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Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

I remember when the pandemic happened all of a sudden robo spam calls suddenly completely stopped for me. So even the pandemic hit cyber criminals! Also for whatever reason spam calls for me have greatly decreased in the past 6 months, for a while I was getting 3-4 spam calls a day and now its 1-2 a week.

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They stopped calling you and started calling me. You're welcome ;-). I get 5-10 a day now, up significantly in the last couple years.

That sounds like a hell hole. I’d throw my sim away.

I set my voicemail to be 2 minutes long (the max AT&T allows). It's just me telling jokes I found on the internet so it isn't terrible but man it's effective. I still get the spam calls but now I don't get a little voicemail I need to delete.

I turned on "silence unknown callers" for a month or two and that seemed to get my number off of the hot list.

The trick is to pick up and immediately mute your phone. They will hang up and eventually flag the number as inactive or unscammable (like maybe it’s a machine picking up). If you don’t answer, they can call back later. If you pick up and say something, then they know there is a human behind the number and that it is actively used.

Change your voicemail prompt to "We're sorry, the number cannot be completed as dialed..."

They don't fall for this. Or at least using the local Australian no-number recording... Somehow they know.

Back in the land line days I bought a nifty gadget that you plugged in between the phone and the line. It had a button that when pressed would inject the intercept special information tone [1] that the phone company used to tell calling equipment that the number was no longer in service.

It seemed to work pretty well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_information_tone

I pretend to do as they ask but purposely stuff up the instructions until they get frustrated. It's amusing how many creative insults they have. Most are directed at my mother for some reason.

I haven't answered the phone for non-family callers in 20 years. They still call several times a day (or their Perl scripts do).

I haven't answered my phone except for family members for coming on 3-4 years now and still get 3-4 spam voicemails a day. That number goes way up when I start screening the calls though, so maybe there is something to answering vs not.

A little town I know has maintained their antique telephone exchange for going on 40 years, and one of the features is that they have a block of numbers that lead to all the error messages. (541-447-0054 for example) For a while I redirected my phone number to one of their error messages, and now I rarely get robocalls, because the spammers presumably blacklisted me.

For anyone reading: what would your top dollar be for a phone number that hasn't received spam calls for 3, 5, or maybe 8 years?

I haven't gotten any for years, because I block all calls that come from any number that isn't already in my phone book. They go straight to voice mail, where only a small percentage even leave a message.

Omg, I was remembering Lenny [0], the incredible automated trolling machine.

Turns out that he/it still works and there's a phone number that you can call -- or rather forward/3-way-call spammers to!! It's 347-514-7296. You can hear past recordings here [1].

I wish there was a way to pay for this incredible service, and can't wait to start using it!

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3b7na/the-story-of-lenny-th...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@ToaoDotNet/videos

You can also self-host it: https://github.com/sladesys/LennyTroll

There's also a way to self-host Lenny on your own Asterisk (often FreePBX) server if you DIY your voip.

I've had tremendous success ending them for me. My main number is with a VOIP provider and I set up the IVR to say "Please dial 1 to continue the call" and wait for it. No spam calls have gotten through since then.

For me, they’ve moved on to spam texts. I get 5-10 variations of “Hey”, “How are you?” a week. No provided names, just social engineering attempts if I were to reply.

I get 5 - 10 "Your <Amazon|Paypal|Google|> account was suspended...". I haven't tried to see what their followup is for phishing.

Funny you mention it. Last couple of months I've gone from getting a handful of "account suspended" SMS phishes a year to getting a handful a week. I assumed it was something that broke at AT&T; never considered it might be a global economics driven phenomenon.

I wonder how much of this is due to STIR/SHAKEN [1]

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

I got a new phone about a year ago and requested an area code that’s not from around here. All the spam calls come from that area code, and I have no business there, so it’s simple to filter out which calls are legitimate just by seeing if the area code is my actual one or the other one.

Once they learn LLM+SST+TTS, though...

Only strong legislation will stop it.

lol, how? The calls aren't coming from places that respect laws, they way that CAN-spam didn't stop spam mails.

