Do not call: States sue telecom company over billions of robocalls
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At this point the phone system is unusable. If my doctors office needs to call me they’re SOL because I’m not answering a number I don’t know.
At that point it's basically a protection racket.
1. junk mail is sent either to a recipient or an address, the mailer is paying some fee for it.
2. while it is a nuisance, they aren't going out of their way to hide who sent it or breaking a bunch of laws and contracts in order to send it.
3. we don't have government agencies ignoring or trying to stop the implementation of laws that pertain to junk mail, we'd need to get laws passed to stop it before that could occur.
so, yeah, horrific waste, but not the same.
I see an awful lot of bulk mail that's trying really hard to look like something it's not. Some of it's so bad that I'm surprised it doesn't fall afoul of various laws (and maybe it does, but enforcement is so poor that it's still profitable to do it).
Just shut down those accounts, and if the foreign telecom doesn't comply, then block calls incoming from that telecom. Eventually the scammers will start encountering serious resistance to obtaining new accounts and numbers.
So why hasn't anyone done this yet?
Approximately 50% of the calls I receive are through a company identified as "Sinch". Some complaints about them here: https://scammer.info/t/sinch-and-inteliquent/85531
Sadly, scams are big business.
1) VOIP providers get revenue from the customer (scammer.) 2) Upstream telcos are getting paid by the VOIP provider for the numbers, call origination fees, etc. 3) The receiving telcos get some call termination fees.
No one outside the telecom's accounting department will have the figures handy to know either way. And the net balance would certainly would be proprietary information that won't be shared on HN in any case.
It's not even possible to talk about it in any substantive capacity.
The sheer volume of calls that go through a phone network, and the lack of a central system to locate the true source of a call, means it's somewhere between prohibitively expensive and impossible to validate and verify the metadata of every call coming into a telco's network.
Isn't that what the SHAKEN and STIR protocols fix? Maybe the telco can't validate every call, but even if they at least told me when the metadata has been verified would be great. Most of my legitimate calls originate from another US number and all of those should be verifiable.
The FCC for example still exempts "small rural phone providers" I believe? Adoption is growing though, but it's hard to say how fast and by who.
It's honestly a cost/benefit thing.. Changing fundamental infrastructure at telcos is super hard and expensive and most will not do it until they are forced to by law.
This is true, but also it does not prevent tracking down the source afterwards. As in, telcos normally have enough records to check a given chain provider by provider. We could still fine the right entity if there were correct laws for it available.
Believe it or not, most non-US telcos don't have (or rather don't choose to have) the capacity to inspect and log every single phone call, because it's not a cost they want to bear for the tiny fraction of calls they might need to look at later.
In the US the govt forces major telcos to either log or copy calls over to the NSA, so it's different but they're never going to use that very sensitive expensive setup to go after scammers.
Even if they did, let's look at what would happen:
A US telco takes a call log that came into their network and tries to work back through the chain of international telco providers that routed the call, to find the source.
It's only a matter of time before they reach a telco in the chain that says "we don't have those logs sorry".
Plus, each telco along the way will charge the US telco for retrieving and providing those logs. No one works for free.
And then even if they get to the source, guess what? It was probably a fraudulent account with a stolen credit card, at a virtual reseller where no human interaction ever happened to set it up.
Sad trombone.
Sure, nobody works for free, but if requests for source become a thing that happens, there will be systems to retrieve it with less work as well. It doesn't need to be a long record - keeping the last couple of days for complaints handling may be painful, but not "too much traffic". If adtech can save all our clicks for analysis, telcos can handle the short term lookups.
> It's only a matter of time before they reach a telco in the chain that says "we don't have those logs sorry".
That's the whole idea - the blame for that specific call falls on them then. Get fined, next time don't lose the logs, sorry.
> Plus, each telco along the way will charge the US telco for retrieving and providing those logs.
Make it a requirement for reporting so they can't - similar to how DMCA safe harbour works. Either you deal with your customer, point at a source peer, or become the responsible party.
> a stolen credit card, at a virtual reseller where no human interaction ever happened to set it up.
That's fine. Close the account and if it repeats too often for the reseller they can get fined until they implement better fraud checks (or prevent large volumes of calls without human interaction). This is not a novel problem - that's why you can't spawn 500 GPU instances on EC2 right after you open an account.
Edit: Back of a napkin - Verizon claimed to handle 800M calls a day some years ago. Logging the 2 source, 1 destination numbers, peer ids and date in binary format, which is all you need for handling complaints, gives you <40GB per day. That's searchable with grep on a laptop. It's definitely not too much data for a telco.
I've been working with or at telcos for more than a decade and I am still regularly amazed (not in a good way) at how complex, messy and byzantine a lot of the internal systems are, never mind anything that needs to talk to another equally (but differently) byzantine telco somewhere else.
Do you do anything other than hang up when you get a robocall?
