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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

Here in Germany commercial cold calling is illegal and carries a pretty heavy fine. (in the tens of thousands). In 20 years I've had one spam call. Literally just ban it and require explicit consent from customers, problem solved.

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It's illegal in the US too. But the nature of our phone system here leaves us open to (largely) untraceable calls from foreign countries.

For real, I'm not sure why people haven't thrown the book at the "car's extended warranty" people yet. I mean, they should have an entity in the US no?

Not necessarily. They can call you from (almost?) any country and put whatever number they want in their caller ID, and your phone company will just blindly show you that number.

What I mean is, if they want to sell you a service (as BS as it is) they have a legal entity in the US

Fair, not familiar with that, maybe they have a way to get cash out of the country?

Regardless, there are a lot of fraudulent and misleading companies US-based companies that should probably be shut down.

Wait, what? Can you cite the statute?

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 big one though is the Do Not Call Registry. Over 240 million Americans are on it and it is severely inforced.

The problem is chasing companies not in US jurisdiction.

Yes, that's fair. But the reason that list exists is because it is legal to cold call. Having an opt-out is much weaker than an opt-in. It sounds like the German system is opt-in (per company).

Is there a difference between Germany and US in regards to the phone system?

What's untraceable about it? The carriers know the original phone number and know when it doesn't match the caller ID field.

There is no technical limitation. It is allowed behavior and that must change.

I don't understand the technicalities behind how they do it, but SPAM calls in the US can spoof their phone numbers. I'm not sure if it's pre or post carrier connection.

Spam spoofs the caller ID field. The calls are routed by the ISP so the ISP sees everything (including that the source address and caller ID address are differ, ie spoofed) and allow it. It would be trivial to flip the switch on spam.

Sounds like a product you could sell if it's trivial.

They already have the power to stop spam. Stopping spam lowers profits. They wouldn't pay someone for an ability they already have that they actively don't want to use.

> It's illegal in the US

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.

Most of the spam calls I receive are already illegal because they're scams or phishing. It's an enforcement problem here, not a legislation problem.

It could still be a legislation problem if the laws making it illegal are impossible to enforce.

True, but what's needed is not to make the calls illegal but to compel the carriers to make changes.

While not in Germany, I haven't had a single legitimate cold call since I disallowed all major calling companies a few years ago and since then it has become illegal to cold call so that was solved.

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.

I've never seen them before, but during the last couple of months have gotten multiple, from international numbers.

Yeah totally weird and for many Americans to get a call from a foreign country code is very unusual. I started getting spam with apparent chinese origin numbers within the past few months.

(Belgian here) After the facebook data leak in 2021 I got 2 or 3 spam calls a week from various numbers but mostly from the UK. I started reporting them as spam immediately and for the last couple of weeks it seems to have died down.

(Finland) Within the last year I've gotten two "ms support" scam calls, before that nothing.

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...).

Out of curiosity, you got these scam calls in Finnish? I always thought that US was a specially good market for these scams because you have ~300m potential victims and a good supply of english-speaking people in poorer countries who are willing to participate on the scheme, so a Finnish-speaking ms support scam would be hard to understand from this point of view.

No, they were in English.

Same in Norway. But that's not the problem here. It's scam calls from abroad, using spoofed phone numbers. So basically how you in your emails can set an arbitrary from field.

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.

STIR/SHAKEN is a step forward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN

How does that stop ”microsoft technical support” from calling you 8 times per day?

You report it to the police, and police finds the perpetrators and fines the shit out of them.

Most of those calls originate in India. How do they deal with international calls?

EDIT: I was just commenting on the physical geographic location of the callers, not anybody's race or nationality

No, you're right. How can local police go find someone calling from outside the country. It's impossible.

You have a lot of expectations of the police.

Some police forces are better than the others, of course.

I, German, once saw a mail-crime being done as the co-owner of a UPS associated package handling business. Some scammer had sent mail to people and they were sending back - to a post box we managed (we had not know what it would be for when it was ordered) - actual money. We called the police - and they said it wasn't their responsibility. Everything was done voluntarily after all. I called a well-known organization - they do just shrugged and told us to just go ahead, nobody would and could do anything. Pretty much that if people were so stupid to fall for it and sent money vial mail to unknown people, quite voluntarily even if scammed, they could not do anything. The scammers used a Delaware company and a Canadian address and they were sending their scam mail (actual mail) to Germans. Probably bought some address list somewhere. No chance to find them, but even preventing the ongoing scam was nobody's priority.

Also, I once returned a wallet thick with various cards, all paper money already stolen but things like drivers license and other important documents still inside. I brought it to the police. I waited for almost an hour in line, and then it took more than another hour of the officer documenting every single item in the thick wallet. He had to, he could not just write "wallet", it had to be every single item.

I highly doubt the police will do anything. Scams don't seem to be anything the police will go after, maybe some very high level stuff when it's about millions. They are also very busy writing reports and doing other important paperwork... /s Googling I just found that there are 760 cases of bike theft per day in Germany. Less than a tenth of them are found. -- https://blog.alh.de/taeglich-werden-ueber-760-fahrraeder-ges... -- There is just too much "small stuff" for police. If anyone gets murdered I just have to wait a day or two for the newspapers to announce the murderer has been found. On the other hand, for small crimes I expect not much is going to happen apart from filing the report (which I'm sure alone takes up plenty of time).

Sadly, to 'report it to the police' is easier said than done. I know my local police department lacks jurisdiction and the best I can do is submit a report to the FCC. But what use is reporting the dozens of spam calls I receive every day to an agency that seems to lack the means to go after sophisticated spammers outside of the United States? It's not like these spammers use real contact information (they use dynamic fake phone numbers) and operate inside of the US.

I suspect virtually all such reports end up being used for metrics and no actual prosecutorial case is created out of them.

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