A lost hiker ignored rescuers' phone calls, thinking they were spam (2021) | Hacker News Reader

A lost hiker ignored rescuers' phone calls, thinking they were spam (2021)

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53 pointsbrightbeige62 comments

To me, answering calls from random or unknown numbers is something the older generation do, the one that grew up before phone spam became the norm. I would estimate that, in general, less than half of incoming calls to my phone are legitimate.

Of course, hiking on a mountain is an exceptional case, where you might reasonably expect that people will set out to search for you (possibly putting themselves in danger) if you are gone for an unreasonable amount of time. I wonder did they try text or leave a VM.

(As an aside, "The hiker had gotten disoriented in an ordeal that lasted about 24 hours" reminded me of the "fugue state" from Breaking Bad.)

Anecdotal fallacy warning, but I just checked my phone call logs on my iPhone. Of the 12 phone calls I've gotten in the past week, exactly 1 was legit.

> the one that grew up before phone spam became the norm

I think there's been phone spam for a long time, it's just that previous generation's phone spam was so innocent. An unsolicited salesman calls and tries to sell you some magazines. If you actually buy the magazines, you'll actually get the magazines.

Compare that to today. The caller records your voice and even saying "hello" might allow them to clone your voice and then use your voice to scam your spouse. If you buy their magazines (or whatever the modern equivalent is), you'll probably get it, but also they might just steal your money and sell any information you give them on the personal data markets.

This is the same in advertising too. Old TV advertisements told you about a product and then hoped you'd buy it when you went to the store, fair enough. Compare that to today's YouTube advertisements that are often straight up scams and merely watching the ad or viewing the associate website is revealing information about yourself which will be sold unregulated.

Is this a rosey view of the past? Are we just suffering late-stage capitalism or is there something more specific we can blame these changes on?

It takes a lot more than “hello” to clone someone’s voice. A lightweight voice clone requires 2-3 minutes of audio dictation for acceptable results.

It depends on what you are cloning for. If you are just trying to just convince some other interactive voice response (IVR) system that you can answer the phone as human "Hello" may be enough to get to the next menu. Don't underestimate the power of a few taped lines, especially in the world of increasing automation on every side of a phone call (and plenty of systems talking to systems with fewer and fewer humans in the loop).

> To me, answering calls from random or unknown numbers is something the older generation do, the one that grew up before phone spam became the norm. I would estimate that, in general, less than half of incoming calls to my phone are legitimate.

I would say I get about 20 spam calls for every legitimate call I get (1-2 legitimate calls per day, 20-40 spam calls).

This is one call every 22 minutes. Even half that, pushing every ~45 minutes, is well past the point I would just get a new phone number.

That being said I'm probably exactly the type of person to have a full VM with no legitimate messages in it.

> well past the point I would just get a new phone number

Agreed, but 2FA makes this a non-starter. I don't want to find out a year from now that I can't access ___ service because they have my old number on file and won't let me change it.

As it is I can't get into my bank account to pay my phone bill if it's past due and service gets suspended. It's infuriating.

All ow the calls through. When a human starts talking don't hang up, but don't speak to them either. Allow them to hang up.

You'll soon get taken off the lists.

Pick up the phone, keep silent for 5 seconds. A human on the other end would say something or you would hear background noise. If you don't hear anything, hang up. This works because the auto-dialers that call centers use listen for you to say something before starting the robo-dialogue or patching you into a meat-talker.

This does work currently, but I worry for when we begin to see LLM agents that assess the victim for gullibility before transferring to an available, practiced con artist.

Mute your end if you're going to do this.

Either you really messed up with who you shared your number with,

and/or you're answering more than 0% of unknown callers, validating the line,

or someone has intentionally signed you up for marketing lists.

This is an insane situation to consider dealing with. I have three to five phone lines depending, less than 3 spam calls total per month.

I'm in the same boat of spam calls. The majority are looking for the previous owner of the number (debt collectors). The thing is I've had this number for well over any sort statute of limitations on debt. In the past I considered getting a new number but that would also be a giant pain. There also wouldn't be any guarantee that the new number wasn't in the same boat

That's between two lines; there are certain area codes that for personal reasons I basically have to answer. As an aside: Android's "Suspected Spam caller" is incredibly inaccurate; with the huge storm last weekend, the emergency alert was flagged this way, and actual spam calls often aren't.

If one of those areas codes is the same as the area code in your number, you're just plain screwed!

Can't answer the calls, ever, or you're "marked" - simple as that.

Really sorry to hear this.

Since you mentioned not enjoying it, and for the reader in a similar situation, a suggestion: use an internet number, with totally different area code from your received calls, so you have a prayer.

"The voicemail box you're trying to reach is full" (Of spam calls)

I had kind of an inverse experience in the sense of an organization who should have tried to reach me and didn't bother in being persistent when they should have.

My elderly father is in a care facility, and I am POA (Power Of Attorney to make decisions for him), and well-documented point of contact for him with his doctor and the hospital. He fell and broke his hip at the care facility on Jan 2. around midnight. He got transferred to the local hospital as a result.

