We just recently purchased a landline and have told nobody our phone number, so 100% of incoming calls are spam (and we get a few every day). It's amazingly frustrating.
only thing that will fix it is burning it to the ground.
fcc regulations and penalties mean nothing to shady offshore grey market scam call centers in india using suspicious/unethical voip providers and methods of getting phone traffic to the US/Canada.
shaken/stir is a joke
set up a voip based system with IVR on your incoming DIDs that asks the caller to input a short series of digits to be connected, then have that series of digits ring your real line.
it will filter out about 98% of the crap
Assuming your telco won't help you with whitelisting, your options are maybe? getting a new cordless system with caller id whitelisting, it seems like maybe some of the newest panasonic dect systems can do it (that will take care of the answering machine needs as well). Or getting an external box, most likely inline with your phone.
I don't have either yet, but it seems like reasonable options include the Digitone proseries II [1], or the Sentry call blocker[2]. Both are more expensive than they should be (IMHO), but offer some amount of whitelisting and blacklisting. The Digitone has a longer history in the industry, and what looks like a clumsier interface; the Sentry has a good, but slightly messy feature for handling inbound calls from numbers that aren't 'known', for those calls, it answers and plays an outgoing greeting (customizable in the 3.x device, prerecorded in 2.x), if the caller presses 0, their number is added to the white list and they can call back; from reviews, I gather on the 2.x series pressing 0 add you to the whitelist and then hangs up on you; on the 3.x series, pressing 0 generates a fake ringback, makes the device ring (but not phones on the line) and after 9 fake rings will let the caller leave a message on the sentry device (2 message capacity, FIFO). This is like not quite right; the recommendation from reviewers is to record a message asking people to press 0 and then hangup and call back, rather than having them go through the weird ringing stuff. There's some negative comments about recording quality.
The Sentry is much better, but has some notable flaws.
The Sentry works as a whitelist, so it blocks all calls by default. After you enter your whitelist (family, friends, etc.), you'll get three types of calls:
-Good Calls: From people on your approved list. These calls ring through as normal. -Bad Calls: From idiots (aka robocalls). The idiots aren't smart enough to press a button, so they don't, and then the Sentry hangs up the call. -Other Calls: From humans who are (ideally) not idiots, but aren't (yet) on your list.
This third item is where the Sentry really needs improvement. Other callers hear a (horrible quality) outgoing message, so they can either hang up, or press a key to leave a message - on the Sentry, not your answering machine/voicemail. The message they leave is only 20 seconds, and you can only receive two messages. And you can't screen these calls - you don't actually hear the person leaving the message, and you can't pick up the call if it turns out it's valid. And the Sentry doesn't timestamp the message. There's a log of calls, but you have to work to figure out who actually called, especially if the caller's message was cut off.
(What I would prefer is to have callers press a button, then my phone rings like normal.)
If you don't get a lot of "new" numbers calling you, the Sentry isn't bad. But you will miss some calls, especially at first. Thankfully, there's an on/off toggle for those times when you're expecting an important call from an unknown number (delivery guy, hospital).
(Assuming you don't specifically wants POTS though.)
At this point, retrofitting CAPTCHA in as an expected part of the telephone system seems like the only option that will make a significant dent.
100% blocking all not whitelisted calls is a more convenient alternative.
For every 300 calls I get, maybe 1 isn't spam. I probably get 5 spam calls per day and under 10 legitimate calls per year.
There are so many simple things carriers could do. The biggest would be simply deleting silent voicemails would help a lot.
I kind of wish a company that actually cares about voice phone calls would come around. Give me the highest fidelity calls possible, give me features for recording, give me the option to block all non-authenticated callers, show me the actual call data and not just the caller id, etc...
For example, you could port a number to VoIP.ms, and (in their terms) set up a caller ID filtering rule based on phone book entries, with the those entries managed either through the web form or API. If you wanted known callers to reach your mobile phone instead of a VoIP phone, I imagine you could use a call forwarding rule. Unknown callers could be routed to a busy signal, voice mail, a "not in service" message, or handled in a variety of other ways.
Because the problem's not just with landline but with any direct-dialed PSTN telecoms system. I don't want a landline or mobile phone any more. The situation's well past simple cord-cutting.
It's been about three years since I stumbled across this quote which confirms that at least someone on the inside is aware that the present situation is eroding all trust in the system, and that this is an existential threat:
[S]ince mid-2015, a consortium of engineers from phone carriers and others in the telecom industry have worked on a way to [stop call-spoofing], worried that spam phone calls could eventually endanger the whole system. “We’re getting to the point where nobody trusts the phone network,” says Jim McEachern, principal technologist at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS.) “When they stop trusting the phone network, they stop using it.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/how-to-stop-spam-rob...
(From an earlier HN comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542926
Stir-Shake may have reduced levels of spam, I've no way of knowing. But the level it's at remains intolerable and a real financial risk to individuals and businesses. I'm personally aware of several people who've been scammed of thousands of dollars within the past year.
Cut phone service and that threat disappears, along with all the attendant billing bullshit and customer service nightmares.
