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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

We've become so desensitized to spam and robocalls due to the scale of the problem - but these should absolutely be treated as attempted theft. If there were a gang going door to door trying to con elderly or otherwise gullible people into giving them thousands of dollars, there would be task forces formed and police patrols on every block. Instead, since it happens over the internet and on the phone, we give it benign names and treat it like a minor hassle and let everyone fend for themselves.

How did we become "okay" with having most of the communication that reaches people be malicious? What is Federal law enforcement doing? Why the hell hasn't the FCC nuked these companies' ability to operate? Who is lobbying for this shit?

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Politicians use the exact same companies and tactics to solicit votes, so why would they fight against themselves?

A politician's job is to stay in power and work towards their reelection, not make your life better. In some cases those goals happen to align but that's merely coincidence and should not be taken for granted.

In this case, effective anti-robocall legislation would also work against their own interests.

> Politicians use the exact same companies and tactics to solicit votes, so why would they fight against themselves?

Say what you will, the 27th Amendment passed. (IE: makes it constitutionally illegal for Representatives to give themselves payraises immediately. They have to give pay-raises for the _next_ congress, which means it may give a pay-raise to the opponent if they lose the election).

Politicians do, and have, been forced by the people to make bad choices for themselves for the good of the country. And its not like its an easy thing to pass a Constitutional Amendment like the 27th.

---------------

We also used to have very strong laws with regards to campaign finance. It was actually our judges who took those laws away in the Citizen's United case.

But our politicians actually put those laws into place to allow the people to trust them more during campaign finance season.

Etc. etc. Plenty of examples. All we need is to convince enough people that a particular law is a good idea, and then that law will happen.

>Say what you will, the 27th Amendment passed.

Sure, but the Congress that approved it never felt its consequences because it took another 200 years for it to become ratified. So the first group it affected was definitely not the same group that voted for it.

90% of the US congress is re-elected. AFAIK, they have given themselves pay-raises several times.

Besides there is an automatic annual hike that is self-implementing and doesn't need a vote. It requires a vote to block the hike, lol.

The salary is not the primary compensation. It's the network, the favors/jobs for friends and family, and the cash-out reward position taken after leaving office.

Do you think representatives live off their DC salary?

I think this is overly cynical. The playing field would be level with or without these companies existing.

This is one of many problems where the profits are concentrated among a few players highly motivated to preserve their existence, at the expense of annoyance among vast numbers of people but not to the degree that they act.

Politicians do not use the same companies. There are very specific firms that primarily handle political communications and text messages and phone calls.

And political communications are exempt from CAN-SPAM

In some cases those goals happen to align but that's merely coincidence and should not be taken for granted.

Explain the Martha Wright-Reed Just Reasonable Communications Act of 2022 Consent.

It passed the house with unanimous consent, had bi-partisan support in the senate, and Biden signed it.

The main feature is that it caps prison phone call costs.

This helps inmates and hurts companies. So explain to me how this slots into your view

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/01/1146370950/prison-phone-call-...

america doesn't care about inmates, this is some kind of sick joke you're making

The innovation needed here is for everyone to be able to have a premium rate phone number, and be able to set fee rates for contacts or "classes" of callers. Spam & robocalls need to become too cost-prohibitive to pursue. Everyone's time has value, so it seems mad that we can't set fees for incoming calls or texts.

I find it interesting that Americans are so afraid of regulation that suggestions like these get thrown out in response to calls for regulation. Just effectively regulate via government and move on. Don’t make everything a private toll thing.

Spam calls are already generally illegal, it's a matter of enforcement:

https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/robocalls

A lot of people may not like regulation, but that excludes the issue of robocallers and spam marketers. People on both political spectrums support regulation here. The problem is that existing regulation is ignored and not being enforced

What would you like to regulate that is better than letting people set inbound fees?

How about banning calling people with robots? Then enforcing it.

There are many downsides to banning robocalls outright.

Robocalls are a weird bill to die on, but this kind of “just ban it” mindset creates a lot of invisible loss in our world.

Better is to let people put a price on the externality and let the market figure out the rest.

As someone who has never lived in a country where automated calls happen: what quality of life do you imagine I've been missing out on?

Just to note: we do get appointment reminders here.

> this kind of “just ban it” mindset creates a lot of invisible loss in our world.

Such as?

> Better is to let people put a price on the externality and let the market figure out the rest.

How is that better than just requiring these callers to get your consent first?

How about appointment reminders from my doctor? Should those be banned?

Obviously you would need an exception for calls you've given consent to receive.

