Americans are drowning in spam
axios.com
axios.com
The end result is that the spam is mostly hidden away, but it’s still there. Full of garbage.
I honestly wish I could deny-all by default. Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now.
> I honestly wish I could deny-all by default. Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now.
I would love an information-lock based system. Basically those "What's your mother's maiden name?" security questions, but repurpose them so other people have to answer them before they contact me.
I'm pretty sure even a basic "What is my name?" security question would eliminate most spam. For those more infuriated by spam, you could set it to something random and effectively have a password to contact you.
In the UK politicians also send out these kinds of flyers in bulk (never mind the inundation of flyers for takeaway food, Domino's Pizza, Papa John's, etc.)
For any single piece of legitimate mail (which is vanishingly small as most stuff is paperless now), there are perhaps 20 or 30 pieces of junk that come with it over the course of a few weeks.
I honestly wish it got legislated against. Junk mailers aren't entitled to offload their waste through my letterbox. I don't understand why they have the right to shove advertisements into my own home.
Allowing bulk spam mail to use that channel of contact is contrary to its purpose. It's not a place where I get high priority messages with delivery confirmation to make sure I get them anymore. It's a place where random flyers get stuffed, and the government insists on mixing their messages into that stream of crap.
USPS should stop bulk delivery entirely and have FedEx and UPS do it. They're not allowed to put stuff in my mailbox (and literally can't, because they don't have keys). At least then we restore the line. Things in the mailbox are important. Things that get left on my doorstep might be, but probably aren't.
Unfortunately, it's high maintenance, and it doesn't take too much of a lapse to get back up to the usual junk load. But I occasionally like to daydream that, if we could get enough people in the USA to do this, the junk mail industry itself might become financially untenable.
Aside from using Gmail, which has quite good spam filtering, my solution to email spam is siloing: using a separate email account for different categories of account sign-ups, etc. I just checked my 'good' email's spam folder, and there's nothing there - I get maybe one spam email every few months. (In order to reduce friction, I have autoforwarding from other emails, which doesn't resend spam with gmail - but there are other solutions which would presumably work for any email provider).
The only downside is, with paid email accounts, this could be monetarily problematic - which I don't really see a solution for, unfortunately. But, it's definitely way easier to filter email spam than physical/phone spam.
I'm a happy customer.
It doesnt stop the possibility that a legitimate other person with your contact details does the "share address book" with some shitty app. Its not you who has to fail - its ANYBODY in your contact network.
Spam works because most of these mass communication channels are free or extremely cheap. Raise the price and economics will dictate that most of these communications will drop off.
Mail? Probably 90+% ads. Email? Hahaha, I only even bother to check it anymore when I know a messages is coming in, and that's usually from a machine. Phone? Ignore-if-not-in-contacts, probably 2x as many spam calls as real calls in a week. Text might be close to 50% but only because transactional texts (lazy 2FA implementations and prescription pick-up reminders, mostly) count as signal.
OPSEC-wise I have a dedicated account for a certain kind of account. But what does the institution that uses that email address do? Send me 10X the email load with upsell nonsense, despite having opted out of all marketing emails.
No. Just, no. Stop. I am sick of this noise, and manually taking time to opt-out raises my switching cost. "Drowning" is a fantastic way to describe this.
And, "The vehicle warranty is about to expire"? Yeah, which vehicle? They won't get specific because they don't know.
I don't know how to implement it, but a "who are you specifically?" filter would eliminate a lot of my phone spam.
Beware that some websites use this "legitimately":
I ordered some stuff from Ikea and asked that it get delivered. Ikea forwarded the request to a third party, TaskRabbit. I now get TaskRabbit email spam to my ikea.com@ per-website email. And no matter how many times I unsubscribe from TaskRabbit the spam still comes.
Spam detection successful! I just put @taskrabbit.com into the blackhole and call it a day. If I get more spam to ikea.com@ then it will also get blackholed. I already won't buy anything else from Ikea for something as dumb as this.
(No affiliation beyond being a happy customer.)
$15/year (plus the cost of the domain)
Currently using the middle tier and have been very happy with it.
Note that codified aliases are limited, but you can create a catch-all account. I have not needed to codify aliases to send "as" one of those accounts.