Is the industry aware of this and what if anything does it plan to do?
it's a legacy of the 1950s and 1960s era of the monopoly bell system when all of the phone system trusted itself.
the whole way that traffic moves between telcos in the PSTN is built on lack of crypto authentication, total trust between two phone switches, in a way that would be absurdly terrible if run on the modern internet (imagine all your online banking as http only, for example).
Or have any idea of what a solution-shaped object might resemble?
Your answer ... mostly confirms my outsider view. And that story ends poorly.
Thanks, regardless.
Headline: they never had a chance.
Conspiracy: they didnt want to.
- First of all, the legacy telco network is still out there in huge quantities. This is the copper landline to grandma's house. It speaks SS7 and TDM which have no inherent concept of identity: the tekco switch simply inserts the calling number in the signaling, the end. There is no economic incentive to replace any of this old stuff since there is no marginal revenue to be made. It will rust in place.
- the telco network has long supported cases where the caller had a legitimate need to replace their number with another. Your doctor calling you always shows as the office front desk, never their direct line.
- this use case gets even worse when you have call centers and other high volume users. Use of VoIP makes the modern call center possible, but also trivially easy to change the calling ID, and again, perfectly legitimately for the businesses that use it.
- extra wrinkle: offshore centers. now some agent in India needs to present as if they are calling from Ohio. No problem, VoIP can do that. But the same tech that does that also means their evil twin can call you up from an area code that looks like your town to ask about your car warranty.
I could go on, but this is a really hard problem.
The legacy assumptions built into PSTN seem to be getting in the way. Simple dumb terminals with no logic greater than being able to generate pulses or tones, logic in centralised switches (which should make upgrading more viable). Identity presumed to be based on the device and circuit, rather than the person at the end of the line (in the increasingly rare cases where a person is in fact at either end of the line). Stronger authentication, and different levels of authentication, are both necessary. (And some preservation for anonymous communications, within the constraints of technologically mediated telecoms platforms, is also useful --- it has its place.)
I'm also fearful that such a system will become captured by a single entity and not offer interoperability --- the long line of personal messaging systems offered by a string of Internet monopolies and would-be monopolies suggest the position has some appeal, if it's difficult to attain. MCI, AoL, Microsoft Messenger, Google's litany of extirpated chat apps, Facebook, Discord, Telegram, Signal, Protonmail, etc.
In its early years telephony was exclusive, and for much of its existence, expensive. Those cost barriers to usage meant that the worst abuses of the system were avoided (though the annoyance of telephone solicitation were still remarked on).
I'm not sure how or where volume increased, though Google Ngram shows "telemarketing" and a set of related terms taking off in the 1970s and 1980s:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=telemarketing%...
> Sprawling networks can be upgraded with gateways and bridges where wholesale replacement isn't viable. Rural services (telephony, electricity, water, gas, sewerage, postal, ...) are often noneconomical and in the US there's a long tradition of either cooperatives or government-run (often municipally-organised) services, and/or steep subsidies.
this is really overly optimistic, you underestimate how moribund the traditional telco/copper POTS line/dialtone service is. the various ILECs around the USA and their patchwork of territories are putting the bare minimum into keeping some of this stuff running. nobody is going to retrofit custom gateways into their network.
they'll spend money on lobbyists and lawyers to fight back against doing anything other than maintaining the status quo instead.
I think that all those companies are dead or acquired now.
My British and Danish mobile phone numbers get less than one junk call per year.
It's an inconvenience if a company wants to use automation to return my call. I can turn this off, temporarily. As I see it, it's stupid of any legitimate company to imitate a robocall for any reason. I don't walk up to cops carrying a fake gun; they shouldn't behave like spammers.
It’s an incoming call whitelist, others go to voicemail.
This makes this a non issue.
Blocking unknown is strictly better than blocking everything.
Automatically transcribed voicemails work in exceptional cases like you describe.
The call volume went way down after a while.
I did make some vacation package scammers feel bad and hang up a couple times. Claiming that I no longer travel because I lost my legs In a car accident years back.
Family that can use the vacation package? Nope, they are all dead too. The last of them died in the same fiery crash.
They will give up.
If you engage with them they will continue to call. Do not speak to them, just answer the call and leave them listening to nothing.
# no call center supervisor will let their employee just sit there and wait for you to answer....your silence actually does cost them money.
One might even be "marked" as "listening the marketing material" which would end up getting more calls.
I grunt and listen for a response (if any). It's pretty easy to distinguish a human from a robocall nowadays. There was a brief time when a woman's voice would say "hello, uh, hello? can you hear me?" which got me once, but that was it because it played whether you made noise or not and was always the same.
American scammers usually laugh at that, but it instantly enrages Indian scammers. I think their mothers don't know, and would be ashamed if they did.
what prefixes in blocks of 10000 numbers belong to what specific carrier is public info
prefixes that are assigned to a carrier like tmobile or that were a metropcs prefix before its full integration into tmobile are highly likely to be cellphones, though people can of course port away their number to a voip service or something, but more often they would just move to verizon or att.
Some have battery backup and so kind of work the same as before ... for awhile.
How did they get your number?