FCC imposes record penalty against transnational illegal robocalling operation
docs.fcc.gov
docs.fcc.gov
They became predatory from then on out. I tried to play around at first, messing with them and such. Then it became relentless and the blocking never seemed to work. Then I just switched to letting random numbers go to VM. That seemed to have cut off about 50% of robocalls over time. Then eventually I got a pixel phone. Just the call screening alone is worth it. I may get 1 or 2 random numbers calling me a month now. And I usually don't even know they called unless I look at my call log.
I am happy that trend is starting to be picked up by other phone makers. Good on the FCC for clamping down on this stuff. It has been a long term problem and there is still a lot more of these people out there. I hope they learned a lot and can utilize this knowledge in the future to shut more people down.
My aging father loves to play with the scammers any chance he gets. One day he got the classic "Grandpa! Oh thank god you answered, I've been arrested in Vegas and I need bail money or terrible things are going to happen!"
After a few beats of shocked silence he launches into "BILLY?!?!?! The family has been trying to find you since your mom ran off with you 15 years ago! Where is she? Where have you been? Are you well? We just want you to come back home! We've had a PI looking for you for over a decade. Give me the address of the jail and I'll send our lawyer to pick you up."
Usually they're not equipped to deal with such a plot twist and just hang up.
Alas, my old Commodore 64 proved scam-proof.
(As an aside, I remain amazed by the scammers' patience.)
What makes this a problem in the U.S., but not in Europe?
Looking at VoIP sites, I can easily get a phone number in seconds, for cents, with almost no documentation, and any area code, in the US. Lines in the EU cost significantly more, take longer, and often require documentation, especially for geographic area codes.
I expect that the type of access used in the US for these calls simply isn't feasible in the EU, and so the calls there need to be from 'real' numbers in countries where the scammers are safe, which then makes them easy to filter out and far less effective. The access in the US just seems weirdly open.
VoIP rates to call a euro mobile number can be $$$. Meanwhile in Canada, it's the same cost as a landline, and available for fractions of a cent to any nobody like me.
I imagine part of the reason it's not a bigger problem in Europe is not a lot of people speak Dutch/German/etc. in the countries where these scammers are often calling from. They all speak English though.
There are a lot of French speakers in the world in poor economic conditions. Probably proportionately more than English. But it's still not as bad as English calls in North America.
(In Canada, I just respond in broken French to these calls, any official call would be able to transfer me to a French speaking (and 99.9% certainly bilingual attendant)).
I imagine that voice actors in German would be less useful because answering often yields a clearly non North American accent person clearly complicit in whatever scam is being attempted
So I assume that the ease of scamming the US government in this regard contributes to us being the victims here.
Edit: I hadn't RTFA and now I see this fine was about auto warranty scams. Second theory: lots of Americans are living below the poverty line, public transit sucks here so most people need cars to get to work, and it can get risky/expensive relying on an older vehicle to be able to get to work, so it makes an easy target to offer somebody what looks like coverage for a likely expensive auto failure for a few hundred dollars.
It's incredibly lucrative and has cost this country tens of billions of dollars a year for at least a couple decades. I wish more was done about it.
It's expensive to call EU cellphones. In the US people are billed to receive calls (of course these days people usually have unmetered calling but the legacy of cellphone numbers not costing any more to call than a landline continues).
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/08/01/phone-scammers-coa...
Setting up a business in Europe (for example in the Netherlands) requires significant paperwork. In the US, it's done in a few seconds. In the US, it requires years of court proceedings or (in this case) government agency investigation to shut down a business. (No idea how long that takes in Europe, but I hope your governments are more powerful than this.)
Regulation can be a good thing.
You can work around it of course but this ultimately reduces the profitability of the scams, so better due diligence around companies still fights scams by making it less profitable.
It being hard to start a business in Europe means that they are not as innovative, but they also miss out on many scams.
I ask because I wonder if the US has unmaintained 20 year old hardware and software builds on it, since Lucent seems to have vanished around then. I mean that I wonder if spammers are taking advantage of unmaintained software, or naive antiquated laws, or both.
> “Armed with the facts [the FCC] gave phone companies permission to cut off this traffic before going one step further and directing them to block it outright. We got results. Following our action, the number of auto warranty calls fell by 99 percent,” she [FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel] wrote.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/03/fcc-fines-robocaller-a-rec...
The government gave companies a heads up, but even Singapore Airlines and a few major banks had to send out emails apologizing for their texts being labelled as "Likely Scam" right after the change.
Suffice to say legitimate companies got registered really quickly.
In the U.S., it's trivially easy to make your call look like it's coming from whatever number you want, so scammers just have caller ID display the real phone number for the bank they're pretending to call from.
It isn't a hard problem. Once we can trace where the call originates, blacklists should be able to snuff this out pretty quickly. Once phone operators start getting penalized for this sort of thing, the problem will get much better.
The telcos are killing their own product. I'm using my phone less and less. Most days, it sits in do not disturb mode because 99% of the time, the call isn't relevant.
1. Set up voicemail
2. Set to ignore all calls from numbers not in your phone book.
3. Resist the FOMO that they count on you being suckered into.
This is just a form of “you may have already won!” The Ned Flanders moment of “but what if it’s an emergency?” Emergencies don’t come from random numbers. Random numbers with legit calls will leave messages.
Take back control of your time. You aren’t thrall to your phone.