Final pricing is still TBD but if you join the beta list, we are handing out huge discounts which’ll bring your effective cost between $5-15/month for everything.
There’s even a group of spammers that call twice back to back, I think to get around the setting that allows double calls to come through.
My iPhone helps a bit in that it will ring if I’ve ever called that number before.
It’s funny because I think having a setting where only apple accounts are allowed would be welcome, but I think that only works on iMessages since calls can be easily falsified. I’m looking forward to the day that Apple will know if a device is actually originating the call and pass that info to me.
I trust Apple more than any other org to actually care about eliminating spam calls. Sad state of affairs.
Most of my iMessage spam seems to be from fly-by-night Apple accounts (often setup with @gmail.com and @outlook.com email addresses). It surprises me that Apple seems to make it really difficult to report these as spam accounts (it's like five taps in iMessages to even find the right profile page to do so) and at this point because I get so many of them I've gotten to just deleting the threads rather than reporting them as spam because it is too many steps to report and the spammers are just cycling through random email addresses anyway so you never see more than one message from the same "Apple account".
- require signatures/other things to prove which hostname the email came from
- do wide-scale analysis of senders/email contents to filter out spam
There are still issues (eg people typically will be more mad if they see spam emails than if unexpected legitimate emails get marked as spam because they won’t know if the latter is happening unless they frequently check their spam folder), and the popularity of some webmail systems means that it can be hard to tick all the boxes to not have your own legitimate emails binned. Similarly the ‘marked as spam’ signal is very strong so if you send out a newsletter that people mostly read and want and can easily unsubscribe to, you can still end up being sent to spam for all users because some people use ‘mark as spam’ to mean ‘please unsubscribe me from this newsletter’.
It seems the phone system is still at the stage where they don’t know who phone calls are actually coming from (except somehow they manage to bill these people).
My Gmail SPAM folder is filled with a ton of stuff that isn't really spam. There are newsletters I probably signed up for at some point or at least downloaded a document/watched a webinar where getting periodic emails was part of the deal. Because, yes, rather than clicking the unsubscribe button which legitimate marketers will honor, a lot of people just hit report spam which at some point puts it into the spam bucket for everyone.
I especially like the feature to "screen" a call that looks like spam, the small number that get through to me. It almost always is spam and I've wasted some of their seconds. It's not much, but I now feel like a victor rather than helpless. :)
The ability to filter per se is quite bad. The calls it decides to screen itself pass through 100% i.e. it listens to an extended warranty call or 5 star hotel call and then rings through as if it's a legitimate call. It's worth noting that only a small fraction of calls go to screen automatically, most just ring and I have to press screen button myself.
But yeah, I do the same. All set to auto ignore, even though it means one or two necessary calls are missed (ex. my cc company wanted to inform me they were cancelling their partnership and thus closing all cards).
The newest one seems to be group FaceTime calls (to about 20 numbers) that hang up after a couple seconds. Not sure what the angle is there; makes me wonder if there's an associated iPhone 0-day. Or maybe just probing phone type.
Even if I know where the call is coming from, your experience shows it is still possible to mess up because you can't possibly account for all the kinds of weird phone systems people might be using.
But otherwise, I leave my phone on silent and have it set not to notify me about voicemails. My friends and family know how to reach me.
The good news I guess is that, while I'm sure people vary, spam phone calls and texts seem to have gone down quite a bit for me to the point where they're a very occasional annoyance.
The solution to me seems clear: use video/voip apps for everything and ditch the phone number. I don't know how to reach that critical mass. It feels like we should already be there with zoom and teams, but apparently not.
I switched my same phone with same phone number to another provider and I get all texts that I am hoping to get now and get literally no spam texts.
I’ve been using Hey for two years now, and while it solved the spam problem, the UIUX makes it just so hard to use.
I’m keeping for one reason, it’s the shortest email I have.
I tested it for a while and liked it, but the price is too high for my low volume of personal email.
Here's the (a?) kicker: advertisers are willing to pay orders of magnitude more to get ads in front of group 1. They'll pour so many resources into it that they'll make everything "worse"* for group 2. Group 1 adjusts their filters (both technical and mental), get back to neutral, but the rest of the internet is just a little worse off going forward because advertisers and publishers saw a very slight up tick in clicks after their scorched earth campaign to reach group 1. Rinse and repeat until we find ourselves where we are now.