But then companies would stick consent in every form license on the internet. So you'd need some kind of cookie banners that require you to give consent explicitly. But then you might miss the box you actually wanted to check opting in to appointment reminders from your doctor and then miss your appointment. So maybe we allow default opt in under some byzantine circumstances that require everyone to hire a lawyer to understand which also has the effect of exempting political donors so that everyone can continue to be inundated with calls.

What was the downside of letting people set inbound fees again?

Theoretically you already need to have a relationship with the sender today. Set an inbound fee and some people will set a high fee which catches the unwary and many legit senders simply will refuse as a matter of policy.

The obvious implementation would warn the caller that there is a fee and tell them how much it is, and then notify the recipient if they had a caller who refused the charge and provide their number.

Robocallers might then refuse the call if there is any fee at all, which is great, and then if you get the one from your doctor's office you see it in the call log and can exempt the number for next time.

Make it hard for people to reach you and they’ll be happy to just hang up. They have better things to do than get through to people playing elaborate games. It’s usually hard enough to connect to a doctor’s office as it is without expecting them to jump through hoops to get you on the phone.

"Press 1 to pay $0.10 and connect the call" is an elaborate game?

It doesn't happen to anyone who regularly calls you because you've exempted them but it handles the case of someone you know calling from an unusual number with something important, because they just pay the pittance. But spammers can't afford to do that at scale, and if they can you can raise it to $0.25.

> "Press 1 to pay $0.10 and connect the call" is an elaborate game?

[...]

> It doesn't happen to anyone who regularly calls you because you've exempted them

Yes, this sounds like an elaborate game and putting unnecessary burden on me.

I'm not sure what you're referring to as an unnecessary burden. Identifying who it is you consent to have call you? How do you propose to avoid that without allowing either everyone or no one to call you?

This sounds like a pretty huge hassle to me as a phone customer, honestly. I'd prefer that they just have to get my consent first. It would be a lot cleaner and easier for everyone, including the marketers.

Did you want the version where consent is easy to get and then you still get tons of spam calls, or the one where consent is hard to get and then many useful services don't exist?

And how would a consent law help anyway? Many of these calls are literally scams. They're already illegal and the problem is a lack of enforcement.

If you are that bothered by spam calls you probably need to make the tradeoff that you’re ok with not being able to reliably receive calls from numbers that aren’t on an explicit white list.

Various fixes are underway but today you have to make that personal trade off.

Why would you need to receive an automated voice call for a reminder?

> Why would you need to receive an automated voice call for a reminder?

Because they want to. The burden of evidence is on the side trying to restrict what others do.

Not everyone can read texts as easily as the majority of the population. Some people can’t read at all.

Instead, let me ask you this: why is this a uniquely American problem. Certainly I don't hear about it frequently happening in other countries.

Phone calls to mobile phones are much more expensive in other countries.

In the US, mobile phones share their area codes with landlines, and it's the person with the mobile phone who pays for the "airtime" of their incoming (these days it's basically free so you can't tell, but historically it was much more expensive)

In the rest of the world, mobile phones have their own special area codes that are charged to a higher rate to the person who is making the call, and incoming calls are free for the mobile subscriber.

If you look at the pricing plans for VoIP providers, calling a mobile phone can be up to 10x more expensive than a landline (e.g. I'm seeing for France a landline is 4c/min, a mobile is 17c/min on RingCentral). But calling a US phone of any kind is often even completely free.

> Phone calls to mobile phones are much more expensive in other countries.

No… that isn’t why. Where I live both are rated the same which is to say, essentially free. We still don’t get this.

I’ll tell you what it actually is: American exceptionalism. Again we’re talking about a country so allergic to regulation that some poster above was talking about inbound fees. Yeah no, here we just regulate, and it works, and I’ve never had to think about it. Maybe just copy the working examples instead of being so dead set that it Won’t Work For Your Country.

> Where I live both are rated the same which is to say, essentially free

I believe Swiss domestic calls are an order of magnitude more expensive than American calls.

If you had looked past the tld in the domain and clicked through, you’d have gotten my country right.

This is the internet equivalent of “don’t judge a book by its cover (or a website by its tld)” :)

(I live in Belgium)

Belgian mobile calls are about a third cheaper than American ones, on average, all costs included. (Sending costs remain remarkably low in the U.S.)

While I think a proposed "inbound fees" soloution is a ridiculous one other countries do not have spam calls figured out.

The reason it happens so much more in the U.S. more than other countries is the ease of exfiltrating money from an enviroment where on average you can get a wealthy target (relatively, even if someone is living paycheck to paycheck if they're paying $4000 in rent it's a pretty big paycheck worth targeting). If the US starts to get on top of spam calling there's a very real chance that the countries it doesn't happen often in will 'enjoy' a similar level of spam as established scammers retarget their efforts.

