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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

We have to start creating criminal penalties for this stuff. We wouldn’t let someone go around knocking on doors, the same door everyday and sometimes multiple times, attempting to scam people.

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.

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The penalties for permitting more than X robocalls through in a given period including those originating outside your network should be so high that legitimate operators under US jurisdiction are terrified of allowing connections from companies that turn a blind eye to robocall farms—a couple of those stop being able to route calls to the US, and they'll either shape up in a hurry, or continue not being able to route calls to the US, and either way, problem solved.

Many of the calls are coming in from overseas, using US VOIP numbers that cost a dollar a month (or less.) We need a "know your customer" type provision for telecom companies. An overseas scammer should not be able to buy 100's of US numbers with a credit card.

The spam detection on Google Voice seems to have improved dramatically in the last 12 months or so, it hasn't missed a single spam call in that time for me.

Letting everything get so terrible that customers are basically forced to preserve their own sanity by selling their data to the data-vacuum of all data-vacuums is hardly a solution.

At that point it's basically a protection racket.

Damages against a legal entity are usually not "existential" in value (sufficiently large enough to terminate the entity). I really hope that an example is set here with intentionally existential damages. A company that so avidly facilitates spam and scams need not exist.

This. I don't understand why we can't catch and prosecute these spammers. Is it that hard for the phone companies/authorities to trace who's making these phone calls?

Good luck prosecuting a scammer in a foreign country. We need penalties for the telecom services providing access. Right know it's trivial for someone to get a ton of numbers and starting making calls over SIP. You shut them off, they'll just go to another provider.

It should not be trivial to buy hundreds of numbers.

It shouldn't be, but it is. The latest scams all involve calling people from local looking numbers (same area code), since it's more likely victims will pick up.

The scammer in a foreign country has to have on-the-record account(s) with some foreign telecom company, directly or via some chain of intermediaries.

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?

They don't necessarily need to use a foreign telecom company. They can buy SIP access directly from a US company (Twilio, SignalWire, etc) and use it anywhere.

Then that's even easier, because a US company's customer accounts are under the authority of US courts.

You would think so. However, the number of scam/spam calls I receive daily proves otherwise. When I look up these numbers, they are mostly CLEC or mobile numbers. I assume some of the caller IDs are still spoofed, though I thought STIR/SHAKEN was going to fix that.

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.

The reported names can be entirely spoofed, but the telecom engineers know who they are connected to, and the companies they are connected to know who they are connected to ad infinum.

What's the incentive to do anything about it?

Money?

Without big fines, don't companies make more money not following up on it?

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.

How does this relate to the discussion?

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.

If there’s no financial incentive for companies to stop this stuff, it won’t happen. That’s how.

We will never discover whether it's one way or the other via HN comments, so it's an irrelevant point.

It's not even possible to talk about it in any substantive capacity.

the fcc should not have put robocall abatement policies on hold for 4 years. for me, that ruined voice calls.

Can we talk about junk mail, while we're at it? I back-of-the-enveloped the numbers once, and we'd need a $5-10/month tax (or service fee or however they want to frame it) to pay the postal service what it gets from bulk mailing, per household—and probably on the lower end of that, because there'd be some savings from not processing all that bulk mail anymore. Easily worth it IMO. Throwing away literally 95%, by weight, of the mail I receive is tedious and wasteful. I think the "tax" it imposes on time and attention is well in excess of $5/month, even for low earners, and losing one piece of actually-important mail in the mess can far outstrip the annual cost of such hypothetical payments.

while I agree that junk mail is an issue, there are some differences.

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.

> they aren't going out of their way to hide who sent it

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).

Won't happen. Your inconvenience is worth far far less to those in power than helping their "business" friends make more money. The difference between "business" and "scam" at this point being nigh indistinguishable.

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