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Comment by thesis | Hacker News Reader

Illegal (fraud) robocalls need to stop.

With that being said, I'm tired of the carriers / phone creators deciding when I want to answer my phone.

An example of what I'm talking about: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251165362

My bank was trying to get a hold of me due to them turning off autopay, and I wasn't answering their calls because it doesn't show a phone number or anything. Just "Spam Likely"

IMO I'd rather see all calls coming to my phone, and send them to VM if I want. Devices nowadays even have the capability to block calls from outside your contact list if you want.

These decisions should be up to me! Not some blackhole where algorithms decide if I should receive the call or not.

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I'm always wondering why Americans allow their lawmakers to get away with this.

In order to stop robocalls, you just need to do three things:

* Flat out ban them and make it illegal to route them at network handover points

* Make caller ID mandatory with a reachable number to call back to

* Create an authority caring for those robocall reports

Then, put heavy fines on violations and go enforce the heck out of it. That's exactly what the EU did pretty much in the infancy of this technology.

I can't recall ever getting a robocall here in Germany.

That being said, my bet is this being a tragedy of the commons, as the only two parties in the system seem to heavily rely on the tool for fundraising — oh and they probably also make millions for some selected members of congress... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> I can't recall ever getting a robocall here in Germany.

The simpler reason you haven't gotten a robocall on your cell phone^W^W"handy" is that the caller pays a non-negligible amount of money to call you (at some point it was around £0.25). This makes the sort of mass spam calling that's happening in the US uneconomical. In the US, the receiver pays the cost of the tower-to-mobile connection; meaning it's fractions of a cent to call anyone, even on their cell phone.

Making the US more like Europe in that regard would instantaneously get rid of a massive amount of spam calls, without the need for any more complicated regulation.

It would also get rid of a massive amount of useful calls. Germany doesn't get robo calls, but that is at the expensive of not being able to use their phones as a phone when they want to.

Back when cell minutes were expensive what Germany has made sense. Today nearly everyone in the US has unlimited voice minutes (in and out) and nobody worries about how long they talk to each other.

> Back when cell minutes were expensive what Germany has made sense. Today nearly everyone in the US has unlimited voice minutes (in and out) and nobody worries about how long they talk to each other.

The thing is, the "flatrates" aren't flatrates under the hood. The providers still pay fees per minute to each other, they're just fractions of a cent now - but at a scale of hundreds of thousands of minutes a month, a robocall outfit can still generate five to six figures of revenue for the phone networks.

> Germany doesn't get robo calls, but that is at the expensive of not being able to use their phones as a phone when they want to.

Can you explain this? My German friends have never mentioned that as a problem and based on how surprised most Europeans seem to be that Americans let spammers train the country not to answer calls it seems like the opposite is true.

It has been 10 years since I looked - 10 years ago spam wasn't a problem and Americans usd their phone for voice about 5 times as much as anyone else.

Even today most people I know answer their phone when it rings. And most people call each other often (though video calls are becoming common) We complain about the spam problems, but most people still answer the phone.

Anecdotally I can say spam calls were never the majority of my calls - and I don't talk on the phone much compared to most people I know. And the amount of spam calls has been going down a lot.

This is just flat-out wrong. I am sitting here in the UK and I get occasional calls from my bank, from businesses, and even from what appear to be random numbers (e.g. when my Ocado driver is running late/early and wants to update me about delivery using his own phone.) Because I do not get bullshit robocalls [0] I actually answer the phone. Yes, a lot of people have limited minutes of phone time, but since most "calls" are over IP-based comm channels I know of few people who hit the limit; it is effectively unlimited minutes here too.

Want to know the number I do not answer? My US VOIP number that I keep for business purposes. It all goes straight to voicemail and I wait for the transcription to tell me if it is another extended warrantee offer, someone wanting to tell me my computer is infected with herpes/ebola, a fake tax issue from a state I have never lived in, or if it is in the 1% of calls to that number I actually want to receive. US mobile customers have had unlimited calls for more than a decade, but I did not get a noticeable level of spam calls ten years ago.

It is not about the number of minutes available, it is simply a matter that Europeans care about the problem and prevent it from happening while US carriers do not care and their customers did not care enough to create sufficient political pressure.

[0] there actually has been a rise in one type of scam robocall over the past couple of years: the "we have been notified that you were recently in a car accident" calls are a once a month or so annoyance.

If i understand you right, by IP based you mean you are switching from a system where anyone can call anyone on any system to one where both parties have to be on the same ecosystem (proprietary app). That is not a win for communication.

A large proportion of the spam that makes it into my gmail inbox is from American politicians and I'm not even American. They are indeed part of the problem.

I'm always wondering why Americans allow their lawmakers to get away with this.

Generations of brainwashing in support of the divine right of "free enterprise" has something to do with it, I suspect.

Turn off spam call detection, if possible. Let all calls not from contacts go to voicemail. Turn on voicemail transcription (unless you're concerned about the privacy implications). Spam calls rarely leave voicemails. Everyone else has been trained to leave a VM if there's an actual business or personal need to do so.

This is a very old problem. In the days of landlines, we screened our calls with the answering machine for this very reason.

Also younger siblings. "Tell them I'm not home!"

> Spam calls rarely leave voicemails.