I used to think that over time group 2 members would trickle into group 1, sort of like how programmers and hackers were using Google before it was cool and slowly the world followed, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Personally I'm seeing the groups continuing to divide. Group 2 really just doesn't see the problems, doesn't care, or isn't willing to put in the slightest effort to improve their interactions with technology and the internet.
My "favorite" outcome of all this is when a member of group 1 is forced to use a device owned by someone in group 2 and are horrified at what they see (favorite because it is equal parts sad and funny).
* "worse" in quotes here because group 2 doesn't seem to notice or care about the slow decline into madness.
Thankfully, there are lots of smart people staying one step ahead of the greedy corporations. And there will continue to be until the internet becomes a bearable experience by default. That'll probably never happen though.
I can't stand it when people are like this! Like when I'm over at someone's house and they're playing something on YouTube or whatever, and they've got no ad blocking, and even if the "Skip Ad" button shows up they don't even bother clicking it.
When I ask them why they don't have an ad blocker installed, and how easy and set-it-and-forget it that would be, either they figuratively shrug or they say it would be unethical to block ads. Some of them enjoy the ads, which I think is partly due to conditioning.
Their whole screen can be plastered with ads and elements they have to dismiss, and they see no problem with it.
Inside, when I witness this, my face melts in horror like in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
However over the past six months or so I’ve seen a drastic shift in how bad the experience is. I think what shocks me most is how often a website will effectively crash mobile safari on an iPhone 13 pro.
That’s jolted me awake as to how terrible the default experience is for people that are squarely in your group 2.
I think that this is precisely what's going on. More-or-less everyone filters spam. It's just that some people make their computers to it, while others do it with their brains. Not entirely unlike how most people who live in noisy cities learn to just tune out the noise.
I don't find ads all that bad. But I will avoid sites that go overboard.
I also take care to report spam messages in my email. And I ignore phone calls from anyone I don't know.
So I guess I straddle the line between the two people you describe.
Because I cannot trust ad networks to get it right 100% of the time, both content-wise as well as safety, out they go.
This is definitely the common justification for ad blockers. As I said in another comment: ad blockers themselves are a potential vector for malware.
Now adblocking is simply a matter of security.
Websites can inject malware irrespective of ads. Not to mention that ad blockers, themselves, are a good vector for exploitation. (Another consideration, obviously, would be to avoid websites that show you ads that you don't like (or fear) rather than circumvent their only path to revenue.)
I generally count on Google (and Chrome) to prevent that. At the risk of jinxing myself: I've never had malware installed on my computer view a website.
They don't care and they hate it when you fix it because then they have to do it all over again.
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.
It's not just the spammers who are the problem. Technology platforms, telcos, and policy makers have failed people like her. Hardware and software designers are part of the problem, too. It seems like every device and app is made for techie/hipster types, not the rest of the population who have no clue what a "hamburger menu" does or where the downloads end up on their computer.
I'm assuming many people on HN are their extended family's de facto IT support team. It's exhausting.
What is it about the US telecoms system that makes it so susceptible to spam? Is it just the size of the market that makes it attractive to robocallers anywhere in the world?
99% of the time when I'd answer a spam call (typically whilst expecting an important phone call) it would just be a dead line anyway - are they just verifying if the phone number is valid, potentially to resell it later?
I actually miss trolling "Jeff from the IRS" every few days.
The saw about "free" facebook/etc is that "you are the product".
But spam has always been allowed. The US government has unenforced laws to protect you from spam.
In the US, you pay taxes to be the product.
Corporations pay lobbying (that is, much much much less than taxes) to keep you being the product.
I'm surprised there hasn't been the mother of all class action lawsuits over this. Telecoms are so deeply ingrained in byzantine government regulation that their in-house legal teams know how to defeat anything. Municipal fiber, cooperatively shared starlink connection, or this, they know how to gum it up.
Did I only blame telecom?
Email spam: ISPs and the internet ad tracking industry, all legal and allowed.
The worst though:
US Mail. They exist on the backs of spam mail, which is an atrocity when you consider the amount of trees that must be killed for it. Again, we pay taxes to get a firehose of spam from our own government.
I get many more than that and I still find my phone to be pretty usable.
