I called them and told them and they said “oh yeah that happens all the time don’t pick up when we call”
That’s when I realized we’ll never win. The spammers have won.
It's tough, but it's not helpful that people don't know the face of the enemy. The fight isn't with just some stereotypical "spammers". Advertisers and marketing departments are spammers, and they've destroyed phone as a medium, much like they did it to physical mail, radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, and now streaming and the Web in general. We won't make progress until we realize that most spammers are operating 100% legally, and phone networks both participate in it and make money from it.
Yeah what everyone else does is creepy af, and _should be illegal_, but that's not the facts on the ground today.
Those cracks need to be sealed, but there's enough creepy af industry lobbying that it won't happen because money.
There's money in them thar retirement villages.
Google's panopticon started this desperate grab for personal contact information (see recent discussions here on HN around Smart TVs as another one of the outgrowths of this) in it's ability to turn it into advertising profit on a previously unprecedented scale.
This is separate to telecomms companies seeming lack of ability to control or monitor what's on their networks. Which is also a regulation / enforcement problem. However, there are functions that are 'allowed' on telecomms networks to facilitate 'business' (eg. overseas companies being able to spoof local numbers so that people actually answer their calls), such that this 'feature' is then exploited by scammers - when, arguably, the whole 'feature' is a scam in the first place.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-03/mobiles-and-landlines...
(I'm sure I read an article somewhere that described the ability to spoof local numbers as a business decision to allow overseas marketers to sell their wares locally without fear of their calls not being answered. Trying to find it. I may be mistaken.)
Edit: services such as virtual phone numbers, such as these:
https://callhippo.com/blog/country/virtual-phone-number-prov...
https://www.numeroesim.com/how-to-get-an-australian-phone-nu...
https://virtual-local-numbers.com/countries/65-australia.htm...
This is likely coming from the purely 'if it can be abused it shouldn't exist' bias, which may mean I've taken a step closer to becoming an old luddite, but it feels as if, if this is possible, then the entire infrastructure can't be trusted any more - and people consciously choosing to just not answer their phones for any unrecognised number feels like confirmation of this stance.
These guys are just doing what the ad guys are doing but it’s for fraud.
The fraud is only half of it.
Phone spam is much more harmful than ads you kinda-sorta opt into, IMO.
Cable is not full of ads that say they are from AT&T and you need to contact them about your bill at <number> but the ad isn't from AT&T and the number goes to a scam call center.
I bet if you tallied it up, there's many more people being tricked into taking on bullshit contracts with legitimate companies[0] and losing much more money in total, than there are victims of actual impersonation scams. I firmly believe both schemes are morally equivalent, and that one of them is still considered legal only means we should push firmly for a change in laws.
Even the impersonation angle isn't clear-cut. When a telco calls me with their newest scam, it's always via a third-party call centre they outsource this job to. Where I live, it's also historically has been a major source of contact and personal information for scammers - always a "disgruntled employee" leaving and "covertly" taking the customer database with them.
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[0] - Telcos are my go-to examples here, they're notorious for borderline fraud. For example, just under a year ago, a billion-dollar telecommunications corporation named after a color, one of three major telcos in my country, tried to scam my own grandmother hard, after my grandfather passed away, and almost succeeded. More generally, after many years of near-misses and one or two mistakes, most people in my family learned to never talk to phone companies cold-calling with offers.
Most of the spam texts I get lately are from non-US numbers claiming to be USPS trying to resolve a delivery exception.
That’s impersonation.
I know they are spoofing numbers because my own numbers gets spoofed as well. Real people call me back and leave voicemails saying I’m the one who called them.
None of this is standard advertising.
When you get a call from Verizon's number, they know the actual originator of the call (or perhaps they know it up to some known-to-be-not-so-trustworthy-source). They know that the number is not Verizon's phone number.
But the phone company chooses to blindly display the spoofed caller ID. Note that T-Mobile will block their equivalent of these calls (not that T-Mobile isn't to be blamed for other things, such as sending their own spam texts).
So it is Verizon's choice to lie to you on behalf of these scammers, and the FCC allows them to do it.
Anyone outside my contact list can leave a voicemail.