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Comment by jupp0r | Hacker News Reader

It already takes me 45 minutes of my time to get a hold of a support person of my own carrier and I'm a paying customer.

I commend the effort, but getting a human to answer a support hotline call in order to report a spammer number is so comically difficult and ineffective that I can't see a significant amount of people participating. Why doesn't my carrier have an automated system allowing them to communicate with the originating carrier, triggered by the "report spam" button in my telephone OS?

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Because contrary to the page, they don't really care about the spam that much. Now, if more people started calling the support for every spam they get... that would translate to some real cost.

Who would bear that cost though? My prediction would be the customers again, because they would make the phone support harder to reach than it already is as a "solution" to the increased demand for phone support.

Partially yes, longer support waits. But there's a threshold where the agents either need to be available or the reviews / opinions about a telco go too low, so it can't be just ignored.

I just don't have sympathy though - ideally people would DoS all the telco and local government lines until the issue is fixed. It's just stupid how many years this exists without obvious solutions.

Now if someone were to make one of those pizza ordering LLM agents do the calling for them...

I suppose that would be like spamming the carriers. Not sure that's better, but it might make them act.

All costs by customers: support increase from 45 mins to 4.5 hours would be one one those.

Also, the more spammers reported the less to bill for the calls. As less spam calls.

In the UK, you just forward the text to "7726" which is SPAM on a keypad. It's a requirement from the regulator.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/advice...

Does a forwarded text retain the envelope?

Presumably they can compare the message body against recent text messages they've given you.

(also, this works in the US too)

If memory serves, it replies asking for the sender's number when necessary.

In the US, 7726 just goes to the receiving carrier (that is, your wireless provider), not the sending carrier. It can help your carrier filter the messages (eventually, sometimes…), but it doesn’t actually stop them.

In Norway it is an offence with penalties per infringing call to cold call anyone who has registered their number with the Brønnøysund registry more than 30 days ago (the equivalent of the Telephone Preference Service).

The US has the same thing for a very long time with the National Do Not Call registry: https://www.donotcall.gov/

The problem is that it's nearly impossible to enforce this. Would be curious to know if Norway has had any better luck.

I don't know about Norway, but the UK Telephone Preference Service does issue a number of fines for the line marketing calls they are responsible for, with enforcement via the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO, the GDPR people too): https://www.tpsonline.org.uk/pages/enforcement

Obviously if scammers are willing to commit serious fraud that will definitely result in prison if caught, they're probably not too worried about that. Along with scams, silent calls also fall under Ofcom's jurisdiction: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/complaints/complain-about-phones-or...

Well something must be working because I have only had one cold call in the last ten years. We never got very many but now it's so rare as to be worth remarking on if it happens. That one cold call turned out to have been a mistake on the part of an otherwise well behaved company who were very apologetic when I pointed out that my number was on the register.

Companies do occasionally get fined.

I have had a couple of calls from outside the country but I generally just don't answer unrecognized numbers from outside the countries that I have a connection with.

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