The "one weird trick" here is to screen your incoming calls. Add all of your friends/family/work associates to your contacts and enable the setting on your phone that sends all other calls to voicemail. And then set your phone to notify you when you have new voicemail. I find that scammers/spammers almost never both with leaving voicemail but Real People generally will, or will follow up with a text.
Probably some C-Suite mandated KPI that involves # of raw calls/texts per day, network wide. Eliminating spam would make the number go down, which is “eliminating shareholder value” and a corporate primeval sin.
It's definitely worse in the US, by quite a bit it seems
You should instead examine the US political system. Corruption.
The myopia among people is abysmal.
Just a tiny hint of cynicism will lead you down the obvious paths, it's not that hard.
AT&T has more influence over governance than the other way around, that's a bit of the 'American character'.
It has some advantages in that innovation abounds, but comes along with lack of regulatory apparatus.
A Russian on YouTube today was trying to explain to Westerners how Russians are default trapped in a kind of despair and it's all they know, they have never known another way of living, there's no hope for change etc..
Europe is far from perfect but if every America lived 3 months in Europe there'd be a revolution instantly.
FYI the opposite would be a bit true as well. Some 'things happen' in America at a pace Europe cannot match.
There is no technical limitation. It is allowed behavior and that must change.
Are you confusing cold calling with spamming? Here, for example, is the SEC page describing rules that cold callers need to follow: https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answerscoldhtm.html
I think the post you were replying to was saying cold calling in Germany is illegal full stop. I don't think that is the case in be US.
The problem is chasing companies not in US jurisdiction.
No. It most certainly is not. It may be illegal in your locality, but it is certainly legal in most of the US. The federal Do Not Call list would be useless if it were illegal.
Now I get 1-2 a month from scammers abroad and with "private numbers" which is highly annoying since those aren't even legitimate. As a solution I asked my phone company to block all foreign numbers: won't do (they didn't say the couldn't they just won't). They also profit from you calling/accepting a foreign number so just get a fine from them and see how long it lasts would be my solution.
Hopefully the authorities and carriers can figure it out before it grows to US levels. At least they are working on it (English article from Dec 2021: https://www.traficom.fi/en/news/traficom-looks-ways-block-in..., latest Finnish technical recommendation PDF on call blocking from Feb 2022: https://www.traficom.fi/sites/default/files/media/regulation...).
However, I feel operators should start verifying these somehow. Or allow me to block all calls from a Norwegian number originating from India for instance if not in my contacts or something.
EDIT: I was just commenting on the physical geographic location of the callers, not anybody's race or nationality
I suspect virtually all such reports end up being used for metrics and no actual prosecutorial case is created out of them.
Robo callers talking to Robo callers is not the future we want to live in.
"I cannot vote or express myself in my country, so this what I do to cope"
The SMS/MMS space is surprisingly "new" in the telecom sense. Many carriers and providers don't have all of the tools built out that you'd expect to handle spam at the scale they're seeing. From what I've experienced, AT&T has the best spam filtering among the carriers, but again they're all pretty hit-and-miss for now.
When it comes to toll-free messaging all carriers seem to do pretty well (as it's easy to detect the same message being sent out 100k+ times from a singular number), but it becomes much more difficult as more companies move over to unregistered or "local" traffic. Businesses are able to send from local numbers using a technique called "Snowshoeing", or spreading the messages out across multiple numbers and dodge large message volumes from any singular number.
While many of these messages are annoying (such as political messaging/marketing), it's not illegal. However, if you receive legitimate spam messages, all carriers allow you to forward the message to the number 7726.
Be careful if the spammer is spoofing your number as the sender however, because carriers are not smart enough to determine the legitimate sender yet and it will result in your actual number being marked as spam. From what I've heard, being able to detect spoofed sms/mms messages will be coming some time in 2023 though.
I've heard that forwarding spam texts to 7726 ends up counterproductive because that system opens up any included links, letting spammers know they've hit a legit active number. Is there any truth to that?
Wait ... you mean there is something ordinary customers can actually do?
This is the first time I have ever heard of this feature. How come the telcos aren't publicizing this?
Each carrier does have a small blurb on their website, but who would even think to look for it?[1][2][3]
1. https://www.att.com/support/pages/report-call-or-text
2. https://www.verizon.com/about/account-security/smishing-and-....
