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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

The thing that I don't understand is why the telecom companies that are letting these scammers SMS spam en masse are not being cut out of the domestic telecom market. There should be a certain percentage of spam reports to legitimate messages that is just permadeath for the telco. I'm pretty sure if I tried to use twilio to send these kinds of messages I'd get banned, but there are sketchy sms/sip companies who go out of their way to enable the bad behaviour.

STIR/SHAKEN is a good start, but we need to come down hard on this.

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Nobody seriously tries to stop spam because they make money off it.

If someone tells you that it's impossible to trace the origins of spam, ask yourself how they can know whom to bill.

The reality is that it's possible and easy but only when the bottom-line is concerned.

This is why there needs to be regulation with teeth.

It needs to make business sense to prevent spam/scams by there being penalties for screwing things up, and incentives for doing well. Otherwise you're right, unscrupulous telco companies like to make money by charging scammers to send messages to customers.

We need regulation and regulators with a minimum of technical skills, common sense and bribery/lobbying being adequately punished that it's no longer seen as worth it.

Currently that's not the case, so the excuse of not being able to trace the source of the spam is successfully preempting regulation as nobody involved has the skills and/or financial incentives to ask "hold on, how come you know who to bill but not who's originating the spam?".

We need a proactive and inquisitive press that questions PR and asks these companies to clarify why they say what they say. Our current media simply reports “In a statement, Company X said Y” and leaves it at that.

I don't know if the phone providers are making money on scams. Phone calls that have gotten so cheap that VoiP calls from overseas may not be charged anything. It is also likely that the overseas scammers are using US machines to make the calls. My guess is that the scammers don't want to pay anything since greedy and don't want charges that can be traced.

Simpler explanation is that the phone companies don't care about the scams because it doesn't affect them. They aren't liable, and there is no mechanism to report scams to them, and make them spend money investigating.

Calls and texts are of course cheap on a per-unit basis, but they're still not free. So not only it means that in aggregate, telcos will lose maybe 10% of revenue if they do fight it, but most importantly that detail actually means every bit of traffic has a paper trail associated to it (since this traffic must be billed for) and thus all the information required to trace the source of the spam is there, just that everyone (including regulators) are financially incentivized to look away and pretend it isn't.

I would pay 10% more for a phone plan some with spam blocking. Like, even just as simple as blocking all voip phones or foreign numbers.

Yes how easy would it be to auto-detect unusual activity on their systems likely to be scammers? How many people ring random numbers 24/7 in foreign countries for legitimate reasons for example?

The scammers are much more sophisticated than you suppose. One common trick they use is to “hack” local PBXs, and use them to place vast numbers of calls.

I'm certain the "Report Junk" thing on my phone is completely ignored, if only because I clicked on it 100 times by accident when it was first rolled out (with very poor UI, IMO).

I get very little SMS spam, and they're usually filtered by Google Messages so I don't even notice.

And in this case, pig butchering scammers use Telegram and Whatsapp mostly.

Yeah, WhatsApp was the first place I saw these scams, and I continue to get these messages from "women" on there.

>STIR/SHAKEN is a good start...

It seems to have done nothing. Even for phones I get more spam than ever. Same for my Mom 99% of calls to her landline are scammers.

Something has changed. The auto warranty scam calls have stopped, which at one point were the majority of scam calls I got. Scam calls are most of my calls as well.

Now I get:

- Travel package scams (I believe this is related to timeshares, this is most calls I get).

- Medicare/Medicaid scams (a close second by volume)

- Auto accident scams (pitching an insurance payout)

- Home security system scams (free security system!)

These days—meaning the last few weeks—I get:

• Home remodeling come-ons. So many. They know my name. Often “I’m calling for my Dad’s construction company, xxx, who is working in your area …” It’s a different company name every time.

• Medicare BS.

• “Scare” scams—just lately with no specific reason, just words such as, “…your case is urgent and you must call our agent Sam at 555-xxx…”

• Tax relief crap.

Oh yeah - the home remodeling ones - I get those occasionally.

Also occasionally solar company calls. These appear to just be really shady lead generating companies, but the solar companies are real (if maybe themselves a little shady).

Once in a long time I get the "scare" scams - those are usually claiming you owe the IRS a bunch of money.

The scare scam I got a while ago was a "cop" claiming that I missed showing up for jury duty that morning. He spoke "cop talk" and passed me to another "officer", who tried to convince me that since I missed showing up for jury duty that a bench warrant was issued which would result in me getting arrested if I tried to show up to the court house to "post bond". Instead, he recommended that I use a remotely located "bond posting" machine they have in several locations (he rattled off 3 addresses), and I can give him the receipt number and that would clear up the warrant. It just so happened that if you googled "Bitcoin ATMs", it came up with those 3 locations as the first three results.

Now what really pissed me off is that it took more than half an hour to get to the scam part -- they put me on hold multiple times, and passed me back and forth between the two "cops", with really no information given to me. Once it got to the demand for money, I started putting them on hold, until I hung up (which he of course warned me not to do), and they kept calling back until I blocked the number.

Anecdotally, I tend to agree. I have both UK and US phone numbers. The US phone number receives dramatically more spam calls than the UK one, despite us not having STIR/SHAKEN in the UK yet. I don't know if that's because the US people are likely to be juicer targets (richer etc) or because of some infrastructure difference that makes it more of a hassle to do in the UK.

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