This is quickly becoming not the case! I get several spam voicemails every week now. They're intentionally hitting my voicemail by placing a "dummy" call to my phone, then another call a second later (forcing it to my VM due to the first call being in the middle of setup). The first call is disconnected before I have a chance to answer it. It's only there to force the next call to voicemail.

The voicemails all follow a similar pattern. Here's one:

Hi this is Josh calling. We spoke some time ago about solar for your home but the timing was bad so I wanted to reach back out because we have a brand new program that's only for a limited time...

and it goes on from there. I've never once spoken to "Josh" about solar for my home.

These are call placement patterns that should be trivial to detect on the carrier's end.

I get the ones where the robot breathes in and out, at the beginning of sentences, and sighs to sound more human

I get a lot of spam calls, but only one reliably leaves VM: the “auto warranty is about to expire” scam. At this point my warranty has been “almost expired” for years, never mind that I never had an extended warranty.

I have started answering many of these calls more so because of WFH as no one is watching me have fun. When they ask me, my car is always old - from 1929 Ford T to 1980s Toyota Celicas. Then they get on to either disconnect or ask if you have another car which is an opportunity to give them another old car or argue with them why they can't give me warranty on a 1929 Ford T. Fun times although I wish I did not have to do that.

But today I got hung up in 7 seconds. Feel bad.

Those are the only calls I get on my work phone and we can't get the IT people to either activate the free call screening from the phone carrier or whitelist at least one call filtering app. So freaking annoying!

Visual Voicemail and voicemail transcriptions are the greatest inventions ever. I love it that Apple also finally added the option to force all calls not in your contacts to Voicemail too.

Nomorobo used to be awesome, but even though they are not as effective as they used to be for the stuff they do detect I have it set to just discard the calls and that's better still. Keeps voicemail from filling up with junk. Now if I could just get Nomorobo's SMS filtering to actually work - not sure if it's them, Apple or some combination; really need to pursue that though because SMS junk is getting totally out of hand :p

For the past two years Ive been needing to clear my ios voicemails every few months because they are full of bounced calls that left a voicemail

There is also a deleted messages section, automatically made for some bounced callers, that needs to be cleared

Non solution offered here

For calls that Nomorobo detects, you can have it just terminate them - it's the only reason I still happily pay for their annual sub. Sadly they aren't nearly as effective as they were a few years ago, but they still get probably 70% of the junk which still makes it worth it.

Out of curiosity, do you feel the same about email? When I look in my gmail spam bucket it's insane how much stuff I never see (thankfully!).

No, I don't feel the same way about Junk email. I can go through it at my leisure and there's history there. Carriers potentially blocking calls is just some black box deciding what's "safe" for me.

There are issues with mail servers being blacklisted and they can't send emails to me. But there's actual visibility to that. You can look up mail server IP's and get to the root issue of why you're blacklisted.

Honestly I'd rather the government focus on the endless junk mail I receive to my home than anything. I spend more time sorting that rather than hitting decline on my phone.

The email that makes it into your Junk folder are just the “probably spam” ones. Email providers are outright blocking “definitely spam” messages, where the decision is being made by a black box. There’s no history you can check for those, and the decisions are made in a much more complicated way than just checking an IP blocklist.

Totally. I recently set up email on a few domains, backed by protonmail. Most of them work just fine. But my internationalized domain -- a .com in fact -- can't send email to Gmail, it is wholly rejected (I get a bounce-back failure notice, and the email never gets to even the recipient's spam folder).

There doesn't seem to be any way to tell Gmail that this email is fine, in fact it's coming from me.

Meanwhile countless horrific obvious spam gets through to my gmail just fine, much of it straight to my Inbox.

It’s interesting - my gmail spambox is mostly accurate, but I get actual important emails there a few times a month. I’ve received real emails from my bank there before! I’ve received emails from Google services there before!!

On the other hand, I frequently get obvious spam emails in my inbox, including from one address that I weekly received a spam email. It was a very obvious email (“increase the size of your member with this one quick trick”), and each time I would mark it as spam, but Gmail never realized that that address was spam. I eventually just had to create my own filter.

I’m not sure what’s up with it, but they need to rethink their approach.

You (you "You" and royal "You") need to recognize that industry/developers have been making these kinds of decisions for decades, but in the last two decades that I've been paying attention, matters have grossly accelerated to the point that some tech platforms are basically entirely driven by industry desires, and not users.

In fact, I'm getting to the point I may start deprecating "Users" in my lexicon, and replacing it with "victims" upon whom technical implementations are "inflicted".

Because I can't honestly say that industry has been looking out for anyone but industry in a looooong time.

Daily Active Victims is a good metric.

You may be able to turn that off. I'm on TMobile and I have controls for that.

What drives me nuts is that spammers leave a voicemail that's essentially 2-4 seconds of silence. Why can't the carrier or my phone determine that there's no message and just auto-delete the voicemail? I get five or six of these a week.

I think it's likely that some banks will start building better communication features inside their apps because of this. IMO the telecom companies in the US lack not just the incentives but the skill to fix the spam problem, so people are just becoming blind to phone calls and texts, with phones abetting that blindness with spam filtering features.

I'll never do banking on a device that I consider to be compromised from first activation. You're one exploit away from having your account drained.

Well in that case I guess you're not banking on the phone even if they solve the spam call problem...

Banks have my email address and send credit ads there, good enough communication for me.

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