3. https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/help-with-sc...
This is one of the biggest pain points for customers, and potentially a huge source of data the telcos (and regulators) could use to stop specific scams and scammers.
We have an apologist for why it shouldn't be so bad. It should be getting better soon. And the law allows it. And please protect yourself.
From elsewhere in the world: it is nowhere near so bad where I am. This is probably something largely unique to USA.
In 2018 the FCC moved away from regulating sms/mms messages as they classified them as "information services" vs. "telecommunications services", meaning that the carriers have been left to create their own rules and enforce them. Without the FCC legal backing, it's much more difficult to stop illegitimate businesses from scaling out their practices.
Meanwhile legitimate businesses in this space have fallen back to the guidelines from the TCPA[1] when answering questions such as:
"When should we send messages?"
"What content is allowed?"
"How should we handle users opting-out of our messages?"
meaning that each business handles them differently, and pushes the envelope however they see fit. Some states have been passing their own mini-TCPAs[2], but these too are limited in their capacity and mostly focus on "telecommunications services".
I'd say that if we want to get serious about stopping spam texts, the best solution would be to talk to your representatives and potentially try to convince the FCC to reclassify text messages as part of "telecommunications services". However, political sends are very large in this space, so I'm sure that large pushback would be expected.
1. https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/tcpa-rules.pdf
2. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2021/1120/BillText/er/...
Carriers are old, monolithic, latent, greedy machines with no ability to innovate or 'do' that much of anything, more likely they want to sit on their control of networks, extract rent, and block anyone from doing anything else.
SMS/MMS could only be 'new' in that context.
If their existential decline was in front of them, they would not be able to adapt quickly enough.
In the 2000's Carriers tried to charge 10 cents per WAP page.
They wanted to control all app distribution with their Kafquaesue App Stores right out of 1980's Soviet Technology.
They used to dictate the terms of most of the gear on their networks.
One of the most important things that Steve Jobs ever did was told them literally to 'F OFF' and that they would never, ever have any control over anything on the iPhone.
Jobs agreed to that tiny little AT&T logo for a while, that's all they ever god.
The App Store Duopoly isn't ideal, but it's a 'competent oligarchy' - meaning that suff moves and evolves, it generally works.
It's be really nice to move to an all digital standard for calls, messaging etc.. and then force Network Neutrality (i.e. they can only bill for 'Quality of Service') and keep them moving bits.
That, and separation of ownership of 'content' and bits as well. Having Verizon and A&T own major networks is just bad, there's no advantage.
Finally, due to the limited access and the issues of 'public domain' with respect to airwaves, there needs to be regulation around pricing.
If there were 100 carriers to chose from in every town, that wouldn't be a problem of course.
Doing this has cut out 99% of my spam paper mail for the last year. Would highly recommend for sanity and as an easy way to cut down some on environmental impact. You can opt out for up to 5 years through the website or permanently by writing a paper letter. I did the latter through one of the "you write digitally, we'll send physical letter" services you can find on google and it's been great.
And the senders are much less likely to be able to get away with sending malware
Ban enough things like that and soon you're talking real impact.
On the environmental side, if your paper is made from reasonably sustainably sourced wood, isn’t throwing it into landfill a form of carbon sequestration?
Is this not standard on phones? Terminating a call on my Galaxy s10 shows me options to block number add to contacts, and redial. I know Samsung's UI has remained a couple years upstream of stock Android (and many yrs upstream of IOS) for the entirety of the smartphone era, but I thought this wouldve been a big standard feature.
The telecoms know who's PAYING for these calls to be connected and SMSes to be delivered - they should be required to surface that information.
I’d like the FCC to impose a fine for spam messages that are paid for the company advertising with spam. I think the issue now is that the spam calls are lead generators that then collect info and forward to “legitimate” companies to sell warranties, insurance, whatever.
The “legitimate” company should be fined and then let them sort out the scammy firms that are spamming to generate leads.
So, I could see a law where we say, "well, if you accept the bundle of leads, you, legitimate company, are responsible for the business practices of the lead-generator."
But would it be possible to launder these things?
Shady company uses illegitimate means to gather leads.
