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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

Say what you will about US regulatory agencies, I wish we had even a whiff of that in Germany. Over here, the best you can hope for is for the regulators to negotiate with the companies to shut down individual numbers that have been used for illegal activities for months.

They might fine the companies running the robocallers/callcenters if they're in Germany, but they're absolutely never touching the providers who are happily supporting the criminals and instead throw their hands in the air and say "guess we can't do anything".

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Even so, the US treats corporations with kid gloves. If I, as a mere human, blatantly and continuously committed crime, they’d kick in my door, shoot my family dog, and charge me with everything they could, expecting a plea deal. But when a company does it, they send them friendly letters: “Pretty please, with sugar on top, would it bother you much to stop committing crimes? We will give you a popsicle if you at least write us a letter saying you’re trying!” You can tell who’s in charge, and it’s not the general public.

Yeah, that's the kind of thing that erodes people's trust in "the system". I'm sure it's harder to go after corporations and their armies of lawyers, but their crimes are usually appropriately larger, too. But still, easier to go after individuals 10000 times than go after one corporation once to have the same impact.

I think one major reason is the lesser extent to which this is a problem. I can't remember the last time I got spam calls. A year or two ago it was much worse, but even then I got maybe one a month on mobile and one a week on my landline. Both numbers are publicly listed.

I don't know how it works, I only get like two a month. A friend of mine gets two or three a day and has just disconnected his phone and advised friends and family to only use his mobile.

The same applies to the large scale phone fraud though, which quickly gets into tens to hundreds of millions of euros per year. Police won't do much because the criminals are outside Germany and cooperating with e.g. Turkey is hard, and with India it's impossible. Phone companies don't care because they're making money and the regulator is asleep at the wheel.

Let's just make the phone companies liable for damages where they can't produce the customer (no KYC) or the customer is international. They'll quickly figure out who is legit and who isn't when it actually hurts their bottom line.

Meanwhile in Spain: past month I finally convinced my mother that they should give up the land line for good. She uses Internet through the cell phone only, where it's easy to block all the spam.

The land line calls were mostly spam, mostly from established companies, and some scams. A side effect: they went from 70€/month to 15€, 22€ after the first year.

I had got them a 35€ contract (land/fiber + 2 cellphones) three or four years ago, but somehow Movistar managed to creep the bill to double and had announced that it will start charging 120€ this year. Because reasons.

Protecting your parents from scam & spam will matter a lot in the future. I've trained my mother on erring on the side of not believing whatever the email or person on the phone says and calling me to verify. It works great, she'll happily take a note from them e.g. when her mobile provider (or someone claiming to be her provider...) calls and asks how I can reach them. The legit calls will be happy to provide a callback number, and the other ones will give up when she's persistent that she can't help them. They'll move on to easier victims.

The cost cutting can be immense as you mentioned. Plenty of people have ancient contracts that they never changed.

> Let's just make the phone companies liable for damages where they can't produce the customer (no KYC) or the customer is international. They'll quickly figure out who is legit and who isn't when it actually hurts their bottom line.

This would result in prepaid sim cards going away which would create a lot of problems for homeless people and illegal immigrants.

In the US, maybe. In Germany, prepaid sim cards already require full KYC with ID. There's no problem, you can get them with a preliminary ID card the government hands out to asylum seekers. There's barely any undocumented migrants in Germany because there's little reason to: if you're from most of Europe, you can come here legally, if you're from Africa or Western Asia, you can claim asylum.

You can also buy so-called pre-activated "Anosims" in Turkish shops everywhere around the country, no need to do KYC.

It's just not true. https://www.heise.de/news/Telefonabzocke-Ueber-150-000-Besch...

Especially in regards to expensive numbers, some critics go so far and say they got an "employment ban". They are not soft at all. But obviously they can only react.

They could just do the same thing the FCC does: threaten the providers with revoking their licenses unless they get their KYC in order and do spam detection & prevention.

But they don't. You can check their actions: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Vportal/TK/Aerger/Aktuel...

They're fining ~20 companies per year for spam and have shut down a few numbers and stopped billing on a few foreign premium numbers. Other than that: nothing. They're simply ignoring the companies that are complicit.

If they're not the right organization to enforce rules, that's fine, let's create one that does and hasn't been closely embedded within the industry for the past decades.

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