FCC orders carriers to stop delivering auto warranty robocalls
upi.com
upi.com
and the carrier, to boost the incentive?
They would sell their own grandmothers for a chance to balance their books, hence the Faustian junk mail bargain.
You can request junk mail, including bulk unaddressed mail be excluded. And reject delivery requiring your carrier to pick it up and dispose of it.
My carrier just started leaving it on the ground in front of my door. Including all that spam addressed to nobody. Even though I repeatedly opted out of that stuff.
At least where I live, the post office primarily serves as a spam distribution agency, and they take that mission very seriously.
How? Last I checked Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) cannot be opted out of.
https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Refuse-unwanted-mail-and-remo...
I'm pretty sure that both EDDM and specific bulk mail senders can be blocked.
There was a long-standing rejection applied to pornographic materials, based on the recipients own assessment based on "I know it when I see it", though that loophole may have been closed.
From the old Junkbusters site, there are a Form 2150 and 1500 which can be filed against any sender.
https://web.archive.org/web/19970713104642/http://www.junkbu...
I'm only finding the form 1500, here:
https://about.usps.com/forms/ps1500.pdf
You can also directly contact bulk senders through the DMA mail preference service, Valpack, RedPlum, and others. See one listing of these here:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-to-stop-junk-mail_n_5b27b...
The From 1500 is the take-off-and-nuke-it-from-orbit option, however.
There is no way to tell USPS to not deliver junk mail to you.
What the post office should enforce is properly labeled envelopes. Watermarks like "response required", "official correspondence", "winning x enclosed", " final notice" should be chargeable/fineable when not legitimate.
not in general: my wife is a letter carrier part time for USPS, and the overwhelming 2 problems they face are people never getting around to it being convenient, and Amazon shipping huge packages via USPS.
Regarding convenience, mail gets recalled and addressees have to be seriously inconvenienced to retrieve it. this isn't a punitive thing, but a logistics issue.
Public schools are another example of this.
https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/0...
https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/1...
Yes, the FTC, not the FCC, but look. Roy Cox settled and was permanently enjoined from telemarketing. Aaron Jones apparently just ignored the complaint altogether, and the FTC won a default judgment banning him from telemarketing also. Yet, here we are again with both of them allegedly involved in this scamming. Maybe the car warranty calls are not considered telemarketing?
I mean, most scams work similarly to this. Fortune telling, for example. The scammer relies to some degree on the victim connecting the dots themselves as the scammer lacks the necessary information. This is just especially true when it comes to spam.
We'd get one or two of these calls per month. I don't think there's a chance in hell these are targeted - randomly dialling 877 numbers in the hopes that one will be answered by a human instead of another robot has to be a complete crapshoot.
And then telling all the other US carriers that they are now authorized to identify and block such calls from the responsible carriers without running afoul of the FCC rules that normally require all carriers to carry for other carriers.
If the originating carriers get de-peered, the FCC will effectively allow other carriers to not carry any of their traffic, legitimate or otherwise and put them out of business.
I tend to answer even still.
Using an ancient vestigial telecommunications system as your lifeline is your problem.
I think ideally people should use something like xmpp or email.
Longtime friend called me from one of these places yesterday. I answered only out of common courtesy, fully expecting a robocall.
I tend not to answer, because it is _always_ an unwelcome interruption.
The warranty provider? Your telco? Peering telco? The data provider? The call centre?
How do you find / sue them?
As an aside: you could then easily add carriers or intermediaries to a block list. You could even subscribe to a distributed block list. You could subscribe to an always-allow list that contains hospitals, police stations, and emergency services. It'd be so much better than what we have now.
That would require some major respecification of PSTN calling standards.
That said, yes, something along these lines seems necessary.
Even automated curtailment by last-link telcos (e.g., your own telco) based on rejection / complaint rates (e.g., recpients reporting calls as spam) could be A Thing, and are not dissimilar to how email spam management occurs today. Making that the peer's problem incentivises them to clean up their acts.
may block. That sounds pretty weak to me. Is there some reason telcos couldn’t block them before?
Yes, the FCC normally requires carriers to put all calls through. So the FCC is only now, very belatedly and in very limited circumstances, allowing deviations from the FCC's own rules that have prevented carriers from stopping robocalls for all these years.
> The FCC said it has authorized all U.S.-based voice service providers to stop carrying traffic from...
Why is this distinction important? The FCC by default requires carriers to put all calls through, and this rule has prevented phone companies from cleaning up the robocalls that have become ubiquitous.
So it's nice that the FCC is finally allowing carriers to clean up a little bit of the robocall problem, but lets be clear about this: this is a problem of the FCC's making that it is only very belatedly allowing carriers to fix.
Telephone numbers are stupid. An arbitrary sequence of digits, area codes, they only really serve as unique identifiers like a social security number, I can easily be contacted by anyone even if I don't want to be. They're technically inferior. I only need one because other people I don't really care to interact with need me to need one. The only reason I even have one is because it comes free with my mobile data plan.
Who are these people that answer the phone for numbers not in their contacts anyway? Or check voicemail? If someone wants to get a hold of you via your phone number and you actually want to speak to them, they'll SMS. I don't even like that, but at least it's better.
Just ask me for a fucking email address so I can communicate asynchronously, I also have a few other contact mechanisms and if I want to talk to you I'll give you information you need to contact me that way.
Sorry, but I am glad you’re not on the board of the FCC. While I do get spam VM, usually less that 5 seconds in length that doesn’t get converted to text, I still get a lot of VM from friends and family that gets converted to text, awkwardly which I read a listen to if necessary.
Like, what if we could set up a system where they have to pay 25c tolls on incoming calls, and they only get waived if it is indeed a legitimate call, indicated by the receiving party...