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Comment by devoutsalsa | Hacker News Reader

These days I just never answer the actual phone for anyone. I don’t even bother to look who is calling.

A scenario I hadn't thought about, that you might want to be aware of: I had to call 911 recently. I talked to the dispatcher, and hung up. A few minutes later they called me back to give me instructions. The call showed up as a regular Los Angeles 323 area code number. In fact, it was flagged by my phone as spam.

It made me wonder whether reverse 911[1] calls, which are used to warn about hazmat situations, fire evacuations, and other public safety issues, show up similarly.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_9-1-1

I quite honestly think that general direct-dial telephony is only a few years from catastrophic collapse, not for technical reasons, but because people will simply defect from the system.

There are too many nuisance calls, there are too many people (and businesses) falling for scams, and there seems to be nothing telcos or governments are willing to do about it.

It's pretty much the same thing that's happened to Usenet and Email (and is now happening to the Web as well). John Gilmore's lament about crackdowns on open email relays is heartfelt, but ultimately naive. If I'm remembering correctly (and I'm probably not), it ran something like: We created a way for anyone anywhere in the world to talk to anyone else, and it wasn't an accident. The problem is of course, bad actors, and lowering costs means enabling vastly more bad actors.

Figuring out how to impose highly asymmetric costs --- and not necessarily financial ones --- on unwanted communication attempts, will win this.

The technical problem is reasonably straightforward. Generating widespread adoption is the real challenge, IMO.

I haven't received any robocall, cold sales attempt or spam SMS in years. I'm also EU based, maybe it's another side effect of non-existant privacy laws in US?

It's probably a number of factors:

- The US remains relatively high income / high wealth. Especially among the more vulnerable senior population.

- The regulatory environment in the US hasn't been successful, or much interested from appearances, in taking on spam.

- Uniform language. Virtually the entire country speaks a single language, English. That's roughly 300 million targets (minor children generally wouldn't count). The largest single European nationality would be Germany, with a total population of 84 million. It's not even possible to necessarily presume an entire country speaks one language, as with Switzerland. And though computer-generated calls are increasing in prevalence, most still use human speakers.

Effectively, it's opportunity, mechanism, and logistics.

But as costs fall and voice-processing (both comprehension and realtime generation) improve, I'd suggest increasing your vigilence around telephone hygiene.

My understanding, from the last time I looked into this, is that the US does have decently aggressive laws against spamming people without offering them ways to opt out and some prior relationship, but a bunch of the spam originates in places outside the US and its immediate allies, so shutting it down becomes nontrivial.

I have, in fact, gotten periodic spam calls, though only once or twice an SMS - usually trying to solicit me about my car's insurance policy having issues (I do not own a car).

I sort of wish I could convince my Android phone to treat all calls to my direct number from anyone but GV as spam, because I have never given that number to anyone.

I’m also in the EU and received a spam SMS not even five minutes ago. I get maybe one a year, so your point stands. Cold sales attempts used to be more frequent, but after blocking a handful of numbers they stopped.

I hadn't really thought about this before, but your comment made me realize the costs that used to be associated with spam calls in the past.

Monetary or social costs were both asymmetrically in favor of the receiver because a long-distance call was expensive and a local spam call would eventually incur a high social cost (either in the innocent case of teenage prank calls being figured out by parents or the less innocent cases where the police or phone company might need to trace the source).

Additionally, if a neighbor is having an emergency they (emergency services) might call you to see if you are home and able to help.

I don’t know anyone that isn’t my parents age that has a landline anymore so this scenario already wouldn’t work with my friends, family or neighbours. My phone isn’t directly tied to my address in any way that might be useful for emergency services.

A true landline, very few people. But setting up a cheap VOIP line is not very expensive on a month-to-month basis, and it's useful to have a phone number that you can give to any person or business that can't bother you at work. We have poor cell service at my house, so the VOIP line is my preference for most calls at home.

Depends on where you live. In Sweden your cell phone is typically tied to yourself and yourself to your primary place of stay.

Sure, that's why I said that mine isn't. I know that's not the case for everyone, but it is for me and many people I know, at least. Its obviously not the case for everyone, many people will have a phone tied to an address, but many people also don't. My phone is tied to me, but whether or not the provider has an address depends on if I have a bill phone or not (many people here do not).

I also wonder EU countries, including Sweden, would actually allow telecom providers to share that information with other parties such as emergency services or whether that would be against data protection laws.

Besides, prior to the pandemic, there was also a high likelihood that I wouldn't be at home, if you called me on a random day at a random time, so even if my phone were tied to my address, it wouldn't be a good idea for emergency services to rely on that.

The one time my neighbors called for help (their car wouldn't start and they needed to go to urgent care), they txt'ed first, then called. Though I would have picked up when they called (and it would have gotten through my do not disturb settings) because their number is in my contacts.

Not saying that your neighbor would call you, but that the emergency services would call you on your neighbours behalf (and it will not be from a number you recognize).

I've never heard of that happening, but yeah, if the neighbor calls 911, and then EMS calls me for some reason, I'm not going to answer since 99% of the time it's a spammer.

If they leave a voicemail, I'll get a transcript.

I have lost track of how many times I have told people: just because you hear a phone ringing on your end, doesn't mean it's ringing on my end. (Verizon US, and yes, you as a caller will hear ringing while my phone sits silent.) Leave a voicemail. It can be short, it can be almost devoid of meaning, but if you send it, I will at least know that you called. If you don't? No record at all. I was out of range, you left nothing to be tracked by...

They likely do. I've seen similar with numbers that are used by medical organizations.

Yeah, me too. I have my 3 best friends and my mom whitelisted; everyone else can leave a message or SMS.

When I set up a contact, I change the ringtone for them. Then, I ignore calls from non-contacts, which are currently dominated by offers of help with my non-existent student loans (it used to be the warranty on my 20 year old car).

I have set my phone to silently reject all calls from numbers that aren't in my address book. Two years, worked fine for me.

Why not? Do you get too many scam calls or robo calls?

99% of the phone calls I get from unknown numbers are some combination of scam/robo/or just immediate hang up. The only exceptions tend to be businesses responding to my initial contact (eg, trying to get a plumber out to my house), in which case I will answer unknown numbers for a day or two until we connect. Otherwise nope.

This is a US mobile number that I've ported from carrier to carrier since the mid-00s. Haven't been particularly careful about where I use the number, which is probably how it got this bad.

I think they're just enumerating the entire address space, rather than buying your phone number from somewhere. But I guess I have no evidence to prove this; I have given my phone number to companies, and I get a ton of spam calls.

I think they're just enumerating the entire address space

Even when you consider most calls now for SIP/VoIP platforms (which is where a lot of these scammers get their DID/phone numbers from) are charging fractions of a cent for outbound calls, enumerating and then dialing entire NPA spaces gets prohibitively expensive after even five minutes of dialing waiting for someone to pick up, even for the most dedicated of scam call centers.

Doesn't mean they aren't dialing randomly to see who picks up, just I doubt they're dialing entire phone number spaces wholesale.

What can be observed going on is these scammers quite literally trade lists of leaked phone numbers and email addresses and they actively keep track of who responds, and who falls for their scam before sharing the list with others.

Jim Browning (a popular youtube scambaiter and infosec pro) has videos where you can watch it happening with your own eyes.

My partner and I have adjacent phone numbers (x and x+1). /Occasionally/ we get sequential spam calls, where my phone goes off immediately after she hangs up. But not super often. Though one can shuffle before calling everything, just as easily.

It’s like a war games dialer 40 years later.

Anyone who knows me will message through any other app.

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