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> My second thought was the majority of this type of fraud is probably from foreign impersonation, not Americans.

There's an industry for it in India, because they can source english call center workers there fairly easily.

The youtuber Mark Rober ran into a couple of US mules for these sorts of scams while working on one of his prank videos, and decided to team up with some other youtubers to troll some of these companies in India. The video on it is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsLJZyih3Ac

>My second thought was the majority of this type of fraud is probably from foreign impersonation, not Americans. And it’s not like they’d be sending in predator drones for surgical strikes against scam call centers, as satisfying as that might be.

I think it means that american-owned social media platforms would be required to comply with these rules though, right? that seems like a fairly big deal.

indeed, almost no novel criminality or fraud is occuring.

robocalls should just be illegal. unidentified propaganda should be banned. ads with fraudulent claims should be prosecuted.

you can argue about "to what degree" but AI isn't doing anything but exposing the true lack of enforcing of existing laws because of capitalism grease.

> but AI isn't doing anything but exposing the true lack of enforcing of existing laws because of capitalism grease.

This is just a dismissive way of saying “AI isn’t doing anything but making the problem worse.”

right.

I guess my opinion is "they already weren't tracking the type of fraud AI is capable; they weren't enforcing fraudulent activity..."

AI just makes it more numerous. a non story.

"sorry guys, we're still not regulating white color fraud"

> white color fraud

white-collar fraud

i prefer mine as more apropos.

I don't get it, sorry.

This is a legal clarification. Impersonation has always been illegal, but they didn't specify AI because they didn't exist back then, so now they do.

> unidentified propaganda should be banned

Oh man, this sounds bad. Who gets to decide that something is the real, real truth and not propaganda? The US? China? Germany? a PAC? A company? Your neighbor?

I think the easily provable part of this is “unidentified”.

Unsolicited and unidentified should be banned, with users being able to opt-in to any lowered bar (which would count as solicited) if they like.

If businesses or political actors start sending robots to shout messages into your home from the street, without some opt-in, they would be banned.

I would be happy for all unsolicited messages (mail, email, text, voice) without a specific purpose related to a relationship or related to unavoidable impact on the receiver be outlawed.

Citizens that were ok with unsolicited or unidentified advertising or political messages could opt into the mediums they were ok receiving such messages on.

_unidentified_

I don't think we need to ban robocalls. People do want to know when their school closes, when their prescription is ready to pick up, when their utilities will be undergoing maintenance, etc. The ban should be on unsolicited calls, which sort of does already exist, but has two major problems: too many exceptions, and calls from outside of US jurisdiction.

whatever happened to SHAKEN/STIR and why didn't that fix everything like people said it would?

I believe SHAKEN/STIR was mandated only for calls originating from within the US, however, most of these fraud calls are originating over VOIP (or SIP) from outside the US.

IIRC it's still being slowly implemented, as slowly as things are made mandatory - because any telecoms that can make money by forwarding fraudster calls to other telecoms don't want to support it.

all of those things can be communicated just as easily over text message. A solution could be opt-in on the customer side, and the business could need a license from the telecom to robocall. Otherwise the FTC could fine the telecom and/or the business for unsolicited robocalls.

I would go as far to say unsolicited business calls, automated or otherwise, should be banned.

Not everyone can receive or read a text message.

Not everyone can hear a voice-mail. My partner is deaf, and if Google Voice can't transcribe a voice-mail, they don't know what it says until I listen to it.

Many automated messages that I get come via both text and voice, I presume, for this reason.

It should be possible to hit a button and receive $1 for every unwanted phone call. If the carrier cannot come up with a liable party, they are responsible for the $1.

Ban robocalls, though, and just pay real humans to make those calls instead of overpaying superintendents.

It's hard to collect, but you're actually entitled to something like $500 per violation of the do not call list. I do wish there were a button on my phone to collect all that money.

That would be rad. The problem is all the guys trying to contact you about your car's warranty are outside US jurisdiction or hidden. If the phone companies were liable at all that would end immediately. I'm fine if it's $500 instead of $1, but it has to be easy to collect.

You used to be able to collect direct from spammers if you could hunt them down, too. I think CAN SPAM ended that, which is a shame.

Yeah "hard to collect" is something of an understatement.

I've always wondered why Google and Apple don't build a report button into their dialer that allows you to generate a FCC complaint. This seems like a pretty easy task but doesn't seem useful from a third party app. It would auto fill a fair amount of information for you. I'm sure this would burden the FCC system, but I'm not sure that's a big concern and rather just would force the FCC to recognize the scale of the problem. Hard for politicians to argue against too: "We need to defund the FCC because companies like Google and Apple are over burdening the systems with reports of spam callers!"

It would also be nice if they streamlined the ability to add yourself to the DNC list.

Google engineers that are here, is there a reason you don't do this? If not, can you do it in your 20% time? 350 million of us will thank you.

20% time died a decade ago

Ahh classic Google, killing everything that made it the thing it is today (or maybe better put, yesterday)

I really like this idea because it has a sassy, unusual, creative and useful logical structure.

As we know, a weakness in all free-entry point systems (like email) is freeloading. The somewhat broken "solution" is charging a small fixed fee to the initiator. But this doesn't work in systems we would like to keep at zero cost because it's a blanket response to an acute problem - most coms are welcome and legitimate.

Giving the callee the power to charge the caller a small "handling charge" if they don't like being bothered makes a lot of sense.

Of course it has its own modes of abuse, but the best way to avoid that is not to send to people you don't know.

Like the worst case scenario for individuals is their friends do it to them as a joke or they misdial and lose $1. I doubt most people would exercise the option for a wrong number though. I need to iron out some edges cases, like it must be ineligible for 800 and 900 numbers. But then I am pretty certain all carriers will be able to miraculously trace and block unwanted calls on midnight of the day it takes effect.

Maybe apply it only to call centers?

I contribute my grain of sand by reporting every single spam SMS that I get . I know those are much harder to spoof so its valuable when they get reported.

This is a nice little resource for quick reporting that an HNer put together recently. I have the abuse report email templated now, so all it takes is 2 minutes to report every new one.

https://reportphonespam.org/#Reporting-abuse-to-your-wireles...

Shout out to Telnyx staff for actually processing my requests with a reasonable SLA. Your CS team should be the industry norm.

I use to report spam SMS, then my next phone didn't have a report spam SMS option, and I've not seen the option on any phone since.

the link makes it someone easy to report. Try it out!

No sane person is going to intentionally touch a potentially malicious link on their phone.

> robocalls should just be illegal

I would pay extra to be part of a phone network that guaranteed humans only and displayed First + Last Name & Organization (if any) of the caller.

When are we sending DEVGRU to raid some call centers?

“Hello sir I am calling from Windows support.”

This is also being quickly rolled out because of the recent incident where someone robocalled called voters with a recorded voice that sounded like President Biden, urging voters to stay home instead of voting. I don’t know that they actually used AI for that, but I recall it being suggested that it might have been used, vs a voice actor.