First, the care facility failed to call me at all. This was discussed with them after the fact and they know they screwed up and admitted it. That's kind of an issue but not the biggest one.

Then the hospital tried calling me at 6 AM (6 hours later). The number was the general "call out" number not a particular office or doctor. They left no message. My father had been in the hospital for another issue just the week before, so I didn't bother following up figuring it was just some early morning administrative thing related to the previous visit.

Then the hospital called my mother at noon (12 hours after the admission) asking her some question about his hip surgery to be planned. She has no idea what it's about. She asks me and I have no idea what it's about. I call the hospital and find out he's been there for 12 hours. What the actual hell...

They claimed they couldn't leave a message due to privacy issues. But they could have said, "This is Dr. X calling about your father - please call me back." Or tried calling me repeatedly until I did pick up (like SAR tried in this story).

In the end there weren't any specific issues where I as POA had to make some decision for him, nor was he on the verge of death and the family needing to be notified. It could have been a lot worse. But still, it was really, really dropping the ball when it came to attempting to connect with someone who really should be connected with.

In the UK, hospitals hide their number when they call you so you have no idea who it is.

Try answering?

Hello, who's that? The hospital Thanks, just the punchline I needed

I've had similar experiences, learning many hours later that an elderly relative had taken a field trip to the ER, or in a few cases even had round-trip transport back to the care home before I knew what was going on.

But I've also had the absurd opposite, where I think the hospital IT system must be triggering some workflow events and it causes a thundering herd problem.

One example: Visiting my in-patient relative, I was called into a hallway by a nurse, as the doctor would be coming to discuss something. Before we could even start, I got an incoming call from the same hospital system which turned out to be a care coordinator trying to discuss the same patient. While I was trying to triage that call and not waste the doctor's time too much, I heard the call waiting beep. That turned out to be an affiliated social worker spawned onto the same case. I let her go to voicemail. Within 5 minutes, I got another call from a durable equipment vendor who was processing an order just put in for the patient.

This became a repeating pattern. Along with all the other stress of handling my family member's illness, this pushed me too far. For the first time in my life, I started to flinch or startle at incoming calls and notifications. It got worse with frequent and randomized calls from the relative, who suffers from dementia. I started to form a new understanding of the stories I'd heard of younger generations having phone-based anxieties.

> "If you're overdue according to your itinerary, and you start getting repeated calls from an unknown number, please answer the phone; it may be a SAR [search and rescue] team trying to confirm you're safe!"

Yeah, but if you answer, then the spammers know it’s a real number!

Seriously though... why didn't the SAR team try sending a text? Texting before calling is the standard protocol for anyone up to date with modern phone usage, but it's also way more reliable when trying to get in touch with someone with a flaky connection, which is probably the case when lost in the wilderness.

Or leave a voicemail. I'm guessing that their phone service was a landline or VOIP that didn't support sending SMS.

the VM transcription is a valuable feature

Recently the county police representative at our local civic association was giving a talk: He was trying to drill down two things to pass to our neighborhood:

1) Don't answer the phone

2) Don't answer your door

Simply because of the amount of scammers that are out there.

My 83 year old father, who needs a walker, who doesn't have internet, who won't install apps on his phone, and who won't allow us to hire him palliative care to visit him in his house, has heard this message loud and clear.

I understand the policeman’s motivations, but the idea that the answer to abusive scammers is that we should reduce our level of trust in society generally is severely damaging.

This is why the suburbs are the way they are now. It’s really sad! So many people living in safe neighborhoods, convinced that untold danger lurks outside and that they have to turn their homes into 24/7-surveillance fortresses and never answer the door or something unspeakable will happen.

Ratios.

When you're in a suburb, a stranger directly outside your house for any amount of time is far less likely to be a friendly just going about their day,

like it would be in a small town or in a city.

Learned reactions. Ugly overreactions, often. But, learned.

They broke into my flat once and tried several times.

I don't answer the phone or the door unless I know someone is coming or I'm expecting a parcel. And I have a huge 6 D cell flashlight by my bed (that I will not hesitate to use as a weapon)

Granted I don't live in a suburb but in an inner city in Europe.

Or perhaps the reality is that society is no longer high-trust, and those who still believe otherwise are now easy marks.

It isn't clear the hiker even wanted a rescue, they ultimately reached safety on their own accord.

I've gone into the back country many times where getting hung up in some way, going off-route, or even an ankle sprain could lead to the possibility of an uncomfortable bivy. It's something I consider acceptable risk. I'm not going to call for help unless I believe it's a life or death situation.

that's what i thought. if he actually needed help he would have been able to call.

but the real failure here is that phone technology is still so bad that it is not possible to reliably identify callers. caller-id exists, but feels like a hack, is not working relibaly, and is spoofable.

is there no way to have a trustable registry of numbers (not all of them but say any service that legitimately needs to be able to cold-call people) that can be built into every phone? a whitelist of known numbers?