Because the calls are being enabled by absurdly weak security on the part of the telecoms. You think they can't stop spoofed numbers? They're making money allowing it is all

And when they aren't, they don't want to spend the money to stop them.

Require phone carriers to block networks that consistently send spam calls. This puts pressure on foreign networks to clamp down on the practice.

This is true, but they’re a lot more email servers that there are telco carriers. So it’s not entirely unwinnable.

Thought exercise: a law is passed personally charging the CEO of your phone company $20. How many hours would it take before they’d magically announce that it is in fact technically feasible to block spoofed phone numbers and de-peer the shady VoIP providers who originate most spam?

They don’t do this now because it’s more work and they aren’t legally required to do so. The money they get from the spam outfits is greater than the cost, so the phone companies didn’t have an incentive to stop it. Make it uneconomical and that can change very quickly.

There are also wiretap laws that sometimes take effect.

In NL, almost zero calls. What is the difference?

Not enough scammers speak Dutch? One day they'll realise they can robo call people in NL in English and be understood most of the time.

English is a great language for scammers because it scales well worldwide - that one language covers the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and others, so an English-based scam operation has a much larger addressable market than other languages which would usually be limited to a single country.

Most people in NL speak English, though. They could definitely be targeted by English payloads.

Is it common for the services typically impersonated by those scammers (local tax authority/government department, bank or major retailer such as Amazon)? If not, it would still be a potential red flag for the victim.

It would fit for a call "from Microsoft", but not much else.

Britain also isn't plagued by spam calls though, so it's not only a language barrier.

Hrr. I once got such a call in Germany while reconfiguring my Voip, so my usual filters were down.

But I've never heard of Microsoft germany calling endusers, nor doing that in english.

Was funny btw. I picked up, asked 'Wer stört?/Who is disturbing(me)?' and got an Indian accent bubbling something about calling from MS customer service, that they had to clean a virus.

Me in a mix between giggling and sighing: 'Could you stop your fucking script, PLEASE?!'

...You want me to open some page which tries to download some remote access tool, camouflaged as something else, hoping that would fly because my explorer doesn't show real file endings? While there is nothing from MS running here at all? Not even in a virtual machine?

He bubbling 'What is your name, what is this company?'

Me: 'I'm just the facility manager, doing house keeping stuff, and you don't need to know.'

He bubbling something about me being impolite.

Me countering with something about no need to be polite to fraudsters.

He flustered.

Me telling him about criminal acts, and our 'Bundesnetzagentur' where one can report such attempts, which leads to termination of such faked numbers, fines, and on occassion seized equipment, which makes the rounds in such circles, which leads to less and less acceptance of such 'businesses', because it's bad for their business. Too much hassle to be worth it.

About 10 minutes of hilarity ensued, where I asked why they are even trying it(in Germany), who would fall for it, if ever?

In the end, enraged gibberish, which I countered with 'Ja. Ja. Du mich auch, Arschloch!/Yes, Yes, the same to you, asshole!'

Clack...

Germany is big, but it wouldn't be so unusual for a Dutch (or Norwegian, Swedish etc) person to phone a support helpline and find it's only in English. It's not that unusual to find staff in a small bar, restaurant or shop who don't speak the local language.

Microsoft presumably have support in Dutch, but for example Adobe don't: https://helpx.adobe.com/contact/phone.html

Yes. I know that. But 'ze Görmänz' have this special concept of Amtssprache/legal/official language in which you have to conduct business. Which especially applies to larger businesses, which in turn leads to such strange experiences with outsourced hotlines in all over south-eastern Europe, Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Portugal insisting to speak in their sometimes not that good German to you, while you could be done with it much faster and less ambiguous in English.

Because of that I'd say it's very uncommon to have the hotline talk to you in English. Another reason would be that no hotline is ever calling you, without you having asked for that call(back). That just won't happen.

I guess it's a cultural thing, as evidenced by dubbing of movies/tv-series, and not just subtitling them like it is done elsewhere. At least in the past. Getting blurry with things like Netflix.

A high profile corporate hack happened recently, lo and behold I now get tons of spam sms’s that I never used to.

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