This is an absolute that just plain isn't true. For instance, out-of-state PD calling my sister-in-law from an unrecognized number to inform her that her sibling had died suddenly. There are numerous instances where an unrecognized number may need to contact someone for an emergency. I don't say this to disagree with the general sentiment of your post, but I do disagree with that particular statement.
I just don’t understand how we got to a place where the way things worked for decades suddenly doesn’t work anymore. We would leave our homes and not be reachable. Most urgent calls aren’t actually “emergencies.”
Sure, but whether or not that suffices for someone is pretty circumstantial.
Like I said, I don't disagree with your general sentiment, just the absolute. And hey, change happens, c'est la vie.
You're making up a past that didn't exist. During the entire period where caller ID existed in the U.S., I can only think of a single person who screened their calls in the way you've outlined. (And that person also happened to screen calls from known numbers, too, so it doesn't really count.) Everyone else would screen obvious calls coming from toll free numbers (1-800, etc.), and just take a chance on the remaining unknown numbers. An answering machine/ringer could be turned off for special occasions, but that's no different than putting a cell in airplane mode or whatever.
In fact, there was an entire genre of comedy albums devoted to messing with incoming telemarketer calls during this period. Those albums wouldn't have resonated like they did if most people had been screening all unknown numbers.
In the same way mobile phones shouldn't have to worry about working with emergency services numbers as before we had mobile phones we were still calling them. In other words: it is sometimes better to do things that weren't done in the past.
The same goes for “But what if my kid is throwing up at school?” They’ll deal with it, or someone from your contacts will probably text you.
As a sibling comment said, this was our lives for the decades between when the telephone was invented and when cell phones became ubiquitous. I promise it’ll be okay if you don’t leap to answer every unknown call that lights up your screen.
Sure, in that specific instance. But it doesn't have to be strictly for a death. Spouse gets into a car crash, or has some kind of medical emergency, where they're still alive but they're trying to get in touch with someone from the family to notify them of their whereabouts and current condition.
>I promise it’ll be okay if you don’t leap to answer every unknown call that lights up your screen.
I think you missed the part where I said I agreed with the general sentiment but disagreed with that specific absolute, but thanks for being a touch condescending.
Maybe so, but my cousin passed away suddenly nearly 10 years ago and I was the one who received the call because his family was out of town.
The thought of missing that call because I had to disable unknown numbers because we live in a society that doesn't value privacy enough to leave people alone is really depressing.
If someone contacts you claiming you have won a prize, and it appears to be from a real but shady business (e.g. a car dealership), consider falling for it. The scam is most likely illegal and you may be able to collect. Your local government should have a consumer protection agency that can help you do so. Just keep your cool and document everything.
I've taken two car dealerships to court for this. It was fun and profitable.
Also, it appears the scam is illegal at the federal level.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/01/...
I am not a lawyer. You should read your local laws.
I took them to court because the settlement offers contained clauses I didn't like. I could have recovered the money with less work. Going to court took an afternoon, most of which was spent sitting in a waiting room.
It’s infuriating.
95% of calls from businesses are announcements rather than conversations. There is zero need to interrupt me in real-time to tell me my car is ready; it is not going to make me come any quicker.
SMS is far less invasive.
For people who are even remotely customer-facing their job involves answering calls from unknown numbers, so that's not a solution.
If that’s what other people experience then yeah, this may not be a silver bullet.
I would think it should not be all that difficult for telephone companies to implement spam blocking measures: so why isn't this happening?
Unfortunately, spam calls come from a new random number every time, ensuring that blocking the number doesn't work. Also, the number is spoofed, I even got a call from my own number once.
My understanding is they can easily just setup a new route/new ip/new account and start making calls again.
Not sure whether actually get the $300M paid....
We can hope that the size of the fine will set the stage for some significant jail time, as it seems unlikely that anything else will work.
I thought it was not permitted (under ITU rules) to refuse to carry selected traffic.
Years ago, I was getting robocalls from overseas; at least, the voices seemed to be overseas. I asked $SOMEONE[0] to put a stop to it, and they said that was illegal. But perhaps ITU rules only apply to international calls; or perhaps the ITU[1] has finally got off it's ass and done something useful, for a change.
[0] It was years ago; I imagine I asked my landline provider, which was probably BT.
[1] The ITU, as far as I can tell, is essentially a body to which governments that are members send representatives. They're supposed to be engineers; but they're there to represent their government's interests, not to improve the global telecom network.
But it ebbs and flows and there are days I get 6+ calls.
it's horrible.
I have a mobile, but it's old, and the battery no longer holds much charge, so despite being mobile, it never moves; it sits on my desk plugged into power. I only have it so I can receive and respond to SMS challenges.
Doesn't mitigate the disturbance entirely, but it helps.
That means it’s published, and is known as a business line.
I probably get 30 s[c|p]am calls a day on it. None of them are the ones these guys ran.
> That enforcement action was taken in coordination with the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, which brought a lawsuit under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act against several entities and individuals associated with the enterprise. The Commission also proposed a fine and offered the parties a chance to respond, which they did not do, resulting in today’s unprecedented fine. Should the parties not pay the fine promptly, this matter will be referred to the U.S. Department of Justice for collection.
But maybe the legal/justice system is so broken in the US that they'll just ignore it? Hard to imagine, but I don't live there so who knows.
Unfortunately, our telecoms control the regulators, instead of the telecoms living in fear of the regulators.