The other odd thing here is that SAR was alerted by a caller, presumably someone close to the hiker who knew their itinerary, and was worried when they were not off the trail by that evening. But that caller appears not to have tried to tell the hiker that they were calling SAR? And presumably that caller would _not_ be an unknown number ...

>presumably someone close to the hiker who knew their itinerary

I'm not sure what this trailhead is like, but it's not unheard of for someone to call rangers who call SAR for something as simple as a car parked at a trailhead after it's closed.

They likely didn’t know that the hiker would have cell reception on the mountain. That’s the sort of thing that SAR would know, but the average person’s assumption is that you’re not going to have reception on the trail.

Maybe the rescuers should try texting.

because spam texts are not a thing?

I'm much more likely to glance into the spam folder on the phone to see what's going on when I repeatedly get messages I think are spam, than I am to pick up a repeated call from totally unknown number(s).

Yes, and that might even be reasonable, but add "also you're lost and disoriented on a mountain" and suddenly it becomes pretty ridiculous not to answer the phone.

Spam texts wouldn’t say “This is search and rescue. We are attempting to contact you. Please call or respond.”

I think this whole thing goes a bit deeper into the habits we have all developed over the years.

Just this morning I ignored an early morning call from someone that was trying to make an appointment for something I was loosely engaged in. I ignored the call because I thought it was a spammer and lamented spammers are calling so early. Randomly later it occurred to me that maybe it was the person trying to make an appointment. Thankfully they left a voicemail.

I think we expect emails or texts now.

Also, I see office workers ignore calls now because of digital phones showing the number or caller ID. Old desk phones didn’t really show who was calling, so everyone picked up the phone because it was a business call. Now you can’t get anyone to pick up the phone.

I often don't even know that I have received a phone call because my phone is always on silent.

If so, then it would have probably gone to voicemail. It would make sense SAR would leave a message if they got to VM.

A couple years ago I broke my phone and needed a replacement. At the Fruit store I needed credentials for my Verizon account, but all the stuff was in 1Password on my dead phone. So the Verizon rep called my partner to verify, and of course she didn’t answer. Later in the day she told me she saw the call and ignored it, figuring spam.

It’s sickeningly ironic that the company responsible for the network literally cannot use it to contact their own customers, because they have let it become such a cesspool of noise and bullshit.

Wireless companies must make money from spam calls, right? That must be why they allow them? My mental model is that with sufficient motivation they could do much better, but maybe I’m wrong.

I can't say that I exactly know the economics of telcos, but in my mental model, it would probably be the most profitable for them if nobody made any calls regardless of whether or not they are spam.

As ever, the only "sufficient motivation" they'll ever have is government regulation.

I think its the case that the vast majority of mail carried by USPS is unsolicited junk, but it pays the bills to stop at every house in the country every day.

Wouldn't be surprised if the plurality of phone call revenue is spammers, and then there is no way to solve the problem but to make fines (to the provider) higher than the revenue.

Did they not leave a voicemail at least? Article doesn't seem to mention that one way or the other. I at least glance at voicemails from unknown numbers to determine if they're spam or not.

From my experience having a voice mail activated stopped being the default around me. Does ~everyone in the US have one?

Still, they should have texted. I'm so annoyed when someone calls me multiple times without attempting async communication.

It's been at least a decade since I checked any of my voicemails. The UI is too clunky to be worth my while. How do you "glance" at a voicemail? At this point, I'm sure my mailbox is full or deactivated, so no one can leave new ones anyway.

>How do you "glance" at a voicemail?

My carrier does voice-to-text transcription of the message and texts it to me.

Alternatively most phones can also transcribe it locally. E.g. clicking a voicemail on iPhone doesn't even default to playing it, it shows the transcription and gives you the option to play the audio if you want.

Phone app > voicemail tab on my iPhone.

I can imagine why the hiker wouldn't answer, perhaps to save battery.

The headline makes it sound like the hiker was expecting rescuers to be out searching, but in this case it sounds like that wasn't so.

When I go hiking or backpacking, I turn my phone completely off so that I have battery in case I need it. My phone would be dead in under 2 days if it was constantly trying to get a cell signal.

That's what jumped out at me -- if the hiker was seeking help, they would have made a phone call and presumably answered calls as well. It sounds like a 3rd party got concerned because the hiker was overdue and started the search process. It is still however weird that even knowing they were overdue, they didn't think anyone would take action. I thought it was standard procedure when hiking more difficult trails to tell others where you're going and when you expect to come back.

Discussed at the time:

A lost hiker ignored rescuers' phone calls, thinking they were spam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29001181 - Oct 2021 (15 comments)

"We are so concerned about your auto's extended warranty that we have engaged a SAR team to find you so we can discuss your options"

if he was truly lost but phone worked / had a connection, couldn't he call 911 / emergency services?

"I am lost, but I'm not in danger" vs "I am lost, I need help"

Sounds to me like the hiker was very experienced, and ultimately had no issues at all reaching safety...

I find it interesting that someone called SAR and didn't call/text the hiker?

iOS can also be configured not to ring when it’s an unknown number. Important calls just need to leave a voice message.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com