"Sells" only the successful leads to third party that's just popped up for this transaction and, as a result, hasn't really engaged in any practices at all...
I dunno. Seems like a big headache for regulators, although I guess they sort out this kind of stuff all the time (or at least try to).
Since companies must pay out to lead generators, I assume this means they have to know them with taxids and whatnot if they are paying out large sums.
By fining the companies using the leads it takes the headache away from the regulator and puts it on the company. Set up some sort of statutory damages process where I record the call and get to the point where I get transferred to someone who says “I work for FooCorp and sell warranties, please give me your credit card.” I send that recording to a regulator, fines the company $300, keeps $50 to fund itself and pays me $250 as the victim.
This seems like it will quickly make companies strictly vet their lead generations.
It seems pretty bad that any company exists based on cold calling genera consumers. All those companies should go bankrupt for sucking.
This may also be a choice of whether I want to get 35 calls a day from spammers or assassinate all shady car warranty companies. The companies are already shitty as they allow these spam-generated leads, so I don’t have much sympathy for their continued existence.
Thanks, Ajit.
“The Directive 2002/58/EC on Privacy and Electronic Communications (date of transposition 31 October 2003) requires Member States to prohibit the sending of unsolicited commercial e-mail or other electronic messaging systems such as SMS and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) unless the prior consent of the subscriber to such electronic communications services has been obtained (Article 13(1) of the Directive). This is the 'opt-in' system, which was until now only applicable to faxes and automated calling machines”
People often call out the EU as being government of the people, but not by the people, but IMO it often is more for the people than what the USA has.
This is in Europe, so is it just a regulatory difference that makes me feel that spam is a non-issue since for the last decade almost?
For example, I have gotten recruiter email spam to an email I used/gave to a company for HR communication only (luckily, it was a unique email address). Maybe a spam filter catches most of it, maybe not. It's a losing proposition to need throw-away information and spam filters for all types of information though. No filter is 100% accurate.
Chinese or English spam centers have a lot more potential marks to exploit than Slovenian or Estonian ones.
1. The successful communication platforms are ones that are opt-in, meaning you can't message or talk to someone unless you give their consent; and
2. This is why federated messaging systems have not worked and likely won't work in the future. Why? Just like with POTS, there is always going to be an incentive for bad actors to "launder" messages or calls.
What I find particularly irksome about the spam situation is the exceptions carved out for charities and, worse yet, political fundraising to the "do not spam" laws. I mean these laws don't stop a huge amount of spam because it's illegal anyway and probably originates overseas.
But I honestly don't want to be a part of the current phone system and just ignore any unknown numbers.
Not particularly true in the rest of the world, for instance in Europe as many have pointed out in other threads. The SMS text messages work well here, and good data protection laws/regulations ensure that there is virtually no spam or phishing. This is not a problem with the platform, but with the lack of regulation in the industry.
I have started just leaving most things unread because I just can't deal with it anymore.
If I look at my phone I have 420 unread texts and 152k emails. Even my work email has been largely spam and is sitting at over 7k unread emails.
Every once in a while I go in and I try to finally wrangle it all together, setup filters. mark stuff as spam. Etc etc. But the number of "are you still considering x" emails after I never gave them my email, or other spam. It is just ridiculous.
I now have developed a "feeling" on whether or not I have to pick up the call, based on if I'm expecting a call, country code, similarities with previous spam phone numbers, etc... It's really annoying.
It's most likely that people are just mistaking my number for some real estate agent's number, but you never know. Has anyone else experienced something like this?
As for email: spam is a fact of life, but can be managed by things like Simplelogin & Firefox Relay.
We integrated an alias feature within our app allowing you to create aliases within your mailbox page. Every email sent to your aliases will be received in an independent folder named after your alias.
It allows you to manage and organize everything in one place while keeping your main inbox free from spam!
wait for exactly 4 seconds and then only say “hello”. Some automated call systems use this pattern to distinguish whether they are talking to another computer as a human will almost always follow up with another statement. If no other statement is made, the automated caller will hang up after another ten seconds.
I have no direct information about what/which systems might work this way. Purely anecdotal.
Hopefully, this flags your number as moon-human to reduce future spam calls.
I get spam robocalls and spam text messages from politicians in states where I've never even lived. But it's all perfectly legal, because they make the rules.