Sometimes when I do answer a robocall I just ask them to hold on for a second while I get a pen and something to write on then I set the phone down and go back to work. They rarely stay on the line for more than 10 seconds and one Medicaid scammer calls often enough that he recognizes my voice and will tell me to fuck off and then hangs up immediately.
Haven't gotten one in months though...
…on my 1909 Stanley Steamer.
Yes, I don't answer in the first place. My phone may as well not have the "phone" feature, I think I use it less than once per month.
I'm outraged by the idea of people responding to phone rings like Pavlov's dogs.
This is a really common scenario for me, so I have to leave the ringer on to avoid it.
Edit: I think my record is about one hour with the "social security administration".
I was getting, without hyperbole, more than 150 calls per day, about 100 of which were Robocalls, all of which were trying to sell me healthcare. When I would get humans, they were always asking for Alnar.
This went on for about three months, until I just decided to no longer have my Google Voice number route to a "real" phone anymore. I still get about 40 calls a day, most from robots, but they're manifested in the form of transcripts on Google Voice.
I hate Alnar, I hope he steps on a Lego block, but even more I hate that it must be at least a little profitable to do this phone spam. They're making the phones largely unusable.
Over a period of years, it became basically unusable. A dozen or more people with the same first-initial-last-name have typo'd my email address into enough systems that the volume of crap coming in—some unsolicited stuff that gets through gmail's increasingly-useless spam filters, some technically solicited, just not by me—is high enough that keeping up with it's just not worth it.
Fortunately my last name isn't terribly popular in the English-speaking world, and my first name (Thomas) isn't super popular in Germany, so it's not a huge deal. Still, it was annoying enough to where I eventually just bought [lastname].app and set up an email for that.
Real humans wait a few seconds and say “Hello?”
I use Verizon’s call filter app and it seems to help. I haven’t gotten robocall spam in a while.
Back when every telco was a quasi-governmental national operation, they could all more or less trust each other to do the right thing, so when one network operator receives information from another (for example, caller ID info) it just blindly trusts it as correct.
We've layered tons of modern digital services on top in the last decades but fundamentally there's still that very old network with very basic capabilities underpinning it all.
And so in today's world where every telco offers wholesale access to resellers (who then have sub-resellers and sub-sub-resellers) it's almost impossible to police this stuff.
There's so much traffic going through these networks, it would be very expensive to stop and validate/verify every call's metadata, even though there have been proposals on how to do that put on the table by various parties for years.
But telcos are competitors, and getting them together to agree on how to handle this kind of thing is hard. No one can agree on who should pay for it, and no one wants to go first. Every telco basically passes the buck. So if you are on Verizon and you get a fake caller ID spam call, Verizon will say "we're just forwarding the call from X, go complain to X".
There has been some legislation passed in the last few years as the problem has gotten worse, but don't expect telcos to move on any of this until forced to by law.
source: I work for a telco.
This is why making telcos explicitly, legally, financially responsible for the forwarding garbage calls would fix this really, really fast. The telcos would figure it out, no need to dictate a system.
If you think no one has proposed this or tried this before, you'd be incorrect. :-)
Don't get me wrong, you're right that would work, but getting it to work is near impossible.
Don't forget that every telco would lobby against this, and they are some of the most well-connected enterprises around.
That's the trick, you don't. The US has enough influence that its telcos should be forced to say "from date X international peers that send spam will be disconnected, because we're directly liable for it". There's no serious telco in the world that would say "ok, so our customers won't be able to call the US anymore".
It's a bit like the Brussels effect.
Look I get it, you've imagined a very reductive simple solution to a hugely complex problem and I know it makes sense to you, but you're really drifting into the Dunning-Kruger zone here..
Telcos are hugely, stupidly, complex operations, and all the international inter-connectivity between them even more so.
You can do whatever you want of course, but perhaps consider just trusting me when I say if this was as simple and effective as you put it, it would have been done by now.
> > > Don't forget that every telco would lobby against this, and they are some of the most well-connected enterprises around.
Oh, you already covered the reason I think this actually hasn't already been done.
"Lenny - The Telemarketing Troll - is a chatbot which answers your home telephone and plays pre-recorded messages interacting with Caller-Id spammers while recording the call for your pleasure and to easily share with the larger Lenny community."
Also, technically speaking, how can big telcos make sure they route a call to the right phone, and also claim to be helpless against spoofing?
And I go into a bit more detail here if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36058560
I can forward you all the emails from YouTube recently "announcing important changes to my account" that were really Google marketing announcements and nothing changed on my account.
I know people like you stay silent when it's time to buy the latest shiny iPhones, fast fashion clothings which are made by exploiting labour(even child labour) which pays pennies to 1 $ an hour and working in harsh conditions.
It's about the facts and not prejudice.
You're correct in that economic imbalance is where many businesses make a big chunk of their profits, it's only natural that scammers try to take advantage in the same way.