability to disable for a brief period (30min? A day?) when expecting a call from an unknown number.

This is a far better solution than the blacklists that hardly work.

AFAIK it is hardly a problem in The Netherlands. I can't imagine it is totally different for our direct neighbours ( other EU countries ).

In Germany it is a problem, but more subtle. We have things like "Münzkontor", things like "Enkeltrick" which target old people with their scams.

In Germany it's a department of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Network_Agency who deal with complaints. They can switch off a phone number and give 300.000 Euro fines against companies.

Year 2020: 40k complaints about 18k phone numbers (12% from outside Germany) for predictive dialing. 155k complaints about phone spam (company trying to sell you something). 1.3 million Euros in fines. https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Vportal/AnfragenBeschwer...

I received one spam call in 2020.

Do you think government regulation is the reason you didn’t get scam calls? Or is it more likely that the Indian and Pakistani scammers can’t speak German and therefor don’t target Germany?

If you were to do this, you would block millions of valid phone numbers. The "we've been trying to reach you about your vehicle's extended warranty" spammers spoof numbers in your local area code, and if you call back, you get extremely confused elderly people and small businesses.

The block would be at the source, not the spoofed number. The calls originate from somewhere, and that can be identified.

But the current system has people blocking those spoofed numbers, so its effectively doing that now. Google phones give you a fast button to just block the number, despite knowing its likely spoofed.

I don't think they're proposing blocking numbers, I think they're proposing tracing the actual origin of the calls and blocking that. The number that shows up on caller ID is completely meaningless in the face of bad actors.

I'd be happy if I could just *SPAM a number immediately after receiving it and let the phone company track them down. I worry about blocking numbers since spammers have started spoofing valid numbers of real people.

It works for the internet, more or less, and it runs over the same lines--and often the same protocols!--as phone calls.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com