The good news is the US telcos are forced to do a lot of the heavy lifting in forcing foreign telcos they connect with to begin using SHAKEN/STIR protocols. This means that other countries (which are in just as bad a technical position as the US) will be able to pass similar regulation on their telcos, without having to worry about accidentally forcing them to cut off entire other countries, as most legitimate telcos will have cut their teeth while dealing with the US telcos.

N.B. SHAKEN/STIR protocol requirements basically means that you can identify a call and say to a foreign connecting telco "Here are these identifiable calls that are a problem, I'm sure it's not you so go talk to the smaller telco you provide services for that you can identify with these number (even if we can't) because we don't want to be forced to cut you off". It basically removes the deniability of "Well we've got 10 smaller sub telcos servicing the country/countries and no system implemented to tell which of the 10 is selling to bad actors" because it enforces having a system going out and if your not getting your sub telcos to use shaken/stir on the way in you're the problem.

It has been a problem in the UK -

Doing some quick googling I found this -

> The research also estimates the average person now receives 6.04 nuisance calls every month, while 56% of people receive nuisance calls every single week, and 83% of people receive at least one nuisance call a month.

https://telecoms.com/518505/britons-will-receive-4-billion-s...

Funnily enough people have stopped using phone calls for anything other than spam, so the problem has solved itself.

There are industry experts who know the technical answers to your question and lawyers who know the legal ones, why should I have to come up with it myself?

There are gangs going door to door attempting to coerce and extort elderly people. My grandmother invites them in for tea. They try to sell her funeral insurance and extended car warranties or they tell her that her grandson whose name they can't say is in jail and this is their one and only chance to ever get bailed out or would she like to donate to their political campaign.

Where does she live?

I don't know where OP's grandma lives, but my own grandmother contends with this sort of scammer in suburban Milwaukee.

That's so sad, I had no idea this sort of thing existed in the US but I suppose it doesn't surprise me.

> What is Federal law enforcement doing?

Probably negotiating with India behind closed doors to shut down the scam callcenters, but as a recent scambaiter video (I think it was Jim Browning) showed, corruption in their police is endemic and callcenter operators still get warnings before raids. The profit these centers can make is utterly insane, and so they can afford a lot of bribes.

> Why the hell hasn't the FCC nuked these companies' ability to operate?

SS7 is an international system with seriously lax access controls, it's many decades old and as a result it's extremely difficult to get everyone to upgrade their systems - you don't want to cut off entire countries, particularly poor ones, from international telephony, the fallout would be catastrophic.

Actually I do want to cut off entire countries, if those jurisdictions are waging criminal war against our citizens. Clean up if you want to participate in the global community.

No disagreement from me here - if I had anything to say, Russia, North Korea, Iran, China and on the cybercrime side Turkey (a hotbed for scam callcenters targeting Germany) and India would be completely cut off from Internet and telephony networks.

It's time to hold bad actors accountable. Unfortunately, the cost of doing so would put way too much money at risk, I'd even see some of these escalating into outright war.

Trade is a big issue in some places. Elderly New Zealanders regularly lose their life savings to these crooks with hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars leaving the country every week. The government is hesitant to do anything about it.

Same here in Germany, just it's Turkey instead of India. Alone the "fake policemen" scam is estimated at hundreds of millions of euros a year [1].

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/telefonbetrug-wie-die...

How much of a problem is this outside the US? In Japan I get maybe 1 call like this a month (always from a "weird" area code). Meanwhile everyone in the US seems to be constantly getting these calls. Surely other countries also have marks!

(I know about the scam calls to old people in Japan being a thing. Having a cell phone probably removes me as a mark)

Not a problem in the Netherlands. Unsolicited calls from companies you where never a customer of where made illegal a while back. In the last year i've had 1 robo spammer call and 1 telemarketer, so it seems to be working.

Lol, that was made illegal a long time ago in the US as well. In fact since I was a kid and I'm 43 now.

If you apply for a home loan, you will get about 100 calls per day for the first week and it will trickle away over the next two months. I still get 3~ per day. It's insane.

Ah that's a good point. I had a similar experience with moving services (to a smaller scale).

Your bank is rating you out to spammers?

Door-to-door missionaries and college endowment call centers are the scum of the earth that intentionally prey on old folks looking for meaning and/or legacy.

But I have yet to see dedicated police forces.

I'd love to see SWAT teams called to deal with door-to-door missionaries.

Email has been more thoroughly ruined than phones and SMS. Would be nice if the government actually stood up for the people for once.

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