I've started keeping screenshots of the political spam I get. I'm not sure what I will eventually do with it. Maybe some name-and-shame web site once I get enough of them.
Here's a text message I received just yesterday, from a politician in a state I don't even live in:
This is Danielle Piper Chio, I'm running for Las Vegas Justice Court, Department 9. Since 2009, I have worked as a Special Prosecutor at the District Attorney's office. I have handled over 50 felony jury trials & brought justice to hundreds of victims. EVERY LAW ENFORCEMENT ORGANIZATION has endorsed my candidacy. My opponent, the current sitting judge, has had a history of low bail and letting violent offenders back on the street, to commit more crimes. We need a change this election, we need to bring back law and order to Dept. 9. Please let me know if I can count on your support for my campaign. If you would like you can email me at Danielle@Danielle4Judge.com ,visit my website at www.Danielle4Judge.com ,or call me at 702-706-7117. Thank you, Danielle
No, screw you, Danielle. Even if I lived in Las Vegas, why would I vote for someone who sends me spam?
Years ago when I asked them if they could do essentially this, they said they couldn't and that the only alternative was blocking on the phone. This would have sufficed if it weren't for Android's bizarre reluctance to make blocking spam straight forward and feasible. First of all, why no wildcard matching?
I resorted to setting my phone to permanently be on "Do Not Disturb", making all text messages silent while still allowing numbers in my contact list to ring through.
That approach mostly worked for me until this last year when spam calls became horrendous. Shouldn't DND take care of those? Well, for some reason beyond me, Android thinks that even if you have DND turned on that the calls should still block the screen and stop apps like Spotify from playing music until the call is dismissed. There is no way for the phone to completely ignore numbers that are not in your contacts. Even numbers that the phone knows are spam still do this. I mean, why the flip would I answer a call that the carrier and the phone itself agrees are spam?
I don't know if it's STIR/SHAKEN, but whatever that T-Mobile is doing, it seems to have adequately addressed the spam problem for me. I encourage any fellow T-Mobile users to go turn this on in the account settings.
For other T-Mobile customers, I found it here: https://www.t-mobile.com/account/profile/line-selector/block...
The current option of going "paperless" by way of providing a privately owned email address is a huge risk factor. Gmail should not have access to view my government related emails. They aren't accountable for network issues either that may result in personal damages. The email itself is commingled with spam streams, related filters, and other things.
We need a dedicated, government protected, digital communication line. Sending mail through it would be tied to your government identity. Behavior is then open to regulation and accountability. Which is a good thing for the specific need of two known identities talking to each other.
Google can be the contract vendor for the service, that's fine. But there needs to be a contract setup where they are simply providing the service and not owning the data / contents. Maybe Microsoft outbids them the following year, and the underlying provider changes to no observable effect to the users. that kind of thing.
As a bonus, it would be immensely helpful for people dealing with permanent housing issues and the host of problems that are associated with requiring a mailing address for things. A government regulated email address would be sufficient for a lot of those things.
I'm always surprised at people saying that "government can't tech", without ever demanding competence from the thing that takes a good chunk of their income.
SSN alone shouldnt be sufficient for account creation so you'd probably have to jump through the usual 2-3 forms of ID to get access to your account, but then the email itself could act as another form of ID. Which would be super useful in lots of situations, especially if you lose one of your other forms.
Also there is a lot of digital user verification workaround right now that would be solved by this. I would much rather interact with a government controlled email address than scan and send a copy of my drivers license to online services
In the past few months, things appear to have changed, and emails that are obviously spam, complete with the misspelled titles and funky case and punctuation, are now appearing in my Gmail inbox. It looks like the Gmail spam filter is becoming less effective.
I would love for email to be opt-in on a per sender basis. If I haven't opted-in to receive email from someone, perhaps a request is added to a queue that I can check from time to time (with its own spam filter), and until the request has been accepted, no email will arrive from them.
Yes, I've noticed the same thing. Emails that are quite obviously spam (multiple recipients, complete gibberish, PDF attachments) are getting through the Gmail spam filter.
https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
It's been a while though, so perhaps some of these are no longer relevant.
Someone, somewhere, is having a scrum right now on how they can tie physical location to phone numbers to spoof caller numbers more effectively. It's completely plausible to use eg social network leaks to spoof phone numbers you are likely to recognize.
If they aren't doing it now, it's probably more that they don't need the extra spam-power at the moment rather than that they're too bumbling to think of arbitrarily clever ideas for ways to combine all of the public and leaked information about us.
Physical mail spam though is a huge problem - we are destroying tons of trees for shit that nobody wants. At least with phone calls it does not result in a ton of paper waste.
In an oligopoly it's really the only way to fix this, and every single time I mention this an American friend will say that the government can't be trusted with anything. If you have such a low opinion of your government's capabilities, why not ask it to get better instead of abandoning all hope?
My bank kept spamming me multiple times... I didn't know the number and was working on another project.
Later I checked and blocked the number.
Happened a few times, now they seem to have given up.
But that's about the only occasion, apart from useless polls where they first ask me a lot of questions and then at the end, my age... And then tell me they can't use my answers, so just have wasted my time. (Happened once, I refuse to do them nowadays)
I ended up installing and starting to use TMobile's Scam Shield app (on iOS), which uses some algorithm/data to block suspected spam calls before they get to your phone, and that's basically solved the call problem (it seems to do a good job, and hasn't yet blocked any legitimate calls. On the other hand, I don't get a lot of legitimate calls from random numbers in general, so I'm probably not a representative sample). I started forwarding any spam texts to 7726, and that at least seems to have slowed down that aspect as well, though I still get them once in a while.
Recently, I received a few spam iMessage group texts, with ~18 numbers in a group. It's happened 4 times over the past month, and each time I've blocked every number on that list. I presume that iMessage spam is some cutting-edge development and will only get worse as more spammers figure it out.
I'm ruthless about it, so perhaps 1 undesired message a day gets through to my inbox. It used to be 1 a week, but now Google seems to let through phishing "CostCo ConfirmationReceipt" patterns.
It's possible we'll figure out how to keep our idealized anyone-can-get-on-it Internet, but I'm not counting on it.
And all these network providers are just not capable or not willing to spend any effort to solve this problem.
For example, T-Mobile is so bad that even a valid 2fa SMS messages are blocked.
On the other hand, AT&T allows even so obvious scam goes thru.
We don't typically worry about pathological NULL sets
It's stopping it at the source. Severe punishments for instigators and technology to catch these people.
I would happily sign up for a communication system on top of email, texts and phones that require identity to be transferred with texts. Some system that unfortunately allows big brother to track all activities. That will effectively stop spammers and scammers.
I get the big brother aspect is bad. So that's why I want this to exist on top of standard communication systems. Though the bad thing is... If it gets to popular people might end up eventually fully switching.
Whenever I see a study, I immediately search out for who conducted the survey / study / report and see if they are motivated by a particular response. In this case, yes, RoboKiller of course has a story to peddle. Are they right? Perhaps, but would they communicate a story that would decrease the value of their spam-blocking app?
* I get the odd text spam message which is annoying
* I get very little spam email all the way into my inbox, and rarely see false positives (and then typically marginal messages)
Overall my spam situation is better than ever, but I'm super-aware of the risk and impact on people like my elderly parents who still have a land line and are not as familiar with the standard scams as others.
My Thai phone number got slammed this week and I've had many friends here complain about all the scammers. Apparently they will have 1 person pretend they are the police and one of my friend's friend (not the brightest person) started crying thinking it was real
From my observations, Thai people are very trusting and nice so unfortunately this is probably a very profitable operation
Then any organization sharing or receiving any contact info will have to be careful who they share it with lest they share it with someone who causes me to be unsubscribed from the group.
I'd expect that with time the cost/risk would increase as governments and infrastructure providers intervene and the reward would decrease and people wise up to spam/scams. But the problem just keeps getting worse.
Is the decreasing in technological cost/difficulty just out-pacing the decreasing ROI?
It's probably already been tried.
One of the meain resons I have watched regular tv for nearly two decades. I dont miss it at all.
Personally I think tv ads and spam in general to make people dumber.
I just checked my texts going back two years, and there is not a single unsolicited, spam or scam text. The same is true for phone calls.
I understand why things like ActBlue exist to centralize this kind of stuff in terms of contributions, but the comms side of